World War 1 exacerbated the cost of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 in two ways. First, it facilitated the spread the flu virus through the movement of clusters of infected soldiers and sailors. Second, it constrained public health measures that would have reduced mortality (as during the...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is currently the focus of much media attention and policy discussion. A historical perspective on AMR suggests that although the challenge of AMR is real, the doomsday tone of most commentary is unwarranted. That is partly because most of the gains in life...

This paper replies to commentaries by Sam White and by Ulf Büntgen and Lena Hellmann on our 'The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe'. White and Büntgen/Hellmann seek to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the...

Sustained economic growth in England can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. That earlier growth, albeit modest, both generated and was sustained by a demographic regime that entailed relatively high wages, and by an increasing endowment of human capital in the form of a relatively...

Ebola and plague share several characteristics, even though the second and third plague epidemics dwarfed the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in terms of mortality. This essay reviews the mortality due to the two diseases and their lethality; the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of plague mortality;...

This paper surveys publications in the fields of economic history and demography in the ESR since 1969. Numbering sixty in all, they cover a broad chronological and thematic range. Some of these papers never attracted much notice, but stand as useful sources for future historians. A few have...

Are return migrants 'losers' who fail to adapt to the challenges of the host economy, and thereby exacerbate the brain drain linked to emigration? Or are they 'winners' whose return enhances the human and physical capital of the home country? These questions are the subject of a burgeoning...

This paper offers (yet another) reflection on the history and current status of economic history. No other sub-discipline of economics or history has tried so hard to be loved as economic history. That love is unrequited, because economic history's problem is existential: it is an inherently...