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This thesis examines various aspects of the environmental economic history of China and provides the data and analysis to allow for more research at the county level. The study verifies the use of some newly developed AI based techniques, including character recognition and lexical analysis, to digitise historical information from paper sources. Applications of this newly constructed data set show that more frequent flood events will encourage rural-to-urban migration, while more frequent cold-related events will encourage urban-to-rural migration. We also adopt a Spatial Durbin Model and find that the spatial dependence of conflicts is strong. The possible mechanisms for the spillover effect of weather shocks are whether the weather shocks are spatially connected or the weather shocks encourage refugees to move to other places.

My thesis addresses several questions which relate to the link between demography and economics. The first set of questions relates to the topic of famine. I ask if pre-famine conditions correlate with famine severity and if population pressure is a cause of famine. This is examined in the context of nineteenth-century Ireland. High-resolution spatial data is used to establish what was contributing to increasing poverty before the Famine, and how these factors and poverty were correlated with Famine population loss. The second area I look at is fertility and its relationship with financial development. The context of pre-Famine Ireland is used as a test of the old-age support hypothesis by using access to different types of microfinance institutions at parish-level. The final area of focus is historical pandemics. I carry out a systematic review of the pre-Covid-19 literature on all pandemics which have occurred since the Industrial Revolution, focusing on their economic and demographic impacts. From this, we can identify what we already know about pandemics, while also highlighting the gaps in the literature which economic historians can address to make us better placed to deal with future pandemics.

This thesis presents an analysis of the 1797 fleet mutinies at Spithead and the Nore based on an application of methodologies drawn from social, economic, and cultural history. Using both quantitative and qualitative sources, I present a new interpretation of these momentous events that reveals the centrality of perceptions of fairness and ‘good usage’ to their causation, course, and legacy with implications for historiographies of labour relations and popular protest. I have analysed the evidence used in previous studies to support the interpretation that the mutinies were revolutionary in their intentions and concluded that this does not provide a credible case. For the first time, I have quantified the impact of the stagnation of sailors’ wages between 1653 and 1797 on their purchasing power and conclude that this was a, but not the, cause of mutiny. Through the study of mutineer writings, rhetoric, and behaviour, I argue that insult and hurt pride were key motivators of mutiny and that relative rather than absolute naval conditions were pivotal causes of dissatisfaction. I assert that complex social inversions were employed by mutineer leaders to create legitimacy and encourage obedience towards their regime while minimising the need for violence or coercion. The practical challenges inherent to daily life during mutiny are contended to have encouraged continuity and moderation on both sides. Far from a ‘terror’, the judicial response to the mutinies was, I conclude, both pragmatic and conciliatory, while also within precedent for naval justice and reflective of judicial practice in civil society. The public perceptions of the mutinies are found to have been hotly contested and rehabilitation of the navy had to wait for redemption provided by victory at sea. Frequent comparisons are drawn between naval practice and the wider attitudes and prevailing circumstances in British society on shore.

This thesis consists of three chapters. Each chapter can be read as an independent piece of research, since the topics studied are different in nature and in the methodologies applied. However, all chapters delve into topics of development economics, looking at it from an historical perspective, as in Chapters 1 and 2, or from a contemporary policy perspective, as in Chapter 3. In the first chapter, I study the impact of European colonialism in Africa on the present status of women. The historical literature suggests that a critical determinant of persistent gender inequality is the colonial cash crop system. This favoured men's entry into the cash economy and excluded women, whose workload increased as they provided additional labour in their husbands' cash crop fields. By contrast, contemporary economic literature suggests that raising the status of women in the labour force could improve gender norms. I take districts with different levels of participation in cash crop agriculture and compare outcomes for the contemporary female descendants, using exogenous land suitability as the instrument for cash crop production. My findings show a persistent positive effect of cash crop agriculture on women's status, measured as higher agency within the household and less willingness to justify husbands' violence. The intergenerational transmission of culture plays a key role in explaining the long-run persistent effect, which is especially prevalent in regions whose cash crops were cocoa and palm oil. In the second chapter, a collaboration with Luigi Pascali, we show that navigation patterns and ship speed changed as a result of the adoption of the chronometer, a tool invented to precisely measure longitude at sea. Combining historical data on navigation for the period 1750-1855 with climatological data on cloud coverage, we find that navigation changed around the years 1825-1834, the decade in which most historical sources place the mass diffusion of the chronometer. We find that ships became faster in more overcast areas when using the chronometer, as they did not need to rely on celestial navigation when using the chronometer. As sailing speed reduction contributed to the transport revolution of the nineteenth century, this paper quantifies how this technology contributed to this process. Finally, in the third chapter, which is joint with Kristina Czura and Andreas Menzel, we present the results of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) we conducted on a sample of 1,000 female garment workers in three factories in Bangladesh, offering access to free sanitary pads at work to 500 of the workers. We cross-randomised participation in information sessions for hygienic menstrual health care implemented by an experienced local NGO, and we vary the salience of commonly perceived taboos in the pad collection process. We find effects of the free pads and information sessions on self-reported pad use, but not of the taboo variations. We find effects on absenteeism and adherence to traditional restrictive and health-adverse taboos surrounding menstruation, but not on worker turnover or selfreported well-being at work.

This thesis brings together two bodies of scholarship, the first on immobility, and the second on artisan capitalism. Darzis (Muslim tailors) and Dawoodi Bohra merchants who stayed on in Calcutta between 1890 and 1967, are at the heart of this study. They are shown to be resilient survivors rather than passive victims of ghettoisation and state control. Without undermining the real predicament of immobility - entrenched poverty, physical frailty, obligations of care-work, communal intimidation and everyday indignity - this thesis demonstrates how some Muslim tailors thrived in constrained contexts. This thesis examines their strategies of survival and negotiation through what I describe as 'immobility capital', a cluster of assets which consist of: (a) locational incentives and 'mythic resources'; (b) a knowledge of material culture and consumption practices; (c) the 'property of skill'; (d) a mastery of small technologies, such as Singer sewing machines; and (e) patronage networks, such as with Dawoodi Bohra merchant-outfitters and family firms. Not every tailor had every asset. For instance, a tailor with a skill did not necessarily have a patron, but adapted the skill in response to changing market demands for particular commodities. Together these artisan communities were able to transform their assets into sufficient 'immobility capital' to stay on, and sometimes flourish, in independent India.

