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This paper challenges the prevailing view among economic historians that tea and coffee were luxury articles of consumption prior to the nineteenth century. It reviews an array of available evidence, including national trade statistics and probate inventory studies. In particular, it examines the surprisingly wide social and economic diffusion of tea and coffee drinking among Amsterdam citizens of lower to middling economic status during the period of that city's ascendency and subsequent decline at the centre of global trade networks. Using the distribution of tea and coffee wares of both local and exotic manufacture across households of the artisanal and labouring classes, it seeks to map both the economic reach of the East Indian trade into the poorer parts of the city, as well as to locate the cultural meanings associated with the consumption of these new goods. New data to address this issue have been derived from a substantial collection of after-death inventories drawn up on the estates of middling and poor Amsterdam citizens in the middle decades of the eighteenth century by the Regents of the Municipal Orphanage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the social and political history of the European town of Basel, Switzerland. The town was famed for its paper manufacture and its printers, and its university had been founded in 1460. The site of Basel was almost unique, the first permanent bridge over the Rhine was built there in 1225. This created a nodal point for traffic from the regions on either side of the Alps. Basel was not spared by the Black Death which afflicted so much of Europe but, soon after the great pestilence of 1349, Basel was struck by a catastrophe which may have been still more severe. In the political context, Basel was of some importance, perhaps rather too much so for the taste of the urban population affected by this. Underlying Basel's political position was its economic and financial importance, something which was to continue well into the future. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was still the largest town in Switzerland, and later still much of the development of the modern Swiss economy was financed from there.

