We study the decisions of state-chartered banks to join the Fed in its first decade. Ours is the first study to combine state regulatory environment characteristics and individual bank characteristics to explain Fed membership choice. Regulatory environments that reduced the benefit of discount window access or increased the regulatory cost of joining the Fed led to fewer banks joining. Individual

The dramatic decrease in international trade costs in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a global trade boom. In this paper, we examine the consequences of greater openness to international trade for regional economic activity in a small, open economy during the first era of globalization. Specifically, we provide a quantitative assessment of the role that exposure to globalization played

Abstract not available

During the nineteenth century, U.S. manufacturers shifted away from the “hand labor” mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to “machine labor,” which was increasingly concentrated in steam-powered factories. This transition fundamentally changed production tasks, jobs, and job requirements. This paper uses digitized data on these two production modes from an 1899 U.S. Commissioner of

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic

Dorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential

Cobble's study of American social democratic feminism is a fascinating narrative of the lives of women who crossed the boundaries of class, race and nation-states to build a better world. Her chronological account of the careers and activism of these women is not only a major contribution to the history of feminism but also a significant addition to the study of social democracy worldwide.

This introduction to the review dossier on Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, introduces the major themes of the work in light of Cobble's earlier interventions in gendering labor history and focus on laborite activist women here called “full rights feminists”. It asks the contributors to expand on and decenter the transnational and global

In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully

Abstract In this article, the authors attempt to advance discussions of mercantile concentration in British North America in the eighteenth century by employing two measurement tools common in the field of industrial organization-concentration ratios and the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI)—to measure and analyze concentration levels in Charleston, South Carolina between 1735 and 1775. These tools

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a handful of societies began creating and enforcing impersonal rules, rules that treat everyone the same, on a broad scale. The existing institutional literatures, while appreciating the importance of impersonal rules for the rule of law, have not understood how they contribute to economic and political development through rules that are enforced but not followed:

The introduction outlines content and scope of this special issue on "Housing, Hiding and the Holocaust". It points out that during World War II-ccupation accommodation became a scarce commodity, with collapsing housing markets. As a consequence, in those places where the German army (and navy) was stationed, direct contact between the occupiers and the occupied couldn't be avoided. Worst hit by housing

As elsewhere in Poland, the German occupation deeply disrupted the relations and social dynamics between the non-Jewish population and the Jews in Tarnów from the very first day. Investigating housing, property and the urban space in a society under occupation, in a Kräftefeld dominated by the German occupiers, offers new insights into this relationship. It traces the notions of an ethnically encoded

Abstract We provide a detailed case study showing how social network analysis allows scholars to detect an event affecting the entire historical network under consideration and identify the responsible actors. We study the middle 13th century in Czech lands, where a rigid political structure of noble families surrounding the monarchs led to the uprising of part of the nobility. Having collected data

Shooting associations represented one of the most popular expressions of sociability in Imperial Germany. Their club houses were to be found in large and medium-sized towns, in villages, and in overseas colonies, too. Middle class men would regularly gather to practice shooting and to organize competitions, activities characterized by clearly gendered rituals of social life. Based on values of loyalty

The article analyses the German requisition and quartering practices in Norway in the light of international law and traces their impact on everyday relations between the enemies. With an average of 350,000 soldiers stationed in Norway, the German demand for housing was enormous. Space became a highly coveted resource. It was both the object of power struggles and a reflection of those struggles. The

The unique anxieties experienced by married couples remain under-examined aspects of both the First World War and the early twentieth century. Drawing on the writings of four upper-middle-class couples, this article reveals the complex ways in which couples sought to maintain intimacy across transnational time and space during the war. The author argues that, elements of modern marriage were clearly

This article examines the Lady Kennaway assisted emigration scheme, designed to send women from Ireland's workhouses to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in Southern Africa. First proposed by Colonial Secretary Henry Labouchere in 1857, the scheme's purpose was to provide wives for the British German Legion, which had been resettled to British Kaffraria the previous year. Initially, the plan

