It is commonplace to observe that one of the great changes of the modern age is not only that life expectancy is much longer than a century or two ago, but that there has been a radical change in the causes of death. Even in the nineteenth century, infectious disease was by far the biggest cause...

This study is concerned with a case study of a famine in an economy where internal food markets are generally deemed to have been poorly integrated, ancien regime France. In the century or so before the Revolution, most historians agree that high transport costs and local vested interests...

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey's excellent The Rise of Free Trade (RFT) gathers together speeches, contemporary writing and extracts from parliamentary debates relating to British trade policy between 1815 and 1906 (the year in which free trade was consolidated by a decisice General Election victory...

To test a model of contagion -where individuals hear some bad news and communicate it to their acquaintances, who pass it on in turn, leading to a market panic- requires a knowledge of the information networks of market participants, something hitherto unavailable. For two panics in the 1850s...

This paper tries to be the first step in a systematic comparison of economic growth in Denmark and Ireland between 1870 and 1939. Section 2 ofthis paper sets the scene by discussing broader trends of living standards and agricultural productivity. Section 3 outlines the developments in the...

This is a paper about intercontinental trade, since factor proportions differ far more between continents than within. Long distance intercontinental trade was also the economic event which motivated the theoretical work of Bertil Ohlin.

The paper offers a simple test of spatial integration in food markets during famines. It applies the test to two data sets; one for India between the 1860s and the 1910s, the other for Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s.