The current thesis presents three empirical studies, motivated by the historical impact of agriculture on aspects of development, such as cultural attitudes, formation of human capital and regional development. The initial chapter explores the impact of land ownership inequality on beliefs towards gender equality. Using a combination of cross-country land inequality data and individual level data on attitudes towards the role of women in society, I find that higher shares of historical land inequality have a negative impact on beliefs in favor of gender equality. Looking into the mechanism behind this transmission, specifically at second-generation immigrants, it appears that these cultural attitudes are predominately shaped from the mother's country of origin. The following chapter focuses on an agrarian economy during earlier stages of development. It exploits how the increased cultivation of currants affected human capital formation in the Greek economy during the 19th century, following an exogenous shock related with international trade. I show that regions that were able to respond to the increased demand for currants faster, were less likely to invest towards education. The evidence is consistent with the idea that gains from international trade in agrarian economies may reduce incentives for human capital accumulation, and instead exacerbate the specialization in the production of low-skill nonindustrial goods. The final chapter investigates how land relations affected regional development of the same economy, at the local level. Following the annexation of Thessaly to Greece, the transition of communities out of feudal relations towards different forms of private ownership had an significant impact on regional development. Communities that transitioned towards small private ownership, experienced higher rates of population growth. In terms of the underlying mechanism, I provide evidence that municipalities with higher shares of small ownership have higher shares of married and illiterate households, thus settled down households increased their agricultural efforts rather than increasing their demand for human capital.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters on development economics and Japanese economic history. The first chapter analyzes the effect of railroad construction in the Meiji period (1868–1912) on technology adoption and modern economic development. By digitizing a novel data set that measures the use of steam engines at the factory level and determining the cost-minimizing path between destinations as an identification strategy, I find that railroad access led to the increased adoption of steam power by factories, which in turn induced structural change and urbanization. My results support the view that railroad network construction was key to modern economic growth in pre-First World War Japan. The second chapter analyzes the effect of time horizon on local public investment in the Edo period (1615–1868). I use a unique event in Japanese history during this period to identify the effect. In 1651, the sudden death of the executive leader of the Tokyo government reduced the transfer risk of local lords, especially for insiders, who supported the Tokyo government during the war of 1600. Using a newly digitized data set and a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that after 1651, regions owned by insiders increased the number of public projects more than regions owned by the other lords. I discuss other possible channels to interpret the effect of tenure risk, but I find no strong support for these alternative channels and conclude that the results support a longer time horizon effect. The third chapter provides more general background and a complete description of the data availability in Japan in the 17th–20th centuries, to discuss future research directions. It would aid reexamination of the history of Japan and other East Asian countries, which have experienced different economic and political paths.

The first chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in this thesis. The second chapter explores the effect of historic gender division of labour during slavery on African American women’s performance in the labour market. Using census data from 1870 to 2010, I show that African American women living in areas with lower levels of gender division of labour were more likely to participate in the labour market and have higher occupation income scores after emancipation. The effects are persistent for at least 70 years after the end of slavery. I analyse the mechanisms driving the results, distinguishing between labour supply and demand channels, and I explore intergenerational transmission of gender roles. The third chapter empirically assesses the importance of ethnic networks in facilitating international trade. In particular, it investigates the impact of ethnic Cantonese networks in the United States on the export performance of firms based in Southern China. The results indicate that exposure to ethnic networks has a positive effect on exports, both at the extensive and the intensive margin. We explore the mechanisms underlying the results, distinguishing between information flows, contract enforcement, foreign investment and technology diffusion. The fourth chapter analyses the effect of ethnic Chinese networks in the United States on knowledge diffusion and innovation in China. I construct a proxy for the ethnic network based on historic Chinese settlements and current industry employment patterns, exploiting the migration restrictions imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The results indicate that when innovation in the U.S. increases, industries that are more exposed to the ethnic network in the U.S. innovate more in China. This suggests that ethnic networks contribute to the diffusion of technology across countries.

This thesis analyses the medieval ceramics circulating in Rome between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries, using quantitative methods for fitting ceramic data into the wider economic history of Rome. Even though the importance of Rome during the Middle Ages is undeniable, it is still difficult to fit the numerous archaeological data into an overall analysis of the city. In particular, with ceramics as the most numerous find, it is crucial to fully understand what kinds of information these might return: the ceramic assemblages found in three sample-sites (Vicus ad Carinas, Colosseum, and church of S. Omobono) have been fully studied and compared, in order to reach a diachronic level of analysis. In fact, each site has a different chronology, thus this diachronic approach clearly shows differences and similarities of each period. Finally, the results of such analysis have been put together again and reanalysed regarding the economy of medieval Rome. The final aim is to demonstrate the importance of ceramics as a source, as these increase our knowledge of medieval trades, production, and diet. The thesis is divided into different sections: the first part is an overview of sources for medieval Rome, its people and economy, and medieval ceramics of Rome; in the second part each site has been analysed, from its earliest phases to the medieval ones, assessing both archaeological evidence and written sources; the third part focuses on quantification methods, particularly those used for analysing the three assemblages; finally, the conclusions fit the results of these quantifications into the broader context of medieval Rome.

In this study, I examine the New Institutionalist Economic History (NIEH) of Douglass C. North from a historiographical and philosophical perspective. As a point of departure for this purpose I take North’s critical engagement with the primitivism-modernism debate in premodern economic history, as represented in his early work by the ‘challenge of Karl Polanyi’. This challenge, I argue, has given shape to the development of the NIEH in its various stages of theoretical elaboration. Therefore, understanding its contextual significance is indispensable for making sense of North’s oeuvre as a whole. On my reading, North interpreted the challenge of Polanyi to mean combining two methodological conceptions previously not united in one work. On the one hand, North’s NIEH extends the scope of economic theory to the study of the longue durée of economic history; while on the other hand North seeks to theorize the importance of historical variation in sociocultural institutions for understanding why there are rarely complete or well-functioning markets in most of economic history. North considers neoclassical economics suitable for neither of these purposes. Yet his critique of Polanyi’s substantivist-primitivist approach is primarily based on the absence of an integration of his project with the tools of economic theory. For this purpose, North therefore adopted the theory of transaction cost economics, also called New Institutional Economics (NIE), to this new ambitious end. More than perhaps any other author North has been responsible for extending the scope and sophistication of this economics based approach in the study of economic history. In the present work, I discuss to what extent this approach has been successful in its own aims, internally consistent, and to what extent it is plausible as a historiographical approach from an ‘external’ point of view. I do this by combining a close reading and interpretation of a variety of North’s writings, focusing in particular on the most contemporary version of his work - which has not been much studied - with a methodological and theoretical discussion of various major themes in or aspects of his work from the viewpoints of historiography, anthropology, and philosophy of social science. These themes include (among others) North’s understanding of the functioning of markets in politics and economics, his approach to choice theory, rationality, and game theory, his use or neglect of evolutionary concepts, the meaning of embeddedness in his work, and North’s contractarian anthropology. As this work shows, North’s NIEH is situated in a difficult intermediate position within larger debates in economic thought: between primitivism and modernism, between substantivism and formalism (in the anthropological sense), and most significantly, between the ‘new mainstream’ of economic theory and the quest for successive endogenisation of the institutional context of economic behavior. This certainly speaks for the ambition and sophistication of North’s historiographical approach, something which has only increased with the further development of his theory. But in his quest to unite the best insights of choice theory with New Institutionalist economics as well as incorporating the ‘anthropological’ level of fully socialized beliefs, preferences, and how they give rise to institutional variation in history, North frequently seeks to have his cake and eat it. The persistent methodological ambiguities in his work give rise to problems of internal consistency and external plausibility, which are present from the very inauguration of his NIEH research programme. The subsequent development of his work has not, I argue, been able to overcome this fundamental problem. For this reason, while much of North’s toolset and his overarching ambitions are valuable developments in economic historical theory, he does not achieve his aim of overcoming the challenge of Karl Polanyi. Without a more decisive break with his original economic microfoundations, North’s NIEH project cannot ultimately live up to its grand ambitions.