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles

Abstract Drawing conceptual boundaries is one of the defining features of constitution-making processes. These historically situated operations of boundary making are central to the definition of what counts as “constitutional” in a political community. In this article, we study the operations of conceptual delimitation performed by the Constitutional Commission (1973–1978) that drafted the 1980 Chilean

During the occupation of the Netherlands, the Jewish population was systematically robbed and deprived of their property rights. Their economic and social isolation went hand in hand with a loss of social status, connectedness, security and identity, as homes were expropriated and furniture was confiscated. The process of depriving the Jews of everything they owned, which happened with such apparent

During World War II, France faced a housing crisis with over 1.2 million dwellings destroyed or damaged. In addition to the destruction, the German occupiers requisitioned thousands of accommodations including some 6–7,000 locales in Paris. Anti-Jewish persecution forced thousands of Jews from their homes and the average non-Jewish French resident, facing their own housing issues, benefited from the

Recent historiography has been more positive about the Wilhelmine German Empire, which long had a poor reputation. This might be partly due to the trend towards transnational history with a specific focus on transfer and exchange. This article argues that from such a perspective the re-evaluation of the German Empire may easily overshoot the mark. Focusing on a comparative study of Hamburg and London

On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re-assessment

A novel series of interest rates paid by the Corporation of London shows that interest rates in London declined by 350 basis points during the seventeenth century. The decline followed a similar pattern in Europe. Records from the Corporation’s archive provide evidence for financial development: an increase in the number and volume of debt instruments, an increase in the number of lenders, and the

I use newly-developed data on Africa to estimate the effects of the international slave trades (circa 1500–1850) on the institutional structures of African economies and societies (circa 1900). I find that: (1) societies in slave catchment zones adopted slavery to defend against further enslavement; (2) slave trades spread slavery and polygyny together; (3) politically centralized aristocratic slave

I use new evidence from servant contracts, 1610–1890, to estimate male farm wages and the length of the work year in Japan. I show Japanese laborers were surprisingly poor and could only sustain 2–3 adults relative to 7 adults for the English. Japanese wages were the lowest among pre-industrial societies and this was driven by Malthusian population pressures. I also estimate the work year and find

In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters

Abstract The TOFLIT18 project documents French bilateral international trade flows from the 1710s to the 1820s. This article presents the TOFLIT18 dataset and its exploration tool (the “datascape”). We make four contributions: first, we discuss the institutional framework in which the sources were produced; second, we present our method to standardize the collected data and reduce the variety of commodity

This article tracks the remarkable role played by a commercial property developer, the Arndale Property Company, in the transformation of urban Britain across the second half of the twentieth century. This was an era of great change in cities, as urban environments were remodeled and urban centers had to adapt to deindustrialization and the rise of a consumer-driven and service-dominated economy. Arndale

Abstract Based on the life course perspective, this work adopts a sequence analysis approach to examine internal migrant trajectories and their interdependencies with life course factors. The analyses are based on longitudinal data from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands. The internal migrant trajectories of Dutch cohorts born between 1850 and 1922 are followed from birth until age fifty. Two

Abstract This article investigates the archiving practices of a little-known group of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, the Diyarbakır Chaldeans, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues for a flexible definition of archives, based not on traditional characteristics such as links to a defined institutional repository, but on their purpose of community formation. The loose institutional

This article examines the survival strategies of forestry workers and craftspeople in the late Ottoman Empire. Through the example of the Tahtacı, a semi-nomadic community specialized in lumbering in the forests along the western and southern coasts of Anatolia, it visualizes the adaptation strategies of forestry labourers in the changing economic and ecological environment of the Mediterranean Basin

I study the rates of, selection into, and sorting of European immigrants’ secondary migration within the United States and their geographic assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration. These phenomena are recognized as important components of the economics of immigration, but data constraints have limited prior study of them in this context. As part of the debate over immigrant distribution, they