Examines the height of Georgian convicts and concludes that their height declined beginning with the birth cohorts of 1835. The economic transition brought about a decline in their nutritional status.

Examines the height of students who attended The Citadel, the military academy in Charleston in the late-19th and the first half of the 20th century. Shows a long stagnation in the biological standard of living in this part of the South until the 1910s, when it began to increase substantially.

This paper argues that the conventional Malthusian account of pre-modern economies as constrained by diminishing returns resulting from a fixed land supplied is flawed because it does not recognize the importance of systematic indivisibilities in the production and distribution of farm produce...

Cognitive obstacles to perception of novelty on the scientific frontier created obstacles to evaluating scientific work and recruiting scientific workers had to be overcome for the scientific enterprise to expand to the point where it could significantly affect factor productivity. The principal...

Between 1300 and 1500 the French agricultural economy was subjected to massive demographic, political, fiscal and monetary shocks. Despite these shocks, the seigniorial system of property rights governing the ownership and use of land remained largely unchanged. This paper describes the shocks...

Recent archaeological findings indicate that the Hellenistic and Roman economy was a specialized market economy that obtained levels of factor productivity that appear to be on a par with levels current on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This raises the question when that economy began to...