This thesis presents research that subscribes to the broader theme of the Economic History of South Asia from 1891 to 2009. First, Chapter 2 shows that the Partition induced expulsion of religious minorities reduced school provision in Pakistan. The effect of minorities is explained by their education, occupational structure and their contribution towards local social capital. Then, Chapter 3 examines how areas affected by the Partition fare in terms of long-run agricultural development in India. It finds that areas that received more displaced migrants after Partition perform better in terms of crop yields, are more likely to take up of high yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds, and are more likely to use agricultural technologies. It highlights the superior educational status of the migrants as a potential pathway for the observed effects. Next, Chapter 4 shows that the agricultural productivity shock induced by the adoption of HYV of seeds reduced infant mortality across districts in India. It uses data on the characteristics of children and mothers in the sample to show that it was children born to mothers whose characteristics generally correlate with higher child mortality, children born in rural areas, boys, children born in rice and wheat producing districts and children born in poorer households who benefit more from HYV adoption. Furthermore, Chapter 5 shows that baseline differences in irrigation prior to the adoption of HYV are associated with differences in the growth of yields after adoption. It explores the relationship between irrigation and yields over time to uncover potential mechanisms for the observed relationship. Finally, Chapter 6 empirically investigates the relationship between religious shrines and literacy in the Punjab province of Pakistan.

Industrialization altered the socioeconomic landscapes of France and the United States in the nineteenth century; meanwhile, the content and style of art produced in both countries also changed. In particular, landscape and rural genre painting became more prominent. Scholars have argued that the socioeconomic changes caused the artistic ones. This thesis, 'Painting by Numbers: Case Studies in the Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Landscape and Rural Genre Painting', uses methods from the social sciences to conduct case studies that examine these causal links. In addressing this topic, this project engages with the work of T.J. Clark, Alan Wallach and other founding social historians of art. With the creation of two databases containing information about 410,000 artworks exhibited in nineteenth-century France and the U.S., this thesis applies statistical methods to a much larger sample of artistic data. Exploiting this data source provides a socioeconomic history of the average experience of participants in the art world rather than detailed examinations of the experiences of a handful of still-famous artists, which have been more typical of the field. The first two chapters of the thesis provide an introduction, literature review, and description of the French dataset. Chapters 3 and 4 address research questions in the history and historiography of images of nature in nineteenth-century French art. Chapter 3 employs econometrics to examine systematic relationships exist between the quantities of images of nature exhibited in nineteenth-century France and the pace of industrialization. Statistically, the element of modernization that most affected the output of images of nature in the artistic data examined was the founding of artists' colonies near new rail lines connecting Paris to the countryside. Chapter 4 analyzes the artist Jean François Millet's letters, excerpts of which scholars used to form assump- tions about how artists' anti-urban attitudes inspired their depictions of nature. The chapter demonstrates that Millet was an active user of industrial modes of transport who often traveled to Paris. Chapter 5 introduces the American dataset, and the remaining chapters present three case studies about art in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. Chapter 6 examines the much-cited inventory The Art Treasures in America, showing it overstates the amount of European art in American collections during the nineteenth century. Chapter 7 analyzes how art collectors' socioeconomic backgrounds influenced their acquisitions; it demonstrates that socioeconomic markers are generally poor predictors of collecting patterns. Chapter 8 investigates the relationship between the growth of the railroad in the U.S. and landscape painting. Mapping the frequency of depiction of natural sites alongside the growth of railroads shows that visual culture is often a byproduct of rail lines built for other purposes rather than a catalyst for building new lines. My thesis refines current understanding of how socioeconomic change affected art in the nineteenth century in two ways. First: it shows sample bias can compromise existing socioeconomic histories of art, and the use of data can help combat this bias. Second: it provides examples of how industrialization most affected artistic output by removing structural constraints on the geographic movement of artists, collectors and artworks themselves. More broadly, this project demonstrates that scholars can use digital tools in conjunction with economic methods to document and analyze phenomena in the art history that would be neglected in purely qualitative analyses.

New Economic History of interwar Yugoslavia is uncharted territory. Combining historical data with modern econometrics the present thesis explores how economic development of Yugoslavia - a newly established and diverse country - was shaped by industrial location, market integration and financial crises. The results are relevant for the present as the least economically developed part of Europe today is comprised mostly of Yugoslav successor states. What determined the location of industry in interwar Yugoslavia? Using panel data econometrics and a new dataset which covers eight Yugoslav regions and ten industries over a period of eight years industrial location is explained by a model in which Heckscher-Ohlin (HO), New Economic Geography (NEG) and Path Dependence theories are captured by interaction variables. Econometric results show that all three of the tested theories had a role to play. History matters in addition to HO and NEG type forces in determining the location of industry. Were Yugoslav markets integrating during the interwar? If so, what were the drivers? Analysis of a novel panel data set of commodity prices observed over ten cities during the period from 1922 to 1939 shows that market integration increased during the interwar. City-pair commodity market integration is modeled using a set of trade cost. The progress of market integration during the interwar is explained by institutional and infrastructural advancements that reduced transaction and transport costs. Cultural differences did not impede market integration. Yugoslavia set out on a process of economic integration that was not hampered by its diversity. Did Yugoslavia and six other East European countries experience financial crises during 1931? If so, what were the main contributing factors? Newly gathered high frequency data series on indicators of currency, banking and sovereign risk crises are explored using an analytical narrative. Worsening of economic fundamentals, drop in international credit and global demand, as well as international transmission led to financial crises in Eastern Europe in 1931. Completely avoiding financial crises was elusive but the most economically developed country was the least affected. This pioneering New Economic History study of interwar Yugoslavia leads to a broad conclusion that present day economic backwardness and regional differences in economic development between Yugoslav successor states are not new and do not stem from a historical lack of market integration but can partly be explained by regionally uneven industrial development and a long history with financial crises.

