We measure technological progress in oceanic shipping by using a large database of daily log entries from ships of the British and Dutch navies and East India Companies to estimate daily sailing speed in different wind conditions from 1750 to 1850. Against the consensus, dating back to North...

Although largely absent from modern accounts of the Industrial Revolution, watches were the first mass produced consumer durable, and were Adam Smith's pre-eminent example of technological progress. In fact, Smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95 per cent...

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;...