12博

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed

Why do international organisations die? Their causes of death deserve attention and analysis. Europe in the 20th century with its plenitude of international organisations provides a rich ground for studying why some of them died, why some lived, why some were resurrected from near-death and why some survive as institutional shells, or zombies. The introduction to this special issue summarises the cases

A newly elected president declares NATO ‘obsolete’ and announces his country's withdrawal from parts of the transatlantic Alliance. Some European leaders fear a more complete abandonment. Although France remained a treaty ally after Charles de Gaulle's 1966 announcement, this episode remains the most significant rejection of NATO's organisation in its history. And yet, the potentially fatal crisis

During the early 1930s, a number of fascist international organisations emerged in Europe and East Asia. Italy's ambition to universalise fascism led to the establishment of the Action Committees for the Universality of Rome (Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma, CAUR) in mid-1933. Meanwhile, some months earlier, Japan's continental expansion and the founding of Manchukuo brought about the

This paper examines the effects of abolishing the foundling wheel (ruota) on reproductive decision-making in post-unitary Italy (1863–1882). The ruota was a turning wheel placed on a wall outside foundling homes across Catholic Europe, which offered a means for anonymous infant abandonment. As infant abandonment rates and foundling mortality soared in the nineteenth century, countries began dismantling

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first and most notable post-war supranational community advancing the process of European integration. It is also the only such community which ceased to exist after 50 years, as laid down in its founding treaty. Based on archival research, this article reviews the discussion on the future of the ECSC Treaty within the European institutions held

In this article, we revisit the story of the League of Nations’ (1919–1946) death. Throughout its existence, the League served as an instrument for a series of important experiments in organising European politics and negotiating Europe's place in the wider global order. To understand the League's demise and legacy, we need to study these different conceptions of Europe, their shortcomings, failures

The significance of the state’s fiscal system for military capacity, colonization, trade, and economic development is a long-studied topic. Much scholarship has focused on Britain and the emergence of its fiscal-military state. This article shows that fiscal capacity was not created only by government bureaucracies: the ‘company-state at home’ model presented here complements the narrative of the ‘fiscal-military

We link the 1940 full-count Census to World War II enlistment records and 1969 administrative tax returns to study how WWII service in the Army and Army Airforce impacted the income and mobility of non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American male Army veterans relative to their non-Army counterparts in 1969. The size of our data set provides enough power to shed new light on previously

The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968 was focused on highlighting, and ultimately reducing, poverty in the United States. As part of the campaign, protestors from across the country were transported to Washington, D.C. in 6 separate bus caravans, each of which made stops en route to rest, recruit, and hold non-violent protests. Using data from 1960–1970, we estimate the effects of these protests

Bank distress was a defining feature of the Great Depression in the United States. Most banks, however, weathered the storm and remained in operation throughout the contraction. We show that surviving banks cut lending when depositors withdrew funds en masse during panics. This panic-induced decline in lending explains about one-third of the reduction in aggregate commercial bank lending between 1929

In colonial Bengal, the average police constable was largely unlettered. Nevertheless, constables were at the frontline in the enforcement of colonial law. This paradox of an unlettered constabulary enforcing the letter of law defies the familiar logic in the historical scholarship on British India that associates the written word with histories of state power and orality with histories of subaltern

This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently

Early modern war was a complex phenomenon that marked not only the lives of soldiers and civilians directly involved in conflicts, but also the technology, the economy and the culture of the epoch. Current intellectual approaches to war nevertheless tend to ignore that war was also experienced as a particular series of sounds, from drums to cannons and cries. In fact, aural perception constituted in

We evaluate the role of taxes on overseas trade in the development of imperial Britain’s fiscal-military state. Influential work, for example, Brewer’s Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating

This article analyses the elimination of hand-spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it produced large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed 8 per cent of the population by about 1770. Next, the article systematically

This article suggests that classification exercises were the quintessential modality for both the narrative and labour–management relations of occupational health and safety in Indian mines for the period 1895–1970. The extant literature has underestimated the cause-and-effect relationship that such classification practices had, including punitive safety regulation clauses, compensation clauses, the

The article explores the evolution of household income in India before the late nineteenth century. At a time when criticism of estimates of global real wages challenges the assumptions arising from the Great Divergence Debate, we aim to provide alternative ways of contributing to the discussion. By looking at individual and household income, as well as consumption levels in different parts of India

This article makes use of nearly 25,000 observations representing over 95,000 paid workdays across over 300 years to investigate individual work patterns, work availability, and the changes in work seasonality over time. This sample is comprised of workers in the construction industry, and includes unskilled men and women as well as skilled building craftsmen – the industry that is often used to estimate

To address growing concerns on the representativeness of real wages, we generate new estimates of GDP pc in pre-industrial England and Italy, as well as new exploratory estimates for Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Sweden, with Groth and Persson's (2016) general equilibrium model. Our results question the robustness of the current theoretical consensus

This article examines the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney, in 1983, and explores the emotional politics of the campaigns that followed his death. These campaigns were focused on both determining the circumstances of Roach's death and highlighting tensions between the police and the Black community of Hackney. Using hitherto unpublished archival sources, local newspapers

