After experiencing a period of spectacular growth during the late nineteenth century, the Egyptian cotton sector underwent a phase of stagnation, which was followed by a gradual and steady increase in output during the interwar period. Drawing on a new panel dataset at ...

Abstract Conventional methods of measuring historical household living standards are often criticized because of the omission of women's and children's wages and non‐wage income; the focus on urban centres; and the exclusion of life‐cycle changes in household compositio...

UK investment trust companies were at the forefront of financial innovation during the so-called first globalization era before the First World War. This study examines in detail their portfolio strategies using a unique dataset of 115 portfolio observations for 30 diff...

This article investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the British interwar economy. The first type of evidence examined is qualitative. The historical record shows that contemporaries regularly reported the incidence and consequences of major uncertaint...

This article is the first to use individual-level, longitudinal measures of child growth to document changes in the growth pattern in Britain between the 1850s and the 1970s. Based on a unique dataset gathered from the records of the training ship Indefatigable, this st...

International audience; Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale of the French banking crises of 1930–1 and their consequences have never been fully assessed quantitatively. The lack of banking regulation severely limited the availability of ...

There is a debate debate about whether coastal shipping experienced substantial productivity growth prior to the advent of steam power. To study changes over the long eighteenth century, we use thousands of coastal journey times culled from Board of Trade crew lists bet...

This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is con...

Abstract This article, written during the COVID‐19 epidemic, provides a general introduction to the long‐term history of infectious diseases, epidemics and the early phases of the spectacular long‐term improvements in life expectancy since 1750, primarily with reference...