Economic History Seminars 2025-26

Winter Term seminars are Thursdays, 4-5.30pm

Venue: CKK.1.04

22 January

• Oscar Gelderblom (University of Antwerp). This is a joint paper with Abe de Jong (University of Groningen and Monash University) and Joost Jonker (University of Amsterdam)
• The First Bear Raid and Bear Squeeze: Isaac Lemaire and the Dutch East India Company (1609-1610).
• Abstract: In 1609, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) faced a bear raid by a syndicate of short sellers led by Isaac le Maire, a former director. We reconstruct the forward trade between 1607 and 1611, the actions taken by the syndicate members, and the responses to these actions by the company. The raid ended with a squeeze executed by an opposing syndicate, bankrupting several forward traders and blocking Le Maire’s plans. We characterize the bear raid and squeeze as a crucial episode in the more general tug-of-war between company directors aiming to turn the VOC into an instrument of the state and a diverse group of opposing investors.

05 February

• Andy Seltzer (Royal Holloway)
• Public transportation, public housing, and declining overcrowding: Evidence from early-twentieth century London
• Abstract: Urban overcrowding was widely seen as one of the great health concerns and social scourges of nineteenth century Britain. Using data from the New Survey of London Life and Labour and previously published tables from the Census, we document the extent of overcrowding in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We also examine the causes of its decline in the early to mid-twentieth century, focussing on the role of improved public transportation networks and construction of public housing. Public transportation and the associated commuting improves matching between employers and employees and thus increases workers’ earnings. This, in turn, increases their housing expenditure. Accessible and affordable public transportation also allows workers employed in the center to live in the outer suburbs, where housing was cheaper and higher quality. We show that both mechanisms helped reduced overcrowding, but the second mechanism was likely considerably more important. We also show that beginning in 1919, housing legislation, which provided for slum clearances, rehoming of displaced residence, and subsidised construction of council housing, played an important role in reducing overcrowding. Public housing programs provided larger, higher-quality dwellings at subsidized rents. In addition, the construction of about 100,000 council houses between 1921 and 1939 probably had a substantial impact on London’s housing supply.

19 February

• Matthew Benson (LSE)
• Of Rule, Not Revenue: Predatory Rule, Predatory Peace, and Rethinking the Economic History of War and Peace – Evidence from the Sudans, 1820-2023
• Abstract: This paper rethinks the economic history of war and peace through a long-run analysis of revenue, coercion, and rule in Sudan and South Sudan from the nineteenth century to the present. It advances a simple but under-theorised claim: war and peace are not fiscal resets. Rather, peace agreements and post-war settlements typically reorganise wartime revenue systems, entrenching fragmented and coercive forms of extraction rather than replacing them with accountable forms of ruler finance. Drawing on extensive archival research in Sudan, South Sudan, and the UK, alongside over 700 interviews conducted across both Sudans, the paper traces how rulers have historically governed not by maximising revenue, but by fragmenting fiscal authority across military, commercial, and international channels. From colonial indirect rule and wartime rebel administrations to post-independence regimes and contemporary peace processes, these arrangements have enabled political survival and violence while hollowing out civic and bureaucratic state institutions. The paper conceptualises these dynamics as predatory peace: a mode of post-war governance in which peace settlements institutionalise, rather than dismantle, coercive wartime fiscal orders. By treating the Sudans – and African and Global South economic history more broadly – as analytically generative rather than exceptional, the paper uses these cases to illuminate wider patterns in the political economy of war, peace, and state formation. It argues for a reorientation of the economic history of war and peace away from models centred on revenue centralisation and state-building, and toward the political and institutional consequences of predation, fiscal fragmentation, and international financial entanglement.

05 March

• Frederick Buylaert (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) and Thijs Lambrecht (Ghent)
• Lordship, Capitalism, and the Goldilocks Principle in Holland (c. 1350-1650)
• Abstract: TBC

12 March

• Allison Green (LSE)
• Annexation and the Making of the Sun Belt: Municipal Boundary Expansions and Local Public Finance" w/ Kaan Cankat
• Abstract:Sun Belt cities expanded their municipal boundaries nearly six-fold between 1945 and 2000, while Northern cities, constrained by state annexation laws, saw little expansion. Using newly digitized data on city boundaries and municipal finances, we estimate that the average expansion increased municipal population by over 35%.Through a stacked difference-in-differences design comparing annexing cities to similar non-annexing cities, we evaluate how boundary expansions impacted municipal finance and public good provision during mass suburbanization that threatened city fiscal stability. Results show that while total revenues and expenditures increased after annexation, per capita levels declined by roughly 25%, with the largest declines in current expenditures and labor-intensive services like fire and policing. However, building fires did not increase, suggesting cities maintained service quality by leveraging economies of scale in high fixed-cost sectors. Despite contemporary claims that annexation would spur broader economic growth, we find no evidence of increased county-level employment, indicating benefits were confined to municipal fiscal efficiency.

