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Graduate Economic History Seminars 2025-26

Autumn Term 2025-26

Time: Wednesdays 1-3pm
Venue: KSW.212 (Week 3 will be in CKK 107, 12-2.30pm)

01 October

  • Noah Sutter (LSE)
  • The Grub Street Origins of the Revolution Results - Did the Reforms of the Publishing Trade in the 1770s have an effect on illegal publishing? Evidence from the FBTEE Data
  • Abstract: TBC

08 October

  • Avi Moorthy (Harvard University)
  • The Defender on the Move: Black Newspapers and the Great Migration
  • Abstract: After 50 years of limited migration following emancipation, 1.5 million Black southerners made the journey north during the First Great Migration from 1915 to 1940. Over the same period, Black political organization in the South surged and racial violence fell. I examine whether information on northern life and jobs sparked Black migration and southern activism using quasi-random variation in exposure to the Chicago Defender, the most prominent northern Black newspaper. Classifying the coverage of thousands of southern newspapers, I show that information about the North was limited prior to the Chicago Defender's entry in the mid-1910s. To reach southern readers, the Chicago Defender partnered with Black railway porters working for the Illinois Central railroad. In cities along the railroad, I find that individuals who lived near a porter selling the Chicago Defender were 33% more likely to migrate north than similar individuals who did not. These individuals pulled relatives to migrate, consistent with information diffusion across social networks, and moved to cities that received more coverage in articles, ads, and job postings. Counties with access to the Chicago Defender were 1.5 times more likely to form an NAACP branch and experienced half as many lynchings.

15 October (Week 3 will be in CKK 107, 12-2.30pm)

  • Deirdre McCloskey
  • The Prudent and Faithful English Peasant: An Essay in Historical Humanomics
  • Professor McCloskey's book a is a full and much-supplemented reprise of her early writings on English open fields and enclosures. Selected chapters will be circulated.

22 October

  • Luisa Bicalho-Ritzkat (LSE)
  • Painted Lemons: Evidence from the Art Market on Credibility of Information
  • Abstract: TBC

29 October

  • Alice Calder (UNSW Sydney)
  • One Question at a Time: The Impact of the American Civil War on Mobilization for Women's Suffrage
  • Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the American Civil War on mobilization for women’s suffrage in the US. I construct a new dataset of soldiers enlisted in the Union army and their wartime experience, and locate them to their town of residence. Leveraging variation in casualty rates, I show that people from towns with more casualties were less likely to petition for women’s suffrage in the following years. Consistent with a narrative that major events such as the Civil War can reallocate limited political attention and capacity, elevating some causes, while sidelining others. I find evidence of two possible mechanisms through which casualty rates drive these results. Firstly, Northern towns with higher casualties were more attune to the salience of Black rights, which the Civil War was fought over, resulting in a prioritization of this movement over women's suffrage. Secondly, the collective trauma of casualties resulted in a tightening of pre-war gender norms of separate spheres that were not welcoming of female political empowerment.

12 November

  • Taylan Alpkaya (University of Mannheim)
  • Legacy of Servitude: Long Run Intergenerational Mobility in the US
  • Abstract:This paper presents the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in the United States before the Civil War. I investigate the long-term socioeconomic trajectories of descendants of English convicts transported to America between 1718 and 1775. I digitize a novel dataset comprising 47,000 individuals sentenced to transportation, including names, transportation dates, sentence lengths, destinations, and sentencing locations in England. Without direct genealogical linkages, I employ surname-based methods to trace individuals across generations. I utilize the early household head censuses of 1790 and 1810 to construct the distribution of surnames in early America and estimate the probability that an individual descends from a transported convict, conditional on their surname. My findings indicate that, relative to the average native-born white American in 1850, having a convict ancestor is associated with a 9 lower probability of owning real estate—the earliest available wealth measure in U.S. censuses. It is also linked to a 22 lower likelihood of being the head of a household and a striking 57 increase in the probability of being illiterate. This pattern is robust across censuses from 1850 to 1870. The disadvantage persisted well into the twentieth century: in 1940, descendants of convicts were still 7 less likely to own a home and 11% less likely to have non-wage income, but surprisingly, slightly better educated. As a second step, I also digitize a dataset of 100,000 colonial migrants. I find similar results for descendants of indentured servants who arrived in America during the same period, but null results for free immigrants, indicating the channel of persistence might be wealth transmission. I conduct several robustness checks, including placebo surname treatments, analyses restricted to records of female convicts (who could not transmit their surnames), and examinations of nineteenth-century British emigrants with the same surnames as convicts. All tests yield null effects.

19 November

  • Andres Irarrázaval García Huidobro (LSE)
  • How Much Can Elites Take? Subsistence Constraints, Surplus Distribution, and the Limits of Income Inequality
  • Abstract: TBC

26 November

  • Junxi Liu (Warwick)
  • Battles and Prizes꞉ Evidence from the British Museum
  • Abstract: This study provides a quantitative analysis of systematic looting during colonial wars, focusing on the British Museum's acquisition patterns. By compiling a novel city-level dataset of over 1.17 million artifacts acquired before 1950 and merging it with historical battle data, the research investigates the relationship between British military conflicts and the subsequent inflow of cultural artifacts to the museum. Using Poisson regression models and an event study approach, the analysis controls for city and year fixed effects to isolate the impact of conflict. The results demonstrate a significant increase in artifacts arriving from a battle city in the year immediately following a military engagement. This pattern of targeted extraction was particularly pronounced in Asia and Africa and in regions with high historical state capacity, indicating organized and expert-led looting.

03 December

  • John Zhang (LSE)
  • Deskilling and Unrest
  • Abstract: TBC

10 December

  • Marielle Côte-Gendreau (Princeton)
  • Multigenerational and gender-symmetric transmission of migration behaviors in a historical context
  • Abstract: Migration decisions are embedded in social and family trajectories that escape traditional data sources, which tend to observe individuals in isolation. Genealogical microdata now make it possible to trace these dynamics over long time horizons. This paper documents how prior generations' migration histories shape future internal migration behavior, leveraging rich historical microdata spanning over two centuries and multiple generations at the scale of a full population (Quebec, Canada; 1621-1861). Using a novel dataset of residential trajectories that I reconstructed from linked vital data, I focus on the migratory trajectories of couples during the twenty years following their marriage, examining them in relation to their parents and grandparents' behaviors in the same life stage. I show that mobility depends on parents' and grandparents' migration histories, with descendants of migratory people being more likely to migrate themselves. The impact of ascendants in the grandparental generation is about half that of the parental generation. Moreover, husbands' and wives' migration backgrounds are equally predictive of their joint mobility decisions, suggesting a substantial role of women in shaping couples' mobility and challenging the conventional assumption that migration decisions were historically made by men. These results reveal deep family history as an underexplored axis of migrant selection. The long-lasting influence of family should be integrated in migration theories.