Founded in 1760, the Cambridge Botanic Garden was designed to serve the theological interests of the university by developing a collection of living plants from across the globe. Exploring the construction and layout of the garden, its global network, methods of managing information, and the accessibility of the collection during the professorship of Thomas Martyn between 1762 and 1825, this article

Re-distributive policies are often used by governments to forestall conflict. This paper analyzes the evolution of rural conflict in a region of 1930s Spain in which fast transfers of land using temporal expropriations were aimed at reducing poverty and mitigate conflict. Using a subset of exogenous land transfers, we document that these transfers did not reduce conflict. If anything, they increased

The economic history of the United States is that of Europeans and their institutions. Indigenous nations are absent. This absence is partly due to a lack of data but perhaps also to a perception that Indigenous communities contributed little to U.S. growth. Three case studies explore the economic complexity and social stratification across different nations/regions prior to contact. Migrants to the

Federal prohibition was one of the most ambitious policy interventions in US history. However, the removal of restrictions on alcohol after 1933 was not uniform. Using a new balanced panel on annual deaths, we find that city-level repeal is associated with a 11.6% decrease in the rate of death by non-automobile accidents, a category which critically include accidental poisonings. We relate this finding

In 1672 John Evelyn, Restoration courtier, diarist and polymath, formed a platonic soul union with Margaret Blagge (later Godolphin), a young maid of honour in Queen Catherine’s household. Both were devout Anglicans whose religious practices were shaped by their love of ‘recesse’. For four years they enacted a spiritual solitude à deux in an emotionally charged relationship lived out through private

This article uses the records of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) to examine the economic life and experiences of African American entrepreneurs between 1900 and 1920. Often referred to as the ‘golden age’ of Black business, this era saw the proliferation of African American owned businesses, despite the increase in discrimination and racial persecution that had characterized the United States

Refugee camps are sudden, spontaneous population centers that can persist for years. Their persistence provides an opportunity to learn about the forces of path dependence. I argue that residents stay because the camps create local amenities. I examine this question using refugee camps established in Haiti after a 1937 massacre in the Dominican Republic. Despite the residents’ freedom to migrate, the

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy’s postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops

The framing of India’s constitution was a critical event in the global history of both constitution-making and democracy. Conventionally it has been analysed as a founding moment. Its success against multiple odds has been explained as resulting from a vision and consensus among the elite over what would become a pedagogical text for an ‘ignorant’ and undemocratic public. This focus among academics

This article examines a set of public universities that opened after 1848 across California, Australasia, South Africa and Canada. It argues that these institutions, termed the ‘goldfield foundations’, owed the speed of their formation, if not their existence, to the period’s global gold and mineral rushes. During the first capital-intensive years of university development, new mineral wealth added

This article analyses the petition and response process in late medieval Castile, focusing on petitions of grievance submitted to the Royal Council during the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (r.1474–1504). Studies published in recent decades have revised our understanding of petitionary practices and their significance to systems of governance in medieval and early modern Europe. One persistent gap

The prominence of the figure of Don Juan marks the Spanish literature on masculinities which will be analyzed in this article. This distinctive trait, obvious when comparing it to English-speaking ...

The aim of this paper is to bridge the gap between Spanish and European historiography specializing in gender and Christianity studies, in order to enrich general observations and contribute to ong...

This paper addresses feminisms in Spain during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, proposing a number of interpretative keys for their historical anal...

Women's and gender history has broadened our knowledge of the Franco dictatorship by incorporating new perspectives and categories of analysis. The Women's Section of the Falange, a topic that has ...

This article analyzes the impact of the Great War on two countries that remained neutral throughout the conflict, Spain and Argentina. It focuses on three aspects that are analyzed from a transnati...

The relationship between the rise of the modern European state and military resource mobilization has been studied either through the capacity of Europe's fiscal-military states to mobilize war-mak...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the complex construction of sexual difference in Spain during the eighteenth and at the turn of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, a combined analysis is perfo...

Italy abolished the ‘geographical limitation’ permitted by the 1951 Refugee Convention only in 1990. Thereafter, it could award refugee status to people in flight from countries outside Europe. Why...