19 March

This seminar will be at 6.30pm, in The Old Theatre, Old Building

• Spencer Banzhaf (North Carolina State University)
• The Economics of Nature and the Nature of Economics
• Abstract: In this public lecture, Spencer Banzhaf revisits these questions through a historical lens. At the beginning of the 20^th Century, any assessment of the economic value of nature would have been limited to its materialistic, instrumental ends. By the end, its aesthetic and holistic values counted in the economic calculus. As a new field of environmental economics took shape, the meaning of “environment” and “economics” changed along with it. This historical context sheds light on the place of economics in the policy space and the interdisciplinary misunderstandings that remain.
• Details on how to attend are available here.

26 March

• Sheilagh Ogilvie
• Was Serfdom Good for the Economy? Peasants, Lords, and Markets in Early Modern Bohemia
• Abstract: TBC

02 April

• Laura Channing (Durham)
• A different metropolitan blueprint? Urban local government in West Africa and Britain
• Abstract: TBC

Autumn Term seminars are Thursdays, 4-5.30pm

Venue: MAR 1.04

2 October

• Laura Montenegro, LSE Visitor
• Gilded Apartheid: Market Access & the Forging of Afrikaner National Identity in Colonial South Africa
• Abstract: Do markets make or break nations? I study the impacts of increases in market integration on rural white-settlers’ national identity choice following the world’s largest mineral revolution in colonial South Africa. For causal identification, I exploit time and geographical variation in local market access driven by the expansion of a transportation network designed to reach diamond and gold deposits located in ex-ante quasi-random locations. I find that higher local access to nonwhite labor markets increases white settlers’ marginal value of institutionalizing racial segregation to coercively retain workers in farms amid the mines’ rising demand for labor, prompting identification with the Afrikaner who support these policies. Conversely, lower local access to nonwhite labor markets encourages labor-saving capital investments, increasing the marginal cost of not identifying with the British who dominate world capital markets and outlaw institutionalized racial segregation.

9 October

• Alexia Yates EUI
• Indemnitaires and Obligataires: The Means and Meaning of Haiti's Debt in Nineteenth-century France
• Abstract: This talk stems from Alexia Yates’s current book project on the practices and cultures of investment in nineteenth-century France. France’s recognition of Haitian independence in 1825 included the imposition of an enormous indemnity payment from Haiti to former colonists, and the obligation to find the necessary funds by borrowing from French banks. These arrangements transformed former colonial property in people and land into a national debt that perpetuated, in various forms, into the twentieth century. Assessing the work of Haiti’s French creditors across this period as they lobbied for payment, this talk approaches the debt as a structure that institutionalized principles and mechanisms important to France’s modern economic imperialism, analyzing how investors large and small engaged themselves and the French public in debates about the value of that imperialism.

16 October

• Michael Aldous and John Turner
• The CEO: the rise and fall of Britain's captains of industry
• The CEOs of Britain's largest companies wield immense power, but we know very little about them. How did they get to the top? Why do they have so much power? Are they really worth that exorbitant salary?

This event, part of the School's Public Lecture Programme, will take place in Old Theatre at 6.30pm.  More information, including a recording of the event, can be found here.

23 October

• Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, LSE
• Expertise and prejudice: British economists’ memoranda to the Royal Commission on Equal Pay, 1944-1946
• Abstract: In 1944, the British War Cabinet set up a Royal Commission on Equal Pay to examine whether equal pay between men and women should be implemented for the civil services and across industries in general. The Commissioners reviewed an impressive amount of evidence, testimonies, and reports, among which memoranda from ten economists—Philip Sargant Florence, Roy F. Harrod, John R. Hicks, Hubert D. Henderson, Arthur C. Pigou, Joan Robinson, David H. MacGregor, David Ross, Hamilton Whyte, and Barbara Wootton. After the publication of the report in 1946, equal pay for equal work was not granted to civil servants and not advocated as an organizing principle of labour markets. The first section describes the origins, context, and content of the 200-pages report. Section 2 is devoted to the arguments presented by the ten economists in favour and against the principle of equal pay for equal work. The last section ponders the political weight of arguments from economists, medical doctors, and other scientists, as well as the political instrumentalization of the commission itself, and concludes on the relatively low relevance of economic expertise at the time, in comparison to moral and medical arguments.