This study investigates the theology of wealth, with reference to the parables of Jesus, in dialogue with recent Irish economic history. Poverty is commonly seen as a societal problem, but in the teaching of Jesus, especially in his parables, the status of the wealthy is called into question. This thesis explores what it means to be followers of Jesus in societies where historically high levels of wealth and comfort are widespread. It begins by considering that societal context, naming neoliberalism as the complex of economic, political, and cultural factors that combine to generate wealth. The parables of Jesus are introduced as a collection of narratives which puncture the philosophical assumptions at work in neoliberalism. Reading them after the twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth, the parables are found to be apocalyptic interruptions which reorientate the reader towards the reign of God. With these two strands – neoliberalism and the parables – in play, the thesis reconsiders Ireland's recent economic history. It is argued that the ethical significance of the “Celtic Tiger” boom and the subsequent 2008 crash is best accessed not via the language of economics but through narratives. The re-telling of the events of the crash and its aftermath through parables exposes how markets are embedded in thick cultural, historical, and political settings and how simple and settled statistical accounts can miss much of ethical significance. The decisive chapter takes up the constructive task. Building on this re-described account of a wealthy society, it proposes that the appropriate response for Christians to the problem of wealth is to turn to worship as a reparative therapy that forms congregations in practices and ways-of-seeing that run counter to the normative perceptions of neoliberalism. This is achieved by means of a robust engagement with the work of the contemporary moral theologian, William Cavanaugh. A final chapter underlines the original contribution of the project, sketches some future areas of research, and proposes that lament is the initial stance that results from this study.

A centuries-old artery of credit for Indian merchant networks, the indigenous credit system hundi has received no systematic attention in histories of the Indian subcontinent. Poorly understood and ill-defined, hundi was a highly negotiable instrument, and source of liquid capital. Hundi knitted together the properties of goods, capital, credit, information and agency, all of which served as the backbone of the Indian merchant network. Drawing on government proceedings, reports, and legal cases, this study provides an insight into the legal encounter between Indian indigenous institutions and the British colonial government. It simultaneously reveals the customs, contracts and individual functions of hundi determining its usage. In particular, this study addresses the important issue of how legal change in colonies affected the so-called ‘informal’ institutions which made trade possible. Between 1858-1947, hundi caught the eye of the British Indian government initially as an important taxable revenue stream. This resulted in hundi being integrated with statutes and regulations during the colonial period. However, this process of formalization was not without its own share of classificatory and interpretive problems, nor did hundi remain unchanged. Material from the 1930s reveals an appreciable change in how the government perceived hundi. The instrument distinguishes itself as a source of liquidity capable of promoting trade and modern banking developments. Moreover, hundi’s importance to the indigenous banking community underscores hundi’s function within the wider Indian economy. Nevertheless, the system’s integration with modern banking continued to present problems. The penultimate chapter explores why problems persisted, examining how a legal solution was proposed in 1978. Finally, the conclusion ties all the threads together and discusses the implications for hundi’s survival.

No comprehensive history of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC) has been written yet. While this doctorate thesis, due to time and word limit constraints, cannot claim to have achieved this level of completeness it does provide a major contribution towards such a comprehensive history by providing for the first time an academic account of this African-based gold mining firm from 1895 to 2004. The thesis has chronological range: from the firm's incorporation to its demise as an autonomous company. Depth of analysis is reserved for the consideration of important aspects of the four factors of production and how these resources affected the company's fortunes. The thesis will contribute to the business historiography of Africa as well as to our understanding of the history of Ghana with respect to British foreign investment and the development of the gold mining industry. The main question under investigation is how the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation managed to survive for so long: how the company evolved, what accounted for its longevity, and what assessment can be made of its business performance over time. It is found that AGC's business performance in terms of output experienced five distinct phases: steady growth between1898 and1939, decline between1939 and 1956; strong growth between 1957 and 1974; near-terminal decline between 1975 and 1986; and rapid growth between 1987 and 2004. A different and more erratic pattern emerges on profitability notably with a sharp decline in the company's last decade of existence, contributing to its loss of independence. The firm's longevity cannot solely be explained by the geological uniqueness of the Ashanti mines, although this gave the firm a critical advantage. In the face of challenging political and economic changes, managerial decisions and the manner in which the factors of production were employed help us to understand the firm's successes and failures.

Scottish deer forests are mainly a Highland phenomenon. Many were formed during the nineteenth century when proprietors benefited from their economic marketability as 'sporting estates'. The Blackmount area was a forest, under the ownership of the Campbells of Glenorchy, since the fifteenth century. Situated in one of the most mountainous ranges of the west Highlands, its function was to serve as a hunting reserve for both that family and their aristocratic peers, whilst being protected by foresters from poachers and trespassers. The earlier Forest of Corrie Ba ceased to exist during the later eighteenth century when sheep farming became the predominant land use there. Blackmount Forest was re-formed anew in 1820 due to an economic recession after the Napoleonic Wars terminated. This thesis identifies the social, political, economic, geographical and environmental reasons for Blackmount Forest's creation, growth and continued existence. It questions if this was for leisure alone or for a commercial ethos adopted by landlords of other forests. The Forest expanded during the nineteenth century, gaining national recognition, especially in the 1840s-1850s and thereafter. However, the Campbells of Breadalbane faced internal and external challenges and criticisms, several of a legal nature. The family were long established, in the Scottish aristocracy, with extensive estates in the west-central Highlands. The retained Blackmount for themselves, excepting the period 1863-1885 when it was let out wholesale. The thesis also identifies its social impact upon the locality, and the extent to which this forest may have influenced others coming into existence later that century.

This thesis investigates the social and economic history of slavery in Libya in the period between 1800 and 1950. Focusing on Tripoli and the trading centres of Ghadames and Fezzan, it uses a combination of sources including legal records, travel accounts, commercial correspondence, memoirs and oral interviews to examine the impact of the slave trade, the economic and social lives of the enslaved, and their experiences of emancipation. Examining the trading of slaves in Ghadames, the thesis reveals how merchants considered slaves one commodity among others. It analyses how the slave trade continued until the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911, long after the formal prohibition of the trans-Saharan slave trade in 1856. Despite a long-term decline, caravan trading networks remained somewhat resilient and continued with alternative commodities such as ivory and ostrich feathers. This thesis then moves to analyse the social and economic lives of the enslaved, and the legal status of slavery in Libya. It explores the dynamics of employment, resistance by slaves and master-slave relations by analysing two major categories of slaves, who were treated considerably differently; those who worked in the caravan trade in Ghadames, and those slaves who worked as domestic servants in Tripoli. Many existing sources showed the differences in social relationship between slaves and masters. Different occupational categories, such as caravan workers and domestic servants, had different access to patronage, or experiences of abuse and violence. Oral interviews reveal that slaves in Tripoli experienced less violence compared to those in Ghadames and Fezzan in the nineteenth century. However, mistreated slaves had the right to a court hearing. The court provided a platform for slaves to challenge abuse, with some slaves seeking to push these boundaries further by going to court to assert their rights to better treatment by their owners. The third chapter explores the patterns of religious and economic manumission that existed in Libya before the abolition of slavery, It also traces changes of policies of emancipation that pursued by Ottoman and Italian governments. Finally, the thesis explores the social history of emancipation through examining the economic and social lives of communities of freed slaves. Through surveying a large number of legal cases, the thesis argues that slavery in Libya was marked more by continuities than change across the period of study. The legacy of slavery has persisted over time as relations of clientship between ex-slaves and ex-masters replaced direct relations of ownership. This thesis shows the difficulties faced by slaves in negotiating for clientship (al-wala’) from their former masters. Some ex-slaves unquestionably improved their status with a substantial minority experiencing social mobility as caravan workers and agents, while others remained ill-treated, with irregular work and subsistence wage labour; living on the margins of Libyan society.