Does the prosperity of medieval manors depend on their position in the feudal system? How large are these effects? And what are the underlying economic mechanisms? Using Domesday Book, a unique country-wide survey conducted by William the Conqueror, we reinterpret the eleventh-century English feudal system as a network in which manors are linked to one another based on their common ownership structure

Ventilation emerged as an efficient technique to reduce the health impact of dust and gas in workspaces around 1900. However, this technical solution to a major sanitary problem collided with the human factor. When, in 1894, French law imposed shop-floor clearance during lunch to facilitate aeration, workers resisted the injunction as a disturbance of their daily eating routine. Authorities relied

European states gradually established colonial rule in Africa between the mid nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. Historians have assessed the infrastructure introduced during this period through the lens of colonial state-building and resource extraction. This article offers another perspective by reconstructing the early history of electrification in Lagos Colony, one of

Abstract This study investigates the main features of collected disability statistics for the censuses in Sweden, 1860–1930, when the disability prevalence rose from four to 21 individuals per thousand of the population. We use qualitative methods to analyze the means of collecting, categorizing, and defining disability, while quantitative methods help us calculate the prevalence by disability type

This paper estimates the causal impact of short-term aggregate fluctuations in Egypt, 1911–48, using global cotton price shocks. Firm entry was procyclical, and exit was acyclical. There were persistent differences between cohorts over the cycle; expansionary cohorts were of lower quality. The evidence supports models of firm entry with ex-ante heterogeneity. The findings highlight the extensive margin

We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile nineteenth-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and

The literature has pointed out the negative aspects of political dynasties. But can political dynasties help prevent autocratic reversals? We argue that political dynasties differ according to their ideological origin and that those whose founder was a defender of democratic ideals, for simplicity labeled “pro-democratic dynasties,” show stronger support for democracy. We analyze the vote by the French

Even though the crucial importance of World War II has never been called into doubt by historians, it has not featured as a focal point for the interpretation of the 20th century in recent narrativ...

The British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and particularly Corfu, was a nodal point in maritime communications. Since its very creation under the Treaty of Paris (November 1815), it gave the ...

This article traces what hindsight shows to be the failure paths of the Ottoman ruling elites in dealing with the Greek revolution of 1821–1832. It considers why Sultan Mahmud II and the Ottoman mi...

Slavery remained a problem for Central Europeans after the defeat of Napoleon. Concerns over White, Christian enslavement animated German-speaking European responses to the Greek Independence movem...

Virtually every publication on the Greek Revolution signals the Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) as a turning point in international involvement with events in Greece. What the historiography t...

Abstract not available

This contribution examines the position of the Habsburg Empire vis-à-vis the Greek Revolution of 1821–1830 with a special focus on policing. It suggests that with its undeniable transnational signi...

The unification of Italian public debts in 1861 has been analysed until now without any detailed investigation into the changes that occurred in pre-existent public finance models, particularly as ...

Flightiness, or depositor sensitivity to liquidity needs, can be an important determinant of financial distress. I leverage institutional differences—that attract depositors with varying flightiness—across building and loan associations in California during the Great Depression. A new type of plan, the Dayton plan, involved less restrictive savings plans and lower withdrawal penalties. Dayton plans

In this article, I investigate the effect of landholding inequalities on the democratization process in nineteenth-century France. I focus on the 1849 election, which followed the establishment of the Second Republic (1848–1851), and on the first six elections of the Third Republic (1870–1940), which took place between 1876 and 1893. I find that stronger landholding inequalities were associated to

What is the role of access to land for the decision to emigrate? We consider the case of Denmark between 1868 and 1908, when a large number of people left for America. We exploit the fact that the Danish agrarian reforms between 1784 and 1807 had differential impacts on the class of landless laborers around the country, and use detailed parish-level data police protocols of emigrants; population censuses

This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of

This paper was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Atlanta in November 2021.

