In 1967 Marshal Hodgson (the godfather of global economic history) wrote these percipient words: “Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Asian Oikumene of which the Occident had been an integral part, the western transmutation would be almost unthinkable”. Alas, the recommendation...

If we are to learn the right lessons from the tragedy ofNandigram, then we must ensure that the government is involvedin the land acquisition process and that we correctly deal withthree sets of issues: the size and form of compensation, theeligibility for compensation and the credibility of the...

Eyam is an epicentre of Europe’s plague heritage. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Derbyshire village, drawn by stories of its catastrophic plague and the heroic response it elicited. The story they are told - of a self-imposed quarantine preventing disease spreading to the...

The role of technology in the transition from premodern to modern economies in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe is among the major questions in economic history, but it is still poorly understood. A plausible explanation of premodern European technological development must account...

This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of pre-World War I Britain’s railway system with an improved dataset and with modern time-series econometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of...

This paper explores the location of industry in pre-World-War-I Britain using a model that takes account both of factor endowment and also of new economic geography influences. Broadly speaking, the pattern of industrial location in this period was quite persistent and regional specialization...