Economy of England at the Time of the Norman Conquest
John McDonald, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia The Domesday Survey of 1086 provides high quality and detailed information on the inputs, outputs and tax assessments of most English estates. This article describes how the data have been used to reconstruct the eleventh-century Domesday economy. By exploiting modern economic theory and statistical methods the reconstruction has led […]
The Depression of 1893
David O. Whitten, Auburn University The Depression of 1893 was one of the worst in American history with the unemployment rate exceeding ten percent for half a decade. This article describes economic developments in the decades leading up to the depression; the performance of the economy during the 1890s; domestic and international causes of the […]
Deflation
Pierre L. Siklos, Wilfrid Laurier University What is Deflation? Deflation is a persistent fall in some generally followed aggregate indicator of price movements, such as the consumer price index or the GDP deflator. Generally, a one-time fall in the price level does not constitute a deflation. Instead, one has to see continuously falling prices for […]
Mechanical Cotton Picker
Donald Holley, University of Arkansas at Monticello Until World War II, the Cotton South remained poor, backward, and un-mechanized. With minor exceptions, most tasks — plowing, cultivating, and finally harvesting cotton — were done by hand. Though sharecropping stifled the region’s attempts to mechanize, too many farmers, both tenants and owners, were trying to survive […]
The US Coal Industry in the Nineteenth Century
Sean Patrick Adams, University of Florida Introduction The coal industry was a major foundation for American industrialization in the nineteenth century. As a fuel source, coal provided a cheap and efficient source of power for steam engines, furnaces, and forges across the United States. As an economic pursuit, coal spurred technological innovations in mine technology, […]
Cliometrics
John Lyons, Miami University Lou Cain, Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University Sam Williamson, Miami University Introduction In the 1950s a small group of North American scholars adopted a revolutionary approach to investigating the economic past that soon spread to Great Britain and Ireland, the European mainland, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. What was first […]
Economic History of Premodern China (from 221 BC to c. 1800 AD)
Kent Deng, London School of Economics (LSE) China has the longest continually recorded history in the premodern world. For economic historians, it makes sense to begin with the formation of China’s national economy in the wake of China’s unification in 221 BC under the Qin. The year 1800 AD coincides with the beginning of the […]
Child Labor during the British Industrial Revolution
Carolyn Tuttle, Lake Forest College During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Great Britain became the first country to industrialize. Because of this, it was also the first country where the nature of children’s work changed so dramatically that child labor became seen as a social problem and a political issue. This article examines […]
The Use of Quantitative Micro-data in Canadian Economic History: A Brief Survey
Livio Di Matteo, Lakehead University Introduction1 From a macro perspective, Canadian quantitative economic history is concerned with the collection and construction of historical time series data as well as the study of the performance of broad economic aggregates over time.2 The micro dimension of quantitative economic history focuses on individual and sector responses to economic […]
The Economic Impact of the Black Death
David Routt, University of Richmond The Black Death was the largest demographic disaster in European history. From its arrival in Italy in late 1347 through its clockwise movement across the continent to its petering out in the Russian hinterlands in 1353, the magna pestilencia (great pestilence) killed between seventeen and twenty—eight million people. Its gruesome […]