We seek to understand the welfare of dairy cattle in Denmark from 1750 to 1900, a period marked by significant agricultural development and industrialization. By applying contemporary animal welfare metrics to historical data, we uncover a detailed picture of how bovine welfare evolved. Our...

The relative success of the Danish and failure of the Irish dairy industries before the First World War is often contrasted given their competition for the lucrative British butter market. The traditional narrative implicitly assumes that Ireland failed because it was unsuccessful at adopting...

Energy was one of the keys to the remarkable increase in English GDP between 1650 and 1700. Increased per head physical activity and basal metabolic rate led to increased energy consumption. In response, subsistence wages, productivity, wages and incomes increased. Malthusian adjustment explains...

I use spatial and temporal variation in temperature shocks to examine the effect of adverse weather conditions on the onset of social conflicts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The paper's contribution is threefold. First, I document the effect of temperature shocks on standards of...

Did cholera function as a potent catalyst for the reform of urban water infrastructure in 19th century Europe's disease-ridden cities, serving as "our old ally" in the struggle for urban sanitation (Robert Koch)? Based on a detailed case study of Berlin's hydrological reconfiguration, this paper...

There is a vast literature on the effects of land inequality and agrarian reforms, but little on the origins of this inequality. We exploit a new and unique parish-level database of land inequality in Denmark, from 1682 to 1895, during which period there was comprehensive land reform and...

We propose that the "historically relevant" comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We motivate the comparison, noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...

The rapid spread of the Danish dairy cooperatives from the 1880s until the First World War is often portrayed as a uniform wave which swept the country. We investigate this using exceptionally detailed micro-level panel data taken from the Operational Statistics of Creameries, which were...

Previous work has demonstrated the potential for wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the 'first era of globalization' in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was however frequently interrupted by policy and 'exogenous' events such as war. This paper adds Canada to...