Interrogating the relationship between politeness and violence in Warrane/Sydney, 1788–ca. 1816, this article investigates the impact of Enlightenment thought in the transoceanic British colonial world. The author argues that polite sociability was crucial to the imposition and self-justification of the British occupation of Eora country. Principally examining the published and personal journals and

Early Stuart England was awash in handwriting. Handwriting was the medium of property records, law, account books, and scholarly note taking. A large share of government was conducted through handwritten policy briefs, registers, and circular letters. Equally, it was the medium of prisoners, beggars, petitioners, and village wits. Collectors compiled handwritten poems, prophecies, speeches, recipes

This article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis

This article deals with a paradox. Evidence for the punishment of workers during the early Middle Ages is richer in the earlier period (sixth and seventh centuries), when rural workers are generally thought to have been the least oppressed; by contrast, direct discussion of the subject largely drops out of the record in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries), despite clear evidence for renewed

The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families

This article examines legal relations between estate owners and their servants and workers on Danish estates in the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the traditional privileged role of Danish estate owners was changing, and their special legal status as “heads of household” over the entire population on their estates was slowly being undermined. The article investigates

What is the historical role of punishment in the management of labour? This is the central question of this Special Issue of the International Review of Social History (IRSH), “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour”. Through a close reading of the diverse range of articles included in this Special Issue and by addressing the relatively extensive but highly fragmented scholarship on the subject, this introduction

This article examines the experience of minors at the intersection of guardianship, domestic servitude (free and unfree labour), and punitive violence in Charcas (Bolivia) in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The author proposes that the study of the role of punishment in the lives of working children and adolescents allows us to question how practices that occurred under the legal cloak

This article traces corporal and collective punishment in relation to the labour control of slaves and other dependent persons during the Ur III period (c.2100–2000 BCE). Slaves and other dependent persons often worked in related contexts with some overlap in treatment. Persons of different statuses could be detained and forced to work. Persons of various statuses also received rations and other benefits

This article analyzes slave resistance, capital crimes, and state violence in the Mississippi Valley and the Paraíba Valley – two of the most dynamic plantation economies of the nineteenth century. The research focused on the intersection between slavery and criminal law in Brazil and the United States. The analysis of capital crimes committed by enslaved people in Natchez and Vassouras revealed changing

This article explores blacklisting practices following the massive 1886 Southwest strike staged by the Knights of Labor (KOL) against Jay Gould's railroad empire. It focuses mostly on strike leader Martin Irons and blacklisting advocate and newspaperman J. West Goodwin. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri, before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in

Romans rewarded skill in material terms, and wage data reflects this. This study develops a method for understanding the return on skilling in the Roman period by focusing on internal pay scales observed in Egyptian documents. These data reveal a modal premium of 100 and mean of 74. Roman-period returns on training compare favorably with evidence from outside Egypt, especially detailed pay scales in

This article analyses the role coerced intermediaries had on colonial power and authority in the prisons of British India. Coerced intermediaries in this context were convicts placed in positions of control by the colonial prison administration as warders, overseers, and night watchmen and night watchwomen, summarized here under the term “convict officers”. These convict officers were employed by the

In the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees

In the inaugural issue of Past and Present, Eric Hobsbawm cautioned historians against the assumption that a capitalist economy has an inherent tendency to cost-saving and technological innovation, emphasizing that ‘It has a bias only towards profit’. Inspired by Hobsbawm, this article shows how a history of profit can elucidate the economic and social history of machines. Beginning with miners’ protests

The ability to foresee the outbreak of epidemic disease, and to predict its course, is a highly coveted skill. Most often associated with statistical techniques, such efforts to improve the health of communities are thought to be exclusively modern. Public health more generally is often said to be categorically distinct from pre-modern medicine, which was interested above all in individual patients

This paper uses a structural time series model to explore U.S. commodity market convergence, efficiency, and intertemporal smoothing from 1750–1949. I find near-continuous convergence that is largely concentrated in the frontier, broad antebellum efficiency gains, and intertemporal smoothing from the 1880s onward among the most perishable goods. The results reveal new periods of integration across

Thousands of prospectuses offered shares to British investors at the turn of the twentieth century. We find evidence that there were informed investors who participated in the market at this time. Firms that attracted additional investor demand were more likely to be listed on the London Stock Exchange, survive longer, and achieve better long-run equity returns. We find that the exchange screened lower

The first substantive theory of free speech as a secular political right was concocted by two anonymous London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted newspaper column, Cato's Letters (1720–1723). Though its ideals became hugely influential, especially in the American colonies, Trenchard and Gordon's motives and the peculiar biases of their theory remain

Abstract Data constraints determine the scope of historical research. The gradual digitalization of large sources has increased the number of approaches that can be applied to comprehend the past. Here, we show an example of how trade data can shed new light to better understand growth patterns of Latin America at the end of nineteenth century. Latin American exports during the First Globalization