This article examines the possibility that the trans-Atlantic slave trade influenced the political institutions of villages and towns in precolonial Africa. Using anthropological data, it shows that villages and towns of ethnic groups with higher slave exports were more politically fragmented during the precolonial era. Instrumental variables are used to show that the relationship is causal. It is argued that this fragmentation is important for relative economic development because it still influences political institutions today. This argument is supported by the use of more contemporary data to show that in contemporary Nigeria and Tanzania, areas with higher levels of precolonial political fragmentation have a higher incidence of bribery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The western fertility decline is arguably the most significant demographic change to have occurred in the past 200 years, yet its causes and processes are still shrouded in ambiguity due to a lack of individual-level longitudinal data. A growing body of research has helped improve our understanding of the decline's causes by examining the development of socioeconomic differences in fertility using historical micro-data, but these have largely only considered rural areas where fertility was generally slower to decline. This article contributes to the literature by utilizing individual-level data from the Roteman Database for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926 to examine the association of socioeconomic status and fertility and the adoption of stopping behaviour during the city's transition. Using piecewise constant hazard models and logistic regression, we find that a clear class pattern arises in which the elite were early practitioners of fertility control, followed by the working classes. As the transition unfolded, socioeconomic differences in stopping behaviour disappeared and overall fertility differentials were also minimized, both of them being consistent with patterns observed in rural populations. The implications of these findings for major explanations of the decline are discussed in the concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century-long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white-collar (high-status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white-collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre-colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well-educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very few empirical studies have analysed the labour market performance of migrants in European countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article uses a rich new micro-dataset to examine the occupational attainment of migrants, mostly internal migrants, in the city of Barcelona, a key destination from the late nineteenth century onwards, adding to the literature on internal migrations in Spain during the period of industrialization. The study shows that the occupational outcomes achieved by early migrants tended to match those of natives, the reference group. However, some groups of migrants who arrived at the end of the period covered by the study show poorer outcomes than natives. The relative underachievement of these groups is explained by changes in the type of migrants and in the characteristics of the labour market. Our estimates also suggest that Spanish migrants did not experience upward occupational mobility after settling in Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of the First World War, Germany was subject to a shipping embargo by the Allied forces. Ostensibly military in nature, the blockade prevented not only armaments but also food and fertilizers from entering Germany. The impact of that blockade on civilian populations has been debated ever since. Germans protested that the Allies had wielded hunger as a weapon against women and children with devastating results, a claim that was hotly denied by the Allies. The impact of what the Germans termed the Hungerblockade on childhood nutrition can now be assessed using a newly discovered dataset based on heights and weights of nearly 600,000 German schoolchildren measured between 1914 and 1924. Statistical analysis reveals a grim truth: German children suffered severe malnutrition due to the blockade. Social class impacted risk of deprivation, with working-class children suffering the most. Surprisingly, they were the quickest to recover after the war. Their rescue was fuelled by massive food aid organized by the former enemies of Germany, and delivered cooperatively with both government and civil society. The ability of former belligerents to work together after an exceptionally bitter war to feed impoverished children may hold hope for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare of agricultural labourers has recently received renewed interest in both establishing living standards for a baseline group over the long term, and assessing the energy available for increased physical labour in the eighteenth century. Disagreement persists. This article examines a key aspect of agricultural labourers' families' welfare: nutrient consumption. We utilize datasets of the diets of agricultural labourers' households for 1787-96, 1835-46, 1863, 1893, and 1912, to analyse the availability of calories and 11 key nutrients. Self-provisioned foodstuffs are incorporated and adjustments are made for beer consumption. Deficiency is computed against household needs. The results corroborate the general levels of calorie availability identified in agricultural production accounts for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and assess these as sufficient for productive agricultural labour. However, no improvement is found in the nutritional aspect of household welfare between 1787-96 and 1835-46, thus endorsing pessimistic views of living standards for this group over this time period. Gains were evident in the next half-century, but these improvements were neither consistent nor dramatic and left a large minority of these households with nutrient deficiencies even in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new meta-narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories associated with more labour-intensive production methods. The criticism presented here concerns perspective and methodology. The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working-class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the composition and geographies of individual wealth holding in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century. It draws on various forms of death duty records to determine the individual ownership of wealth including both personal property and real estate. By combining information on these different kinds of property, it is possible to explore how different strata of wealth holders accumulated specific forms of wealth at the time of their death. The article then examines how the composition of that wealth varied according to the wealth holder's location in the urban hierarchy and distance from London. It points out important geographical differences in both the scale and nature of wealth holding and raises questions about the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much empirical social-science research, including work in economic and demographic history, has relied on the analysis of published information on administrative districts. One famous example of this type of research, the Princeton Project on the Decline of Fertility in Europe (EFP), was carried out at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research in the 1960s and 1970s. This project aimed to characterize the decline of fertility that took place in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project’s summary statements argued that social and economic forces played little role in bringing about the fertility transition. A central feature of the EFP argument is a series of statistical exercises which purport to show that changes in economic and social conditions exerted little influence on fertility. Two recent articles on Germany for this period have used similar data and methods to draw different conclusions. We show that the difference reflects problems in the Princeton project’s statistical methods. Those problems affect, potentially, virtually all quantitative research of this type. Our findings suggest cautious re-thinking of conclusions based on this type of evidence, starting with the EFP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review of literature on economic history published in 1992 categorized into periods. The time-period includes the medieval era, from 1500 to 1700, from 1700 to 1850, and since 1850. The importance of location for patterns of continuity in the use of the land is illustrated by C. Fenton-Thomas, who has made pollen analyses from 13 sites in County Durham. These suggest continuous occupation through the first millennium A.D. in the lowlands of the Tees valley, but a less stable pattern elsewhere in the county. Within the discipline of economic history, agrarian studies have produced an especially fruitful crop. Perhaps most notable is M. Overton and B.M.S. Campbell's important study of Norfolk livestock farming. The authors succeed in dovetailing manorial and probate inventory sources to identify a doubling of stocking densities between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, implying significant productivity gains in the pastoral sector. Sex, or rather gender, is both widening its scope and making progress towards integration into mainstream economic and social history. In the early eighteenth century, real men had sex with both women and adolescent males. A flexible, but controversial use of E.P. Thompson's "moral economy" model is proposed by J. Bohstedt to explain the variety of motivations and actions of eighteenth-century food rioters, and which might also incorporate J. Barber's anti-tithe protesters.

The article presents a discussion on the periodical literatures related to the economic and social history of England, published in 1987. There is much writing still on estates and parishes, based on the study of charters or on the painstaking reconstruction of early boundaries from later sources; however, though these pieces of research could have implications for social and economic history, they are not always made explicit. Economist C. Hart is able to show that a Northamptonshire estate was divided into three parts, part of a more general process of estate fragmentation which deserves closer investigation. To find out what was going on inside these estates, one needs more archaeological research of the kind carried out by economist T. Williamson in north-west Essex. He finds that the settlements shifted a good deal between the fourth and the eleventh centuries, and that the land was much less intensely used at the latter date. Urban origins attract much attention. Economist J. Haslam applies a broad brush to the eighth century, which he sees as a period of centralized fortress building and town foundation, directly parallel to developments in Carolingian Europe.

Reviews Irish literature on economic and social history since 1968 until 1980. Books which contain surveys of economic history; Works about Irish agrarian history; Publications dealing with textile industries.

The article lists publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland. They include, "Population in the Past: Family Reconstruction by Computer," by R.S. Schofield, "The History of the Dutch Slave Trade: a bibliographical Survey," by P.C. Emmer, "Sixteenth-century fiscal sources for the social and economic history of the Flemish countryside," by N. Maddens, and "The socialist trade unions after the First World War (1919-21)," by M. Nauwelaerts.