This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a...

In this article, I use documents obtained from the NatWest Group archives to examine the work of Alexander Shand as a director of Parr's Bank during the period 1909-1918. A Scottish banker, Alexander Shand was recruited by the Japanese government early in his career to instruct Japanese...

This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the Great Fire's effects on London's economic geography. Our analysis reveals both continuity and change. There was a swift postfire recovery accompanied by some shift in economic activity towards the City of Westminster by 1690, with markets...

Existing series suggest wages in London were substantially higher than in other European cities from 1650 to 1800. This paper presents new evidence from the construction sites that supplied the underlying wage data, and uncovers the contractual and organisational context in which it was...

We explore the connection between social class, social mobility, and voting behavior in nineteenth-century England. To avoid pitfalls associated with survey or aggregate data on voting behavior, we use administrative longitudinal records preceding secret ballot on voters’ choices and...

The physical stature of lower- and upper-class English youth are compared to one another and to their European and North American counterparts. The height gap between the rich and poor was the greatest in England, reaching 22 cm at age 16. The poverty-stricken English children were shorter for...

This brief paper sets forth the evidence that the 1814 campaign against Napoleon was financed using techniques that had become borderline acceptable in Britain after the Suspension, but were illegal on the Continent, and that they succeeded only because the Bank of England was induced to expand...

In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using circa 500 articles of...