Spring Term 2024 - 2025
Tuesdays 12-1pm
Spring Term Venue: PAR.2.03
20 May
- Speaker: Jordan Claridge
- The Black Death as a structural labour market transformation? A new perspective from the labour share
Abstract:
The Black Death, rightfully, is seen as a watershed moment in history. In terms of the medieval economy, Very generally, the story goes as following: the Plague's drastic demographic consequences triggered severe labour scarcity, resulting in a sharp increase in wages, which paved the way for higher standards of living for those who survived. Recent studies have questioned the extent and nature of these changes. For instance, recent work reconstructing annual wages in medieval England has found that wage increases following the Black Death were all but absent in the first decades following the Plague's arrival in England. This paper takes a new approach to an old question: we present a novel perspective on the structural changes in the labour market which followed the Black Death by quantifying the share of agricultural revenue that accrued to labour. We show that, under a plausible set of assumptions, the labour share of revenues is able to inform us about structural changes in the agricultural production process following the Black Death, as well as its consequences in terms of changing power dynamics in medieval labour markets. Furthermore, the labour share approach allows us to integrate both day and annual labour into our analysis, providing new evidence on the differentiated nature of day and annual labour in medieval agriculture.
27 May
- Speaker: Melanie Xue/Louis Henderson
- Melanie: Precious Child: Culture and the Value of Children
Abstract:
We introduce the concept—and a corresponding cross-cultural measure—of the cultural salience of children, captured by the proportion of child-focused motifs in each society’s traditional folktales, as coded from the Berezkin folklore catalogue. This new indicator is orthogonal to pre-industrial fundamentals such as subsistence mode, kinship patterns, and early statehood. Historically, child-salient cultures recorded lower infant mortality, consistent with greater investments in children’s survival. In today’s low-mortality world the same trait predicts higher fertility, lower female labour-force participation, and steeper post-birth earnings penalties for mothers. These results indicate that deep-seated cultural narratives about children remain a powerful and independent force shaping family size and gendered economic outcomes, even in otherwise similar modern economies
- Louis: Age norms and compulsory schooling
Abstract:
Children are routinely assessed against age-related norms to forecast their future aptitudes, capabilities, and health outcomes. Academic achievement is one such benchmark. By standardizing school-entry age, compulsory schooling policies create an empirical association between age and academic performance that did not previously exist (Lassonde 2011). This paper employs an interval-censored regression approach to investigate the family characteristics influencing school-entry age in the nineteenth-century United States. It argues that persistent differences across migrant groups underscore the role of cultural norms in shaping educational decisions. Furthermore, the paper examines whether the introduction of compulsory schooling contributed to a convergence in school-entry age norms over time.
3 June
17 June
21 January 2025
- Speaker: Professor Neil Cummins
Abstract:
We document religiosity in England from 1300 to 1850 using the full-text of ~26,000 last will and testaments and 8,000 will extracts.. By extracting from these documents measures of religious expression and sentiment, together with specified wealth bequests for burial, remembrance, parish church and charity, we measure two distinct types of religiosity. “Nominal” religiosity is measured using a composite index for a set of religious declarations in the preamble of the will, such as gratitude towards higher entities. “Real” religiosity is measured from declarations to religious entities in the latter part of the will, together with the value of cash bequests to church, charity and other religious signals. We also code each will to a set of characteristics such as wealth, gender, place, human capital, and occupation. Thus we can chart the correlates of the rise and decline of real and nominal religiosity in high micro-level resolution. Applying regression discontinuity designs across a diverse variety of macro-shocks such as, for example, the Black Death, Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534, and across the periods of the enlightenment, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions we can assess the determinants of religiosity at the individual level.
18 February 2025
- Speaker: Professor Leigh Gardner
Abstract:
Economic histories of Sub-Saharan Africa during the interwar period have focused almost exclusively on the interventions of colonisers like Britain and France. But this was a period in which the global order was shifting, and new powers like the United States were displacing the old on the global stage. Thus far, the impact of this shift on African economies has been neglected by economic historians of Africa and by historians of the United States in the world - though contemporary accounts suggest that both Africans and Europeans were keenly aware of the opportunities and risks these changes presented. They also show that the material and cultural extension of an interwar "American dream" increasingly influenced African economies as the period progressed. This programme examines the economic legacies of American trade, investment, philanthropic and missionary engagement in Africa in the period between the wars.
1 April 2025
- Speaker: Tom Raster
Abstract:
How do wealthy elites persist through critical junctures such as epidemics, expropriation, or the emancipation of labour? This paper studies the mechanisms of wealth persistence by collecting uniquely detailed ownership records of all landed wealth in Estonia and Latvia from 1207 to 1919. We document extreme and persistent levels of wealth inequality concentrated by descendants of German crusaders. Wealth inequality was only temporarily reduced by several quasi-exogenous plague epidemics, expropriation by new rulers and the emancipation of ethnic Estonians and Latvian serfs after 1816. Collecting extensive genealogical data, we aim to demonstrate how elite networks mitigate the impact of critical junctures, thus uncovering a potentially key mechanism of elite wealth persistence. We further aim to demonstrate how wealth inequality relates to outcomes such as agricultural productivity and profits, industrialisation, and voting.
Tuesdays 12-1pm
19 November 2024 - CANCELLED
- Speaker: Dr Pamfili Antipa