The financial crash of 2007-2008 brought words like ‘capitalism’, ‘capital’, and ‘socialism’ back in vogue. However, the discipline of international law remains to reflect systematically on its relationship with the ways in which wealth and power are produced and distributed. This thesis examines the relationship between international law, imperialism and capitalism through historical lenses, arguing that the diffusion of capitalist relations is a core function of international law. Analysing the nineteenth-century ‘standard of civilisation’, I contend that transforming (semi)colonised polities into centralised, territorialised states operating as guarantors of capitalist relations of production was at the core of the concept. Extraterritoriality in Japan and the Ottoman Empire serves as a case study to verify this statement and to highlight the transformative functions of the ‘civilising mission’. The Mandates System of the League of Nations established a system of partial internationalisation of this transformative process, while attempting to safeguard the long-term interests of capital through the introduction of limited forms of welfarism. My thesis then argues that decolonisation assumed the form of national statehood due to the transformative functions of nineteenth-century international law. Therefore, the attempt to push for a New International Economic Order was both a challenge to contemporary international law and a reaffirmation of its role in promoting capitalist relations on a global level. These reformist attempts did not succeed, however, and a new model of capitalist accumulation, neoliberalism, became hegemonic after 1990. The quantitative expansion and qualitative refinement of international law during that period was intrinsically linked to the neoliberal aversion to democratic and mass politics. The neoliberal reconstruction of Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion is interpreted in the light of this reality. In so doing, my thesis highlights the ongoing synergies between international law and capitalist expansion.

This study is the first comprehensive evaluation of the pig's cultural, economic and social significance in Scotland for the time period 1600-1815. It explores a range of aspects of the pig's role at this time, including the evidence for social attitudes towards the animal, particularly in relation to the alleged prejudice against pork, and pigs in general, and considers the role of folklore and literature in the construction of an unflattering and enduring image of the pig . The evaluation of social attitudes to the pig over this time period, particularly through the use of textual analysis, is the foundation to understanding the pig's role in a Scottish context. Changing attitudes to the type of pig considered worth rearing as it becomes an economically viable animal are demonstrated in the context of a rapidly changing agricultural and commercial environment in the course of the eighteenth century. The study also investigates patterns of pig production and husbandry such as the seasonality of pig-rearing and means of animal control. Patterns of pork consumption are examined for evidence of the pig's culinary use and how this relates to social class. Lastly, the research concentrates on the pig's commercial role, examining the significance of economic factors, such as the price and quality of salt determining the market for and profitability of preserved meat, particularly in relation to Aberdeen's barrelled pork industry. This study argues that the expanding market, particularly in the context of the wider British commercial environment, is a major factor in the increasing numbers and more widespread availability of pigs and pork as the eighteenth century progresses

This thesis explores how rural society adapted to the fifteenth-century recession, and how this affected the ability of their sixteenth-century counterparts to respond to inflation. It does so through three primary sections: the first explores how the Bishops of Durham and the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory responded differently to the fifteenth-century recession and analyses the subsequently divergent development of their estates. By the seventeenth century, all of the Dean and Chapter’s lands were consolidated holdings on 21-year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops’ estate. The second section explores the balance of landed power in the Palatinate of Durham from the late-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century amongst the laity. This further explores whether the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and the ‘rise of the gentry’ are misnomers more adequately phrased in terms of land usage as the ‘rise of agricultural producers’ and the ‘crisis of rentier landlords’. The final section explores how the tenantry of the above estates survived this period, with the gradual stratification of landed society and the emergence of the yeomanry as a social group. It especially focuses upon how the divergent development of the two ecclesiastical estates impacted upon the opportunities and challenges facing the tenants of Durham. The overall conclusion reached by this thesis is that estate management and institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period. Institutional constraints had a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism.

The research undertaken for this project relates to the history of the 'Ladybird' imprint together with the company that produced these popular children's books. The period, from 1914 to present day, during which the books were produced, and throughout which the company operated, was one of great technological change in the print industry as well as one of great social change, and the company was shaped by many outside factors. In turn, its books were widely read and, arguably, themselves influenced generations of children. The research covers the books and the company from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Various factors that have influenced the company and its books, such as the British education system, the First and Second World wars, changes in print and communications technology, the British library system and bookselling practices, evolving social and political attitudes, the impact of the media and the company's competitors, have all been taken into account. The ways in which the brand has emerged and evolved is discussed within the context of commercial, social and political factors.

From the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War was the hey-day of the professional gardener. However, time has eroded the memory of these men and many of the gardens where they worked have disappeared or have been radically altered. Most garden history has been written from an artistic or design perspective. No-one has studied the lesser head gardeners who worked in British gardens and estates, nor has there been a county study such as this which considers the working lives of gardeners from a commercial and practical point of view. Yet research using contemporary documents, such as the census and estate records, suggests the number of working gardeners increased significantly throughout the nineteenth century. Private gardeners worked in growing numbers of middle-class villa gardens, or for estate gardens which had returned to formal planting and mass bedding. Nurserymen contributed plant material to support garden owners' aspirations and ambitions to purchase the newest imports or fashionable hybrids and to furnish glasshouses and arboreta. Market gardeners supplied fruit, vegetables and flowers to satisfy the demands of a society which had changed from being largely rural to predominantly urban and began to specialise and produce for long distance markets. Working gardeners were compelled to change their practices and products in order to accommodate scientific advances which fuelled a rise in interest in gardening across all classes of society. As the century progressed it became harder for a garden labourer to attain the position of head gardener. Increasingly, it was a man with some education who underwent a gruelling apprenticeship and training to reach the top of his profession. Different branches of the trade had their own hierarchy led by nurserymen at the top, jobbing gardeners and labourers at the bottom. This thesis discusses the growth of professionalism of gardeners and concludes that practical training was insufficient for success; self-education, determination, experience of a wide variety of gardens, good management skills, and sometimes luck were needed in order to succeed.

