The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913.

Dublin experienced a marked stagnation in population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by decaying infrastructure and poor public health. Historians have emphasized that this crisis was coupled with poor governance of the city of Dublin—manifested by eroding public services together with increasing tax burdens to counteract growing debt. This paper studies the municipal boundary expansion of Dublin in 1901, which occurred as a way to alleviate the city’s financial distress. It saw multiple relatively wealthy townships annexed by the city via royal order to increase Dublin’s tax base. Using a sample of census records matched to city streets, we show that wealthy residents and Protestant residents were more likely to leave annexed areas compared to areas that remained independent. Moreover, we offer anecdotal evidence that at least some of the wealthy Protestant households departing annexed townships sorted into jurisdictions that remained independent. Our findings offer support to arguments that the municipal annexation by the city of Dublin may have accelerated the decline of annexed areas in the early twentieth century and contributed to municipal fragmentation in metropolitan Dublin.

We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using international market prices for coffee and sugar for predicting labor demands, addresses potential endogeneity concerns. Our estimates suggest that without the abolition of the Cultivation System average overall mortality in Java would have been between 10 and 30 percent higher by the late 1870s.

Abundant land and strong property rights are conventionally viewed as key factors underpinning U.S. economic development success. This view relies on the “Pristine Myth” of an empty undeveloped land, but the abundant land of North America was already made productive and was the recognized territory of sovereign Indigenous Nations. We demonstrate that the development of strong property rights for European/American settlers was mirrored by the attenuation and increasing disregard of Indigenous property rights. We argue that the dearth of discussion of the dispossession of Indigenous nations results in a misunderstanding of some of the core themes of U.S. economic history.

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century.

This paper investigates part-year factory operation, a common but understudied dimension of industrializing economies, in a prototypical late-industrializing setting that offers rich factory-level data: Imperial Russia. Newly compiled data provides detailed descriptions of all Russian manufacturing firms operating in 1894 and shows that factories operating a greater number of annual working days were more mechanized, more urban, more likely to employ women and children, more productive, and more likely to survive. Rather than arguing that part-year operation demonstrated Russia’s uniquely inexorable backwardness, we stress operating time’s relationship to fundamental drivers of growth, including urbanization, geography, and institutions.

Disputes over whether the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution begin with the common assumption that natural philosophers and artisans formed 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 ranging from navigators and surveyors to bookkeepers. Besides its direct economic contribution in diffusing useful numerical skills, this “practical mathematics” facilitated later industrialization in two ways. First, a large supply of instrument and watch makers provided Britain with a pool of versatile, mechanically skilled labor 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.

How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We find suggestive evidence that distress labor supply by widows and rising wages help account for this result.

This paper studies the average and heterogeneous effects of railway access on parish-level population, income, and industrialization in Württemberg during the Industrial Revolution. We show that the growth-enhancing effect of the railway was much greater in parishes that were larger and more industrial at the outset. However, such early industrial parishes were rare in the relatively poor German state. This might explain why we find small average growth effects, which only increase at the end of the nineteenth century. Heterogeneity in the impact of the railway thus increased economic disparities within Württemberg and contributed to the state’s relatively sluggish growth.

An economic downturn coincided with the start of the epidemic but the recession was short and moderate, compared with that of 1920/21. Cross-sectional high-frequency data indicate that the epidemic affected the labor supply sharply but briefly with no ensuing spill-overs; most of the recession, brief as it was, was due to the end of the war. I analyze weekly city-level mortality data and economic indicators with time series methods and structural estimation of an economic-epidemiological model: interventions to hinder the contagion reduced mortality at little economic cost, probably because reduced infections mitigated the impact on the labor force.