Seminars

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure - seminar series

Research seminar series run by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

Seminars will take place on Zoom.

The support of the Trevelyan Fund (Faculty of History) is gratefully acknowledged.

Convenors: Romola Davenport (rjd23@cam.ac.uk), Alice Reid (alice.reid@geog.cam.ac.uk) and Leigh Shaw-Taylor (lmws2@cam.ac.uk).

View the archive of previous seminars.

# Wednesday 9th June 2021, 1.00pm - Joana Pujadas-Mora (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

Title to be confirmed

Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

# Wednesday 16th June 2021, 1.00pm - Tom Heritage (Southampton)

Poverty, Old Age and Outdoor Relief in Late-Victorian England

Venue: Zoom webinar - link to follow

Abstract not available

Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History

The Workshop meets alternate Mondays on Zoom, 12.30pm.

Convened by Caitlin Adams (cia26) and Tom Tyson (tmt27).

To join the mailing list, please complete the Google Form:
https://forms.gle/RcAx1t4WWY1yL2RA9

Twitter: @EconomicandSoc2

There are no forthcoming seminars at present. Please check back here later.

You may wish to view the archive of previous seminars.

Core Seminar in Economic and Social History

Seminars will take place on Thursdays at 5 pm on Zoom. All are welcome.

The Core seminar combines multiple seminars: Medieval Economic and Social History; Early Modern Economic and
Social History; Modern Economic and Social History and Policy; African Economic History; Global Economic History;
Quantitative History; Financial History; the Centre for History and Economics; and the Cambridge Group for the
History of Population and Social Structure. Their specialist seminar programmes do not run in Michaelmas term, but
each meets separately again in Lent and (sometimes) Easter.

Seminar convenor: Amy Erickson (ale25@cam.ac.uk)

Economic and Social History at Cambridge: www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk

There are no forthcoming seminars at present. Please check back here later.

You may wish to view the archive of previous seminars.

Quantitative History Seminar

Supported by the Centre for History and Economics and the Trevelyan Fund (Faculty of History).

The seminar meets on Wednesdays at 13.15 in Seminar Room 6, Faculty of History.
Sandwiches and fruit will be available.

Convenor: Leigh Shaw-Taylor (lmws2@cam.ac.uk)

View the archive of previous seminars.

# Wednesday 12th May 2021, 1.00pm - Dan Bogart (University of California, Irvine)

Transport and urban growth in the first industrial revolution

Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

During the first industrial revolution the English economy underwent a spatial transformation to go along with its structural transformation in employment. It became highly urbanized and, apart from London, its urban growth shifted to the northwest. This paper examines the role of transport and access to markets in causing this spatial transformation. Transport changed greatly with infrastructure improvements and technological and organizational innovations. We focus on those occurring before the era of railways and steam ships, when wagons, canals, and sail ships were dominant. We construct a measure of market access for 458 towns in 1680 and 1830 using a new multi-modal transport model and then estimate the effects of lower trade costs through changes in market access. Our regression model controls for various town characteristics, including coal endowments. The results show that changes in market access had a large positive effect on changes in urban population. The results contribute to a new understanding of the industrial revolution and spatial economic growth more generally.

# Wednesday 19th May 2021, 1.00pm - Zijing Shen (Cambridge)

The occupational structure of Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta 1949-2010: A reconstruction from a High School Survey

Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

This paper reconstructs the occupational structure of Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta Region (PRDR) since the 1940s, using an original data source of a high school survey. This method, namely “Oral Quantitative History”, provides us with a new perspective and evidence to identify the changes in economic and social structure that occurred in the PRDR, and to assess the causal role of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of 1978. The reliability and correction of the data source are also discussed in this paper, via a comparison with traditional data sources such as the census and yearbooks.

# Wednesday 26th May 2021, 1.00pm - Xuesheng You (Swansea)

Transport development and urban population change in the age of steam: A market access approach

Venue: ONLINE - Details to be sent by email

This article takes a market access approach to study the effect of a major transport development, the introduction of steam-powered transport, on urban population change for 415 towns in England and Wales between 1830 and 1911. The totality of the roads, inland waterways, coastal routes and railway networks recorded in available sources for these two dates were digitised with unprecedented accuracy, in order to build a multimodal transport network accordingly. Our baseline model produces the unexpected result that, on average, improved market access had a negative effect on urban population growth. More specifically, the elasticity of population change with respect to market access change was of approximately -0.25. We argue that this unexpected effect was due to the strong heterogeneous effects of market access according to initial town size. Indeed, our estimates show that while market access had a significantly positive effect on population growth in large towns, it had a significantly negative effect on small towns. We argue that this heterogeneous effect was due to the fact that improved transport networks reinforced agglomeration effects in large urban centres while diminished the dispersion effect that had previously protected small towns.

Additional seminars of interest to Campop members

Additional seminars of interest to Campop members.

There are no forthcoming seminars at present. Please check back here later.

You may wish to view the archive of previous seminars.