This paper uses new product-specific, micro-level US data to show that New England had lower levels of productivity in cotton spinning than Lancashire, c. 1900, contradicting results derived by Broadberry from the Censuses of Production. The discrepancy stems from the Censuses’ poor methods of...

Oxley finds that smallpox consistently reduced heights, but that the fall was not statistically significant outside London or for juvenile Londoners. We demonstrate that inappropriate subdivision of the data into small samples explains the lack of significance she obtains. Further analysis of...

This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire’s slow adoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additional transport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machine reduced ring adoption rates, these supply side...

This paper examines major privately-owned British railway companies before World War I. Quantitative evidence is presented on return on capital employed, total factor productivity growth, cost inefficiency, and speed of passenger services. There were discrepancies in performance across companies...

This paper uses new micro-level US data to re-examine productivity leadership in cotton spinning c. 1900. We find that output aggregation problems make the Census unreliable in this industry, and that Lancashire, not New England was the productivity leader for almost every type of yarn. This is...

'Social savings' is a cliometric concept to measure the benefit to society of technological improvements. The terms are defined, and the relationship between social savings and consumer surplus, total factor productivity and growth accounting measures is discussed. We critically outline Fogel's...

Razzell argues that the quality of smallpox recording in the Marine Society data set is so poor that ‘the impact of smallpox on average height cannot be settled by analysis of the Marine Society data set’. We believe that this grossly overstates the problems of the records, and is based on a...

In February 2008, French President Nicholas Sarkozy created a committee with a somewhat ungainly name, 'The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress', headed by Joseph Stiglitz, and advised by Amartya Sen. The aim of the Commission was to 'identify the limits of...

Between them our critics span the entire range of this Journal’s readership. On the one hand Razzell accuses us of ‘the abandonment of traditional scholarly procedures’. He argues that our plight ‘will provide a salutary lesson for the new economic history. No amount of sophisticated...

Using a new source of evidence we explore the geographical mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born - characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men...