This thesis attempts to describe the evolution of a single economic institution in Nigeria: The Nigerian Cocoa Marketing Board. The Board was set up in 1947 in order to control the buying and selling of cocoa and to regulate the activities of cocoa traders and buying firms. Such a narrow focus is justified on the grounds that the development of cocoa marketing institutions in Nigeria epitomises an important aspect of the development of the Nigerian political economy between the 1930s and 1950s. When war broke out in 1939, the Ministry of Food assumed control over the external marketing trade of all major Nigerian export commodities, including cocoa. The responsibility for the cocoa control scheme was subsequently transferred to the Colonial Office. Already in 1941, the Colonial Office and the West African governments, including the Nigerian government, began to discuss whether it would be desirable to continue or terminate statutory marketing control after the war. The decision to establish the Nigerian Cocoa Marketing Board was largely taken because the Colonial Office and the West African governments believed that statutory marketing provided a convenient administrative solution for the recurrent political conflicts in the 1930s cocoa trade. These conflicts revolved around the strained commercial relationship between European trading firms and African traders and reached a climax in the West African 1937/38 cocoa hold-up crisis. The main argument in this thesis is that, at the end of the war, the colonial authorities, parts of the nationalist movement in Nigeria, and a number of smaller African and European trading firms came to the conclusion that a return to the 1930s 'free trade' regime and its conflicts would not suit their long-term political and economic interests. This implicit consensus allowed the Colonial Office to surmount strong opposition from American, British and West African trading interests against the scheme in the politically sensitive post-war period.

The thesis aims to offer a new perspective on tapestry production in sixteenth-century Florence from its establishment in 1545 to the end of the sixteenth century (1600). So far, scholarly literature has mainly investigated tapestries woven in sixteenth-century Florence as finished products in relation to cartoons, their iconographies and patronage. My research seeks to go beyond the traditional framework of studies and analyse tapestries in their making from economic, entrepreneurial and technical perspectives. Tapestries are not just a cartoon, a painter's product; they embody the collective effort of weavers, merchants, investors, dyers and other artisans and professionals. In the thesis, tapestries are reassessed in their making as a product of a complex economic enterprise. By doing this, the thesis combines the traditional art-historical framework with principles of material culture and economic history.  This methodological shift has led to some relevant archival findings, which are contained in the appendix of the thesis. Thereby, the research shows the potential to move away from the dominant perspective in tapestry studies.

Scotland is almost entirely absent from the British Industrial Revolution literature, despite being one of the world's first industrialising economies. This absence has been partially attributed to a paucity of statistical and systematic studies of the kind that has transformed our understanding of English industrialisation. With a view to fill this gap in the literature, this thesis presents an economic geography of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland based on the *Old* and *New Statistical Accounts of Scotland* (1791-99 and 1834-42), collections of essay‐style answers by parish clergy to a 170‐question survey that include observations on the state of parishes' agriculture and industry, demographics, ecclesiastical matters and more. I used it to create a dataset describing parishes' agriculture and industry using 61 ordinal, categorical variables. Because the data is unsuited to standard multivariate statistics, I introduce a novel approach based on geometric data analysis to produce a structured, systematic descriptive and visual analysis, in contrast to the explanatory statistical approaches more common in economic history. The statistical analysis also acts as a framework for collating and synthesising extensive qualitative source material and the large, relatively inconclusive and disparate secondary literature on Scotland's industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution in Scotland is found to have differed substantially in several important regards to common depictions of the British Industrial Revolution. Scotland relatively low wages, a lack of skilled labour, distinct cultural and institutional developments, and its demographic transition was initiated by an unexplained decline in mortality, and not a rise in fertility as in England. Based on the latter I argue population growth is an under‐explored factor and potential explanation for the Industrial Revolution. The character of the Industrial Revolution differed substantially depending on location, leading to the emergence of economic regions with spatial divisions of labour and inequalities. National aggregate approaches fail to account for these differences and omit fundamental aspects of it, and when doing so the Industrial Revolution in Scotland appears as dramatic and 'revolutionary', significantly different to the now orthodox depiction of a slow, 'evolutionary' transformation of the British economy.

This thesis examines the development of the political economy of the United States South after the Civil War, including the reasons behind the failure of Reconstruction and the emergence of the Jim Crow era. Specifically, I examine how anti-Black propaganda influenced important elections and the role of elite support for public schools in holding together a cross-class coalition of Whites. I also examine the long-run effects of temporary school closures in Virginia that occurred during the 1870s. This has many important implications, which includes understanding how propaganda and systematic discrimination were fostered to maintain the political and policy status quo after an expansion in the franchise. This also includes understanding how temporary school closures affected economic outcomes in adulthood. I examine these questions using two new sources of data. First, I collected data on anti- Black propaganda using a large archive of historical newspapers. Second, I hand-collected administrative data from Virginian schools that provides information on the student population and school finances. I also exploit a natural experiment whereby Virginian schools closed for at least a year after an unexpected veto of legislation that had different effects on schools across the state. I find that the use of anti-Black propaganda played a significant role in weakening biracial political coalitions before important elections that set the stage for the legal disenfranchisement of Black voters. I also find that elite support for higher school taxes was important to building cross-class coalitions of Whites after Reconstruction. Finally, I find that temporary school closures during Reconstruction had lasting effects on income and economic mobility in adulthood, particularly for those from low-income backgrounds. These findings provide insights into the importance of propaganda, universal public schools, and the role of cross-class coalitions in shaping the region's political economy.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. The first substantive chapter, entitled "Should you want an educated mayor? Evidence from close elections in Italy", studies the impact of politicians' education on policy choices and public finance. A probabilistic voting model with candidates' education level and public expenditure decomposition is used to explain how a politician's education matters for policy decisions over public budget allocation. Empirically, I use Italian municipality data on electoral results, balance sheets, and mayor candidates' educational attainment from 2000 to 2015. To estimate the causal effect of mayors' education on public finance I rely on regression discontinuity design focusing on close elections. Overall, I find that educated mayors boost public investment, especially in the education sector, without compromising the fiscal stability of the municipalities. The second substantive chapter, entitled "The impact of women's political leadership on institutional quality", studies the impact of female political leadership on future women's participation in politics and hiring in public administration, as well as on different measurements of institutional quality. Empirically, I use Italian municipal and provincial data on elections, politicians, and institutional characteristics from 2000 to 2015. To estimate the causal effect of electing female mayors I rely on regression discontinuity design, and instrumental variable approach, focusing on close elections. Overall, I find that women's political leadership boosts women's participation as politicians and public servants while improving a wide set of institutional quality metrics, reducing corruption, increasing government effectiveness, the rule of law, and political accountability. Furthermore, the positive impact of female leadership on institution quality is stronger in areas with more established gender norms, and if the female politician is holding a tertiary education degree. The third substantive chapter, entitled "Do speeches at the UN General Assembly affect international aid allocation?", studies whether countries' speeches at the United Nations General Assembly matter for international aid allocation. I use a supervised machine learning algorithm called wordscore and 7,533 different statements from 198 countries made in the period from 1975 to 2018 to measure countries' preferences from text. I find considerable evidence that countries' preferences derived from speeches affect aid allocation. Both the US and Russia provide more aid to those countries whose speeches please their current agenda and preferences the most.

