The Growth Contribution of Colonial Indian Railways in Comparative Perspective
Abstract: Railways were an important driver of global economic growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While their role is well documented in industrial economies, we know less about their macro-economic impact in developing countries. In this paper, we first estimate the aggregate growth impact of Indian railways, one of the largest networks in […]
Deliberate Surrender? The Impact of Interwar Indian Protection
Abstract: What is the role of trade policy in promoting intra-Empire trade? We address the question in the context of interwar India, whose trade policies have been accused of harming British export interests. We quantify the impact of trade policy on the value and composition of Indian imports, using novel disaggregated data on both trade […]
Should History Change The Way We Think About Populism?
Abstract: This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller’s definition, according to which populism is ‘an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy’. We make three historical arguments. First, late 19th century US Populists were […]
Tracing Sustainability In The Long Run: Genuine Savings Estimates 1850 – 2018
Abstract: We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of economic development by incorporating broader measures of saving and investment, including […]
The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism, 1776–Present
Summary: Nationalists think about the economy, Marvin Suesse argues, and this thinking matters once nationalists hold political power. Many nationalists seek to limit global exchange, but others prioritise economic development. The potential conflict between these two goals shapes nationalist policy making. Drawing on historical case studies from thirty countries – from the American Revolution to […]
Trade, Slavery, and State Coercion of Labor: Egypt during the First Globalization Era
Abstract: I investigate the effects of trade on labor coercion under the dual-coercive institutions of slavery and state coercion. Employing novel data from Egypt, I document that the cotton boom in 1861–1865 increased both imported slaveholdings of the rural middle class and state coercion of local workers by the elite. As state coercion reduced wage employment, […]
The fiscal state in Africa: Evidence from a century of growth
Abstract: What is the level of state capacity in developing countries today, and what have been its drivers over the past century? We construct a comprehensive new data set of tax and revenue collection for forty-six African polities from 1900 to 2015. Our data show that polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth […]
The settlers’ fortunes: Comparing tax censuses in the Cape Colony and early American republic
Abstract: Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. […]
Globalization
Abstract: This chapter written for the Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy argues that you cannot understand the history of globalization without taking political factors into account; and that you cannot understand the history of comparative economic development without taking globalization into account. Globalization compels us to take geography seriously and to think more like […]
Why It Matters What Autocrats Say: Assessing Competing Theories of Propaganda
Abstract: This article investigates two accounts of political propaganda in autocratic regimes. One argues that propaganda’s content does not matter substantively and that propaganda is mostly a signal of the regime’s overwhelming power over citizens. A second argues that propaganda is substantively meaningful: autocrats may communicate strategically either by attracting attention through highlighting the regime’s […]
The growth and diversity of the Cape private capital market, 1892–1902
Abstract: The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company […]
Antitrust Policies and Profitability in Nontradable Sectors
Abstract: Firms in tradable sectors are more likely to be subject to external competition to limit market power, while nontradable firms are more dependent on domestic policies and institutions. This paper combines an antitrust index available for multiple countries with firm-level data from Orbis covering more than 12 million firms from 94 countries, including 20 […]
Folklore
Abstract: Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by word of mouth. We introduce to economics a unique catalog of oral traditions spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalog’s content by showing that the groups’ motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present […]
Bubbles in History
Abstract: Bubbles have become ubiquitous. This ubiquity has stimulated research over the past three decades into bubbles in history. In this article, we provide a systematic overview of research into historical bubbles. Our analysis reveals that there is no coherent approach to the study of bubbles and much of the debate has unhelpfully focussed on […]
The Economic Origins of Conflict in Africa
Abstract: We study the impact of plausibly exogenous global food price shocks on local violence across the African continent. In food-producing areas, higher food prices reduce conflict over the control of territory (what we call “factor conflict”) and increase conflict over the appropriation of surplus (“output conflict”). We argue that this difference arises because higher […]
Pre-colonial institutions and socioeconomic development: The case of Latin America
Abstract: We study the effects of pre-colonial institutions on present-day socioeconomic outcomes for Latin America. Our thesis is that more advanced pre-colonial institutions relate to better socioeconomic outcomes today. We advance that pre-colonial institutions survived to our days thanks to the existence of largely self-governed Amerindian communities in rural Latin America. Amerindians groups with more […]