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We examine the role of social and geographical networks in structuring entry into premodern London's skilled occupations. Newly digitized apprenticeship indenture records for 1600–1749 offer little evidence that personal ties strongly shaped apprentice recruitment. The typical London apprentices had no identifiable tie to their master through kin or place of origin. Migrant apprentices' fathers were generally outside the craft sector. The apprenticeship market was strikingly open: well-to-do families accessed a wide range of apprenticeships, and would-be apprentices could match ability and aptitude to opportunity. This fluidity aided human capital formation, with obvious implications for economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A new source, 1840s Admiralty seamen's tickets, is used to explore three anthropometric issues. First, did being born in a city, with its associated disamenities, lead to stunting? Second, did being born near a city, whose markets sucked away foodstuffs, lead to stunting? Third, did child labour lead to stunting? We find that only those born in very large cities suffered a level of stunting that contemporaries could have observed. Being born near a city, which gave parents opportunities to trade away family calories, and perhaps increased exposure to disease, did not cause stunting. Britain was a well-integrated market; all families, whatever their locations, had options to trade and faced similar disease environments. Finally, although adults who had gone to sea young were shorter than those who did not enlist until fully grown, going to sea did not stunt. Instead, plentiful food at sea attracted stunted adolescents, who reversed most of their stunting as a result. But child labour at sea was different from other forms of children's work because wages were largely hypothecated to the child as food and shelter onboard. In contrast, where wages were paid to the child or his parents in cash, they became submerged in the household economy and their benefits were shared with other family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a new source of evidence we explore the mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born, characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men with more choices in life, were more likely to migrate to London. Contrary to what might be inferred from contemporary descriptions of urban disamenities or from persistent differentials in mortality, London appears as a desirable destination for those who could choose. The conclusion must be that London was not so bad, and we should adjust our perception of the problems of urbanisation accordingly, with implications for the wider debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution. The paper’s methodological interest is the use of height as an explanatory variable in the analysis of migration. Although correlated with other variables that are routinely used in anthropometric studies to indicate life chances, such as literacy and the ability to know and recall date of birth, height has empirical advantages over these alternatives in that it exhibits higher levels of significance. Moreover while literacy and heaping are in essence binary variables, height is a (near) continuous one, and one that allows us to test for linear and non-linear responses, as we do with interesting results in this paper. Perhaps the most fruitful use of height in historical analyses may turn out to be as an explanatory variable; at the very least such a research strategy provides anthropometric historians with further opportunities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article assesses train speeds in England and Wales 1843-1912. Trains were fast compared with coaches or walking, and the social saving of time saved grew over time to become over 10 percent of national income in 1912. Including fare savings as well, social savings were 14 percent of national income in 1912, with consumer surplus of 6 percent. Time savings dominated fare savings once railways became a new good: travel for the masses. Using the social savings-total factor productivity identity, we show that railways accounted for around a sixth of economy-wide productivity growth in this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reexamines theories previously advanced to explain slow adoption of ring spinning in Lancashire, England. Survey of the literature on the slow adoption of ring spinning; Insufficiency of the standard dichotomy between vertically integrated and vertically specialized firms; Conclusions.

The article presents reply to a comment of historian Peter Razzell on a study about the relationship of smallpox and a person's height in London, England. Razzell believes that the authors have misunderstood the nature of his criticism and are correspondingly dismissive of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The authors share every professional historian's concern for the integrity of the data. Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society dataset is so poor that 'the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society dataset.' The authors believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a careless reading of the original records on his part. Furthermore, insofar as his claim that some of the boys who are recorded as escaping smallpox had in fact suffered the disease, the direction of bias strengthens rather than weakens the statistical evidence that smallpox reduced height. He bases this conclusion on a comparison of the columns for literacy and smallpox. He argues that if the columns for reading and writing as well as smallpox are blank, it is more likely that the returning officer was negligent.

Responds to criticism regarding a study conducted on the effects of smallpox on the physical stature, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England. Who the article was criticized by; Stance taken by the authors regarding their findings; What the findings were based on.

The article discusses the impact of smallpox on the attained heights of those who survived the ravages of the disease. Smallpox exacted a heavy toll on early modern populations, causing a significant proportion of all deaths. For example, it accounted for up to 10 per cent of deaths in London, England during the eighteenth century. But its effect on isolated populations was much more severe: over 95 per cent of those living on the island of Foula died from the disease following its arrival in 1720. Those who survived were left pockmarked for life. Research into historical heights has been the largest single project undertaken by New Economic Historians since the 1970s. It has shed new light on issues as diverse as the standard of living debate and long-term trends in mortality. Biologically, an individual's attained height is a function of cumulative nutritional status during childhood. This is commonly defined as nutritional intake minus claims on this intake, which come from work, disease, cold, basic hygiene, and basal metabolism. Over the past 100 years there has been a secular increase in heights.

An introduction is presented which compares and contrasts the findings of two articles on the long-term growth rate in England between 1381 and 1869, as well as suggesting similar future areas of study in economic history on related topics.