The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of the fertility transition, the unequal opportunities in access to education and the long-term persistence of social status in twentieth-century Colombia. The thesis has two parts. The first part presents a detailed empirical perspective of the rapid Colombian fertility decline including results at the national, sub-national and individual-level. Using full individual-level census data, the results show that before the fertility transition fertility norms differed in the country because of the different historical legacies. But by 1964 fertility started falling simultaneously across all regions and fertility halved almost everywhere in only 25 years; the only exception was the indigenous communities that did not undergo a fertility decline during this period. This sudden decline suggests that a technological or cultural shock could explain the decline. However, the findings confirm that knowledge and access to family planning did not bring about a faster fertility decline. I provide new stylised facts for the long-run relationship between female education and fertility. At the individual level, the relationship between education and fertility holds strongly. However, at the national and sub-national level, fertility decline cannot be explained by the direct effects of education as fertility fell continuously in all educational groups since 1965. The second part of this thesis provides new evidence on the unequal access to education and presents a long-term view of social mobility using surname-based methods. The results show that contemporary patterns of social exclusion in education are rooted in the colonial past. However, the long-term effects of the colonial past have been uneven. While the historical elite reinvented itself, and some have been slowly losing their elite status, indigenous and Afro-Colombians have been trapped with scarce possibilities to move upward. The results also reveal low social mobility and a segregated marriage market with high levels of homogamy at the top and the bottom of the social ladder.

This thesis investigates the consumers' motivations to buy, and estimation of the willingness to pay for, organic food and the environmental attributes associated with it. These attributes include environment friendliness, animal welfare, low chemical usage, health, and quality, all shown to be significant parameters of social welfare. The thesis estimates results from revealed, stated and combined data, addressing the issues associated with single estimations, above all hypothetical bias, collinearity and endogeneity of attributes, and data scale differences. The true reasons why consumers appreciate environmental attributes, and their driving behaviour, are imperative from a marketing, industry and policy perspectives.

Climate change urgently calls for fundamental changes in the way we generate electricity. As the world's largest electricity generator and the biggest greenhouse gas emitter, China has pledged to decarbonise its power system. The success or failure of its efforts to rapidly accelerate the deployment of renewables will have immense implications for the global green transition. How might China meet its energy needs using green energies? This is the question this thesis takes up. This thesis uses mixed methods to address change through time as means to understand where China is now in terms of energy and where it might go next. This thesis begins by applying Hughes's system approach to investigate the evolution of China's power system from its origins in the 1880s to the current green transition. The findings show that the Chinese power system originated in wars, was built by the Western-educated elites, embedded with the socialist-style gained from Soviet assistance, and directed by the central state's political and economic principles. As a late developer, the case of China indicates the importance of human capital and that political, economic and educational openness are necessary conditions for late development. The thesis then focuses on the subnational political economy of the power system's green transition through an in-depth case study. The findings of a neo-Gramscian analysis demonstrate the dynamic processes and evolving power relations of the local electricity industry's green transition. The results point out that the rivalling coalitions of distinct economic interests - the established coalfired power historical bloc and the young renewable energy firms - were particularly central to the process. The final themed chapter examines whether it paid to adopt renewable energies in Chinese electricity generation firms from 2005 to 2017. The quantitative results show that adopting renewable energy positively impacts corporate profitability. Profitability is more stable and increases faster in firms with a higher share of renewable energies. Qualitative investigations reveal that the state-owned generators now strive for profits rather than scale, and private generators prioritise innovation and political prestige over profitability.

This thesis addresses a major puzzle in economic history: why was economic inequality already high when industrialisation and modern economic growth began? In the first part of the project (Chapter 2), I collect new data from archival documents to estimate the extent of wealth inequality in a panel of towns and villages, and at a hypothetical "national" level. This new evidence shows that Germany followed a secular trend of inequality growth between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, incidentally interrupted by idiosyncratic shocks, such as the Black Death (1350) epidemic and the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). In the second part of the project, I explore the causal effects of three central facets of the political economy of early modern Europe on inequality: warfare, the Protestant Reformation and closed governmental institutions in cities. My empirical strategies in these chapters employ difference-in-differences and instrumental variable techniques on the newly assembled town and village-level databases created in the first part of the dissertation. In Chapter 3 I document that, contrary to the widely held view that wars were "levelers" in history, the frequent military conflicts happening in preindustrial times constantly reinforced inequality. That was the result of warfare increasing the financial needs of communities in preindustrial times, which induced political elites to extract more resources via inequality promoting channels, such as regressive taxation. In Chapter 4 I study the effect of the Protestant Reformation on inequality. I argue that the Reformation expanded social welfare, but provided it in a particularistic way. This gave Protestantism an ambiguous character in terms of redistribution and its impact on inequality. I model that trade-off theoretically and test its implications empirically. In line with the theoretical framework, I document that the Reformation exacerbated inequality overall, by making marginal poor people relatively poorer. The result is driven by the introduction of 4 new particularistic poor relief policies in Protestant communities. The final chapter investigates the impact of urban political structure on inequality. I document that more closed political institutions were related to higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macrorelationship, I construct an individual-level panel-dataset, containing c.27,000 observations on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city state of Nördlingen from 1585 to 1700. I show that political elites enriched themselves substantially after entering office, but not before. These private gains from public office contributed to economic inequality. Politicians manipulated the crisis of the Thirty Years' War to enrich themselves further. The results are hard to square with a "civic-mindedness" narrative of urban political elites.

This doctoral thesis examines the impact of innovation on jobs using the first historical index of job quality and international comparative case studies of sectors in Great Britain and the United States. It makes four principal contributions. First, it constructs a new indicator of living standards that measures work-related wellbeing in the past. Second, it shows that macroinventions increased the division of labor and thereby raised the inequality of work-related wellbeing. Third, it demonstrates that firms' push to reduce unit labor costs produced a race between job quality and productivity. Managers adopted microinventions that could have reduced work intensity or improved safety, but to raise productivity they demanded higher effort levels and increased throughput, which mitigated improvements to safety and conditions. Fourth, it shows that some instances of technological change produced widespread unemployment and provided opportunities to reorganize the workforce. Higher-status workers used the dislocation of innovation to claim or retain the best jobs. These findings contribute to historical scholarship on the development of living standards and provide perspective for debates about job polarization and the future of work.

