Patterns of poor relief varied greatly amongst nineteenth century Irish cities. To date, however, there has been little examination of the reasons behind these divergences. One possible factor is the divergent occupational and demographic structures of these cities – ranging from the dramatic...

Since the pioneering work of Tulio Halperín Donghi, historians have tried to explain why Argentina experienced a dramatic pastoral expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century even though there were no price incentives for increasing output. Here this ‘Halperín paradox’ is...

Research on the practices of the moneylender, a permanent yet shadowy fixture of society, has focused on England in the early modern period. This paper, however, examines the business operations of Costantino Bogdano, a Greek moneylender active in Venice (c. 1800-44). At a time of transition in...

There is a major downward bias in the trend of most existing estimates of the periphery’s nineteenth-century terms of trade. By using prices from the North Atlantic core as proxies for prices in the peripheral countries themselves, historians ignore the dramatic price convergence that took...