30 October

• Dora Costa - UCLA
• The Economy, The Ghost in Your Gene and the Escape from Premature Mortality
• Abstract: Explanations for the West’s escape from premature mortality have focused on chronicmalnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoringthe multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors’ harvests, we are underestimatingthe contribution of modern economic growth to the escape from early death at older ages.Using two multigenerational datasets for Sweden, we show that grandsons’ longevity wasstrongly linked to spatial shocks in paternal grandfathers’ yearly harvest variability whenagricultural productivity was low and market integration was limited. We reason that anepigenetic mechanism is the most plausible explanation for our findings. We posit thatthe removal of trade barriers, improvements in transportation, and agricultural innovationreduced harvest variability. We contend that for older Swedish men (but not women) whoreached age 40 between 1870 and 1919 this reduction was as important as decreasingcontemporaneous infectious disease rates and more important than eliminating exposureto poor harvests in-utero. Decreasing contemporaneous infectious disease ratesdominated reductions in paternal grandfathers’ harvest variability for men reaching age 40 between 1920 and 1949.

13 November

• Jonathan Chapman, Bologna
• State Capacity and the (In)Effectiveness of Medical Technology: The Difficult Path to Safe and Reliable Vaccination in Victorian Britain
• Abstract: This study investigates why smallpox remained endemic in Britain into the twentieth century, despite the discovery of an effective vaccine in 1796 and high vaccination rates from the 1850s onward. Using newly digitized data on local mortality and vaccination outcomes, it shows that the effectiveness and safety of vaccination improved only gradually—and only after repeated state intervention. Poor implementation often rendered vaccination ineffective until the 1870s, and it remained relatively unsafe until the early twentieth century. A triple-difference analysis shows that the introduction of government quality standards—supported by inspections and performance-based incentives—was critical to making vaccination effective. The paper underscores that state capacity, rather than medical technology alone, determined the success of early public health interventions.

20 November

• Weijia Li, LSE Visitor
• An Economic Theory of Salvation Religions
• Abstract: This paper constructs a unified model that micro-founds the three types from Max Weber’s typology of world religions, i.e., “mystic religions,” “activist religions,” and “religions of world adjustment.” We then employ the model to study the interaction between world religions and secular institutions. Among others, the model shows that salvation religions might have played a role in the great “reversal of fortune” between the East and the West. Because China and India were the economic powerhouses in the Middle Ages, they might have failed to sustain religious activism that facilitated modern economic growth and constitutional government in Western Europe. The model further interprets competition over socioeconomic status as a partial substitution of salvation religions, explaining why status competition is fierce where the influence of salvation religions have declined

27 November

• Rebecca Simson, Oxford
• Africa Descending and Rising: Revisiting the external causes of post-independence growth cycles
• Abstract: This paper returns to a much-debated question in African development economics: how and why Africa's post-independence growth has been so closely tied to the global commodity price cycle, with a severe economic collapse when commodity prices fell in the 1980s and a recovery in growth and commodity prices in the 2000s. We ask how much of the recovery in growth and fiscal performance in the 2000s can be attributed to terms of trade improvements and capital inflows, and how the external drivers of the crisis and recovery differed between Africa and other developing regions. We also consider how external conditions shaped policy, and question the extent to which better macroeconomic management can be disentangled from the global market conditions which widened the policy space and made it politically feasible to follow the Washington advice.

This event, part of the School's Public Lecture Programme, will take place in the Malaysia Auditorium at 6.30pm.  More information, including a recording of the event (when available), can be found here.

11 December
Please note change of venue - we meet in MAR 104 this week

• Shari Eli, Toronto
• The Origins of Generosity and Racial Exclusion in the American Welfare System
• Abstract: What are the origins of U.S. welfare generosity?  Using newly digitized historical welfare records from the early 20th century, we show that although nearly all states passed welfare by 1930, only 37% of counties ever administered any transfers.  Counties with more immigrants were more generous whereas counties with large black populations were less likely to have programs. Local political leanings and the women’s movement also appeared to have some, but not large, effects on early welfare passage and generosity, in line with previous work. Despite sweeping racial and political shifts over the last century, we find that the most generous states in the 1910s and 1920s remain the most generous states today, and explore why.