Strange Times. There were back-to-back harvest failures in 1799-1800, coming fast on the heels of the insurrections of 1798. The result was massive and sustained inflation in food prices. The conundrum is why there was so little excess mortality. Our approach is to begin by discussing the...

Shipping was central to the rise of the Atlantic economies, but an extremely hazardous activity: in the 1780s, roughly five per cent of British ships sailing in summer for the United States never returned. Against the widespread belief that shipping technology was stagnant before iron...

We investigate the early development of English cotton spinning by analysing about 700 bankruptcies and 1300 dissolutions of partnership reported in the London Gazette, 1770-1840. The data show three temporal cycles, peaking in the early to mid-1800s, in the later 1820s and again in the later...