This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship

This paper analyzes monetary policy in Italy between 1894 and WWI by focusing on the main bank of issue at the time (the Banca d’Italia, BdI) and the Treasury. We show that the Treasury set multiple official rates, and the BdI determined an ”effective” rate transmitted to the market by discounting different bills to the various rates; we provide an original measure of this rate based on primary sources

For two decades, real wage comparisons have been centre stage in global socio-economic history studies of comparative development, offering a tractable – if oversimplified – gauge of living standards. But critics argue that these studies have leaned too heavily on the earnings of male, urban, unskilled, daily wage labourers, overlooking wage disparities between social groups and the mechanics of how

In September 1857, extracts from letters written in Gwalior and Agra, India, by an elite British “lady,” Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray (1834–1912), were published as part of the “correspondence” sections of The Times's coverage of the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion. Through the letters she documented her escape from Gwalior to Agra. She described encounters with the maharajah and “fanatic” “ghazis,” and her

Edible goods are not usually considered suitable for archiving. This short article introduces an unconventional archive of images relating to design, book, costume, and performance history. Each image in this archive depicts an intricately decorated biscuit (cookie) set inspired by historical artifacts or styles. I began making these biscuits during the pandemic as a way of engaging with material culture

Studies on household income and consumption in Southern Europe have primarily focused on rural areas and factory workers. In this study, we aim to incorporate evidence of household income, considering the earnings of all household members and not just the male wage, using the population list of Zaragoza (Spain) from 1924. This population list is the first (and the last) to systematically record the

This study assesses whether British public debt featured a convenience yield during the Classical Gold Standard before World War I, as the US does in modern times. The empirical results support this thesis. Increases in the British debt-to-GDP ratio decreased the convenience yield on British public debt by between 8 and 20 basis points, qualitatively similar to the behavior of US public debt yields

Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development

With the disintegration of the Russian Empire, Romania annexed Bessarabia, a region on its eastern border, in 1918. The integration of the new region was implemented through a centralized process in which the security forces played a significant role. This article examines the beginnings of the Romanian police in Bessarabia, the main security force in its urban areas, focusing on the development of

When the First Carlist War (1833–1840) broke out in Spain between the queen regent María Cristina, supported by the liberals, and the absolutist pretender Don Carlos, French legitimists portrayed it as a clash of civilizations between absolutism and liberalism. As supporters of the eldest branch of the Bourbon dynasty who had governed France from 1589 to 1792 and then again from 1814–1815 to 1830,

Baron Wolfgang Jacobus Forstner von Breitenfels was envoy to Duke Leopold I of Lorraine (1697–1729) at the court of Queen Anne of Britain and Ireland (1665–1714) between 1710 and 1713. Using Forstner's unexamined papers, this article explores Lorrain perceptions of Britain during the twilight of Anne's reign. As a monarch's political decisions were influenced by the correspondence of their representatives

Differences between models of industrialization are increasingly recognized as an important element of global economic history, and the quality of jobs is receiving new interest as a better indicator of living standards than income alone. This paper considers the implications of historical development models for job quality using the spinning section of textile manufacture in the early United States

This article studies the failure of the Spanish-German treaty signed in 1893. The examination of the process that led to its derailment in the Spanish senate contributes to the historiography in the following ways. First, the composition of the executive that promoted the agreement illustrates the fragility of the protectionist agro-industrial coalition, as shown for Germany, in late-nineteenth century

We quantify the extent to which land grant colleges were located in counties that grow different crops than the rest of their states, which we call agricultural unrepresentativeness. We find that land grant colleges located in agriculturally unrepresentative counties tended to produce research focusing on more unrepresentative crops. We find similar results when exploiting historical college site selection

This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings

Demographic response to short-term price fluctuations can be interpreted as an indicator of living standards in pre-modern societies. In this paper, we demonstrate how childbearing and infant and child mortality responded to changes in rye prices in two nineteenth-century Hungarian sub-regions. We conducted a micro-level demographic analysis based on family reconstitution data and multivariate statistical

To delay paying wages to seamen, the late Stuart Navy issued them instead with “tickets” to be redeemed for cash after months or years of delay. Seamen often sold the tickets at deep discounts to ticket buyers, who became government creditors for unpaid wages, one of the largest items in the national debt. Ticket buyers were savagely attacked in pamphlets. This article is a preliminary exploration

This Roundtable marks the beginning of a new era for the Journal of British Studies (JBS). Volume 63, issue 4, October 2024, was the last traditional issue printed on paper. No longer will members of the North American Conference on British Studies receive a bound volume quarterly in the mail. We fully understand that for many of our readers the end of print is emotionally wrought, and it constitutes

This article examines the lived experiences of the older body—the embodiment of old age—from the perspective of older people. It uses letters written from 1680 to 1820 by twenty-two women and men aged between sixty and eighty-nine, selected from a corpus of over 391 letter writers. We begin by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people, as well as their understanding of the relationship

In nineteenth-century London, theater-going was a genuinely mass activity. Within a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, working-class playgoers abounded. Opened to the public in 1818, the Coburg Theatre, later renamed the Victoria and known as the Vic, developed an especially strong association with popular drama. Although much has been written on the kind of work that places like the Vic presented