This PhD thesis lies at the intersection of economic history and the social history of mathematics. The main argument of my PhD is that studying the adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals among European practitioners allows to reconstruct a long-run history of transmission of useful knowledge from the Arabic world to the origins of the so-called European 'little divergence'. During the commercial revolution of the 13th century, Italian international merchant-bankers started to adopt Arabic mathematics in their business practices. Thanks to the use of figures and fractions, Arabic mathematics allowed to handle rational numbers with an efficiency that could not be matched by the previous Roman system. The fundamental financial instrument of the period - the bill of exchange - could not have been developed in the absence of Hindu-Arabic numerals, as it was based on a proportion between fractions. The thesis provides a multi-layered analysis of the reasons that led Italian merchants to adopt such mathematics and reconstructs their spread among European merchants. To reconstruct such spread, I focus on the main sources used to teach Arabic mathematics to prospective merchants: practical arithmetic manuals. I have reconstructed the European tradition of practical arithmetic collecting detailed information on over 1280 practical arithmetic manuals written throughout western Europe from the 13th to the 16th century. This catalogue, which is based both on secondary sources and on extensive archival research, substantially expands previously available evidence. Combining qualitative, quantitative and spatial (GIS) analysis, I show that Hindu-Arabic numerals slowly spread from Italy to the rest of the European continent, reaching a widespread diffusion only at the end of the 16th century. I complement the evidence offered by practical arithmetic manuals with an analysis of business documents (both public and private accounts) and of a variety of further sources. The spread of practical arithmetic manuals - which correlated with the diffusion of key financial and organisational innovations - followed a south-to-north pattern based not on the hubs of international trade, as most economic history literature would suggest, but on inland networks. England and the Low Countries - the main centres of the 'little divergence' - stand out as the latecomers in this innovations cycle. This suggests that a continuous transmission of useful knowledge played a role during the shift of the core of European trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

The occupational structure of late Imperial China, 1736-1898 Cheng Yang Today’s enormous global disparities in national average income levels are overwhelmingly a product of differential rates of economic growth over the last 200 years. China was the world’s most developed economy at the beginning of the last millennium, with the flow of technological knowledge overwhelmingly moving west. Following the British Industrial Revolution, Europe, North America and Japan surged ahead and fundamentally diverged from most of the rest of the world. Historians have hence long debated the timing of this “Great Divergence.” Since its inception, the Great Divergence debate has created tremendous interest in comparative global economic history and directed both academic and public attention toward linking modern-day global disparities with our past. However, the discussion still faces serious empirical limitations, particularly on the Chinese side. Faced with this empirical challenge, many scholars have nonetheless made impressive progress on both primary sources and methodology in the past two decades. By producing new estimates of Chinese occupational structure using a challenging, underused but abundant historical source (刑科题本the Xingke Tiben, a collection of trial papers for all homicides in China, 1736-1898), this PhD thesis aims to improve this empirical basis. Although the source contains rich occupational data, it is noted that the resulting dataset cannot be considered as a random sample of all work carried out in the economy due to the source’s inherent biases. Assessments of the source’s representativeness and a series of rectifications of the different biases were thus necessary and carried out in this thesis. The comparison with other sources indicated that the biases in the source are systematic, consistent, and modest. These comparisons suggest that the secondary-sector share is most reliable, while the primary sector is somewhat under-represented and the tertiary sector slightly over-represented. Meanwhile, the secondary-sector labour force has clearly gendered characteristics, with the female’s secondary-sector employment share being much higher than the male’s. This study thus follows a gendered approach, although the current male estimates are much more robust than the female estimates due to the relatively small female sample size. Further, to take full advantage of the source’s spatial coverage and temporal consistency, the thesis attempts regional and long-run analysis. Although the sample is created through random sampling, in the cases of smaller areas or sparsely populated prefectures or the post-1860 periods when the total XKTB available dropped greatly, the sample size can be very small and does not have the strength of statistical significance. What I present in these cases are thus preliminary findings and a possible interpretation. They are hypotheses. The research presented in the thesis makes a contribution to Chinese economic and social history by improving its empirical basis, and, through this, further hopes to contribute to global comparative economic history. Following a concise introduction, chapter one of this thesis provides a discussion of current literature, illustrating the critical need for improving its empirical basis. Chapter two unveils the primary source, demonstrates its quality, richness and challenges as a source for occupational data, and summarises the XKTB dataset created in this thesis. Chapter three provides the methodological core for the full utilisation of the source, as well as addressing potential biases. Using this new evidence, chapter four to seven presents and discusses the new estimates for the occupational structure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China and its regions of disparate trajectories, including but not limited to, her economically-advanced region of the Lower Yangtze. Chapter seven summarises the key findings, main contributions and future directions of this research. Preliminary analysis using this new source suggests that both China and the Lower Yangtze lagged well behind England by 1736, and most probably even before 1700, with higher primary-sector shares, considerably lower secondary-sector shares, and higher tertiary-sector shares – the latter explained by the presence of substantial excess labour. Thereafter, it seems that China probably did not undergo major sustained structural change until the twentieth century, as the occupational structures in 1761-70, 1821-30 and 1881-90 are remarkably similar, although we cannot rule out fluctuations in 1771-1820 and 1831-80. Indeed, the timing of the Great Divergence between China and England might need to be pushed back earlier than 1700. Further, these estimates might prove useful later as a new factor to be considered alongside other factors such as man to land ratio, wage level or sectoral productivity in the broader discussion about the diverse paths of development in the modern-era global context, although these evidence in the thesis could not do this justice to them at the current moment.

This thesis is a systematic survey of the economic history of Bengal (c.400-1200 A.D.) as far as it can be re-constructed from available sources. In the introduction, we discuss the importance of the study of economic history, especially in relation to ancient Bengal, mention the works written on the subject so far, and evaluate the sources used in our study. The first chapter deals with the geographical background and the close relations between physical factors and the economy of the country. The second chapter is sub-divided into two sections. While the first deals with agriculture, the second gives a short account of the fauna of Bengal. In the third chapter we make a detailed study of the land system. It is sub-divided into nine different sections dealing with the following aspects of the land system; a) land sale, b) land-grants, c) types of land, d) land survey demarcation and boundary disputes, e) land measurement, f) land tenure, g) price of land, h) demand for land, and e) ownership of land. The fourth chapter is devoted to some of the crafts and industries practised in our period. The fifth chapter on trade and commerce contains two sections - a) internal, and b) external trade. Our sixth chapter studies the revenue system and in this connexion we analyse the different revenue terms found in the land grants and try to explain several on which there is difference of opinion among scholars. The seventh and final chapter deals with the coinage system, mainly from the economic point of view.