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The successful assimilation of ethnic minorities into Western economies is one of the biggest challenges facing the Modern World. The substantial flows of Irish, to England, provide an historical example of this process. However, this has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. We use the universe of probate and vital registers of births, marriages and deaths, from England, 1838 to 2018, to document the status of the Irish in England. We identify the ‘Irish’ in the records as those individuals with distinctively Irish surnames. From at least the mid 19th century to 2018, the Irish in England have persisted as an underclass, 30-50% poorer than the English. Infant mortality is about 25% higher for the Irish 1838- 1950 but has subsequently equalized. We discuss the potential roles of selective migration, social mobility, and discrimination in this, and signpost directions for future research.

We use databases we have created from the records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by pre-Famine Irish immigrants and their children to serve Famine era immigrants, to study the social mobility of bank customers and, by extension, Irish immigrants more generally. We infer that New York’s Famine Irish had a greater range of employment opportunities open to them than perhaps commonly acknowledged, and that the majority were eventually able to move a rung or two up the American socio-economic ladder, supporting the conviction of many Famine immigrants that the U.S. was indeed “the best country in the world.”

Automated census linkage algorithms have become popular for generating longitudinal data on social mobility, especially for immigrants and their children. But what if these algorithms are particularly bad at tracking immigrants? Using nineteenth-century Irish immigrants as a test case, we examine the most popular of these algorithms—that created by Abramitzky, Boustan, Eriksson (ABE), and their collaborators. Our findings raise serious questions about the quality of automated census links. False positives range from about one-third to one-half of all links depending on the ABE variant used. These bad links lead to sizeable estimation errors when measuring Irish immigrant social mobility. George Washington University CUNY Research Foundation National Endowment for the Humanities

We provide a centennial overview of the Irish economy in the one hundred years following partition and independence. A comparative perspective allows us to distinguish between those aspects of Irish policies and performance that were unique to the country, and those which mirrored developments elsewhere. While Irish performance was typical in the long run, the country under-performed prior to the mid-1980s and over-performed for the rest of the twentieth century. Real growth after 2000 was slow. The mainly chronological narrative highlights the roles of convergence forces, trade and industrial policy, and monetary and fiscal policy. While the focus is mostly on the south of the island, we also survey the Northern Irish experience during this period.

Disputes over whether the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution begin with the common assumption that natural philosophers and artisans formed radically distinct groups. In reality, these groups merged together through a diverse group of applied mathematics teachers, textbook writers and instrument makers catering to a market of navigators, gunners and surveyors. From these "mathematical practitioners" emerged specialized instrument makers whose capabilities facilitated industrialization in two important ways. First, a large supply of instrument and watch makers provided Britain with a pool of versatile, mechanically skilled labour to build the increasingly complicated machinery of the late eighteenth century. Second, the less well known but equally revolutionary innovations in machine tools-which, contrary to the Habbakuk thesis, occurred largely in Britain during the 1820s and 1830s to mass produce interchangeable parts for iron textile machinery-drew on a technology of exact measurement developed for navigational and astronomical instruments.

For contemporaries, Britain's success in developing the technologies of the early Industrial Revolution rested in large part on its abundant supply of artisan skills, notably in metalworking. In this paper we outline a simple process where successful industrialization occurs in regions that start with low wages and high mechanical skills, and show that these two factors strongly explain the growth of the textile industry across the 41 counties of England between the 1760s and 1830s. By contrast, literacy and access to capital have no power in predicting industrialization, nor does proximity to coal. Although unimportant as a source of power for early textile machinery, Britain's coal was vital as a source of cheap heat that allowed it over centuries to develop a unique range of sophisticated metalworking industries. From these activities came artisans, from watchmakers to iron founders, whose industrial skills were in demand not just in Britain but across all of Europe. Against the view that living standards were stagnant during the Industrial Revolution, we find that real wages rose sharply in the industrializing north and collapsed in the previously prosperous south.

This paper offers (yet another) reflection on the history and current status of economic history. No other sub-discipline of economics or history has tried so hard to be loved as economic history. That love is unrequited, because economic history’s problem is existential: it is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Economists and historians are interested in only small parts of what economic history should embrace. Some examples are given of how narrow views of the past the impoverish research. Not all is gloom and doom, however. The controversies economic history provokes and the insights it provides touch on issues that resonate and that will continue to do so.

Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional spread, and compare them with their British counterparts. We also discuss the share of Catholics and Quakers among top wealth-holders.

Shipping was central to the rise of the Atlantic economies, but an extremely hazardous activity: in the 1780s, roughly five per cent of British ships sailing in summer for the United States never returned. Against the widespread belief that shipping technology was stagnant before iron steamships, in this paper we demonstrate that between the 1780s and 1820s, a safety revolution occurred that saw shipping losses and insurance rates on oceanic routes almost halved thanks to steady improvements in shipbuilding and navigation. Iron reinforcing led to stronger vessels while navigation improved, not through chronometers which remained too expensive and unreliable for general use, but through radically improved charts, accessible manuals of basic navigational techniques, and improved shore-based navigational aids.

The role of skills and human capital during England’s Industrial Revolution is the subject of an old but still ongoing debate. This paper contributes to the debate by assessing the artisanal skills of watchmakers and watch tool makers in southwest Lancashire in the eighteenth century and their links to apprenticeship. The flexibility of the training regime and its evolution are discussed, as is the decline of the industry.

L’histoire économique ne jouit plus aujourd’hui en France du prestige qui était le sien du temps de Braudel et de Labrousse, mais loin d’être le refuge d’une poignée de nostalgiques, elle ne cesse de se renouveler. Fruit d’une initiative du CNRS, ce livre s’interroge sur sa situation actuelle et ses perspectives de développement : poids des héritages, crise des paradigmes, rapports avec les autres secteurs de l’histoire et les disciplines voisines, chantiers en cours et thématiques émergentes y sont étudiés par les meilleurs spécialistes. De surcroît, sortant de l’hexagone, il donne à découvrir des travaux qui, au niveau international, sont en train de renouveler l’histoire économique et représentent autant de défis pour les historiens français. Faisant justice des stéréotypes réducteurs, il montre enfin que l’histoire économique aide à penser la complexité et, en éclairant le présent par le passé, contribue à rendre intelligibles les problèmes de notre temps - des crises financières à la montée de la Chine en passant par la fin des campagnes ou l’accroissement des inégalités.

This paper surveys publications in the fields of economic history and demography in the ESR since 1969. Numbering sixty in all, they cover a broad chronological and thematic range. Some of these papers never attracted much notice, but stand as useful sources for future historians. A few have become classics.

Are return migrants 'losers' who fail to adapt to the challenges of the host economy, and thereby exacerbate the brain drain linked to emigration? Or are they 'winners' whose return enhances the human and physical capital of the home country? These questions are the subject of a burgeoning literature. This paper analyze a new database culled from the 1911 Irish population census to address these issues for returnees to Ireland from North America more than a century ago. The evidence suggests that those who returned had the edge over the population as a whole in terms of human capital, if not also over those who remained abroad.

The link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland has long interested economists. This paper re-visits the topic, harnessing the highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 Census of Ireland. Using population per value adjusted acre as a measure of population pressure, our results indicate that on the eve of the Great Famine of 1846-50, population pressure was positively associated with both illiteracy rates and the prevalence of poor quality housing. But while our analysis shows that population pressure was one of the primary factors underpinning pre-Famine poverty, it also highlights the importance of geography and human agency. A counterfactual computation indicates that had Ireland's population stayed at its 1800 level, this would have led to only modest improvements in literacy and housing.