The EHES blog Positive Check has moved and can be found on the EHES website:  https://ehes.org/category/blog ..read more

by Vinzent Ostermeyer, Lund University, Department of Economic History.  Read more about Vinzent's reserach here. Read the full paper (open access) here.  A common periodization of economic development is that first labor shifts out of agriculture into industry and only then the service sector grows. However, such views disregard that already during the late 19th century — a period commonly associated with rapid industrialization — services were an important part of the economy growing at rates comparable to or even faster than industry (Weiss, 1967, 1971; Hartwell, 1973; Gemmell a ..read more

 Jan Luiten van Zanden and Emanuele Felice The full paper can be read here How wealthy, and how unequal, was pre-industrial Europe? And how rich was the South of Europe compared to the North Sea area: did the Little Divergence already start in the late Medieval Period? And if this was the case, what are the reasons for the decline, perhaps starting already in the XV century, of Italy? These are the main questions we address in this reconstruction of the historical national accounts of Tuscany in 1427. It is based on one of the most detailed, extensive and probably reliable quantitati ..read more

Wolf-Fabian HUNGERLAND and Nikolaus WOLF.  The full paper in the EREH can be read here We are used to distinguishing between the “first” and the “second” globalization, separated not only by two world wars, but also by changes in technology and institutions, and hence their basic economic logic. The first globalization is typically described in terms of “classical” trade models of comparative advantage, where countries trade to take advantage of their differences. In contrast, the second globalization is largely described in terms of “new” trade models based on monopolistic competition an ..read more

By Luigi Oddo (University of Genoa, Department of Political Science) and Andrea Zanini (University of Genoa, Department of Economics). From the second half of the 20th century, the role of urbanization in the development process has become an extensively investigated topic. In standard urbanization models, from the pioneering studies by Lewis (1954) on urban pull factors, then passing on the great classics of the subject by de Vries (1984) and Bairoch (1988), who stressed rural push factors, cities have almost always been represented as a factor of economic development in the pre-industrial wo ..read more

Call for panels and papers are now open for the next EHES conference, to be held 17-18 June 2022 in Groningen.  All submissions are due by 10 January. See the official call for papers for more details about PhD bursaries and the dissertation prize here The website and submission portal are coming soon - we'll keep you posted here ..read more

By Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia and (Norwegian University of Science and Technology; CEPR) and Francisco J. Marco-Gracia (University of Zaragoza; Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón). Blog post based on the article with the same name published in the European Review of Economic History(here).   Many pre-industrial societies regulated population size by resorting to infanticide and the mortal neglect of unwanted infants and children (Langer 1972; Harris and Ross 1987; Hrdy 1999). These practices have traditionally targeted girls in India, China and Japan, among other countries characterised ..read more

Sara Torregrosa-Hetland Oriol Sabaté   The World Wars were associated with progressive tax policies in most Western countries. Top marginal income tax rates increased to unprecedented levels, while other fiscal instruments, such as excess profits taxes, were implemented during the wars to meet the extraordinary revenue needs (Scheve and Stasavage, 2016). In the income tax, this leap in progressive reforms came along with the broadening of the tax base, which brought for the first time low and middle incomes into the tax (Brownlee, 1996; Broadberry and Howlett, 1998, 2005; Rockoff, 2012 ..read more

 by Abel Gwaindepi, Lund University  It has been accepted that colonists in settler colonies were willing to shoulder unusually high tax burdens to assert their self-rule and autonomy. Was this willingness to shoulder high tax burdens by the colonists generalized through the British Empire? To explore this question, I study and compare the Cape Colony’s fiscal path to the experiences of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.   A divergent fiscal path? How did the tax to GDP shares evolve in each colony? Figure 2 shows the Tax to GDP ratios of the four colonies. What is clear i ..read more

Michiel de Haas (Wageningen University) Few doubt that colonialism generated new economic cleavages in African societies (Van de Walle 2009). At the same time, we know very little about the extent of such economic inequality in different African colonies and across time. In this article, I measure income inequality in Uganda, located in central-East Africa and colonized by Britain, in five benchmark years between 1925 (mid-colonial period) and 1965 (just after independence). I find that overall income inequality was low compared to other African colonies, but also find that sharp fault lines e ..read more