This article responds to Professor Jane Humphries’ critique of my assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth century British and its importance for explaining the Industrial Revolution. New Evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy. It...

TOn the occasion of the hundredth issue of the Discussion Papers, this special number contains reflections on the past and future of economic and social history at Oxford and in general. Five scholars, who have been associated with the subject at Oxford, contribute with personal reflections on...

It is commonly thought that the rapid increase in household saving during the early years of National Socialism was partly driven by ideological factors. On this view, the popularity of the regime allowed it to exert ‘moral suasion’ on households to save more than they might have done in the...

In the late 19th century Britain accumulated substantial overseas assets. It has been generally accepted that overseas investment displaced domestic investment. This paper questions this assumption by pointing to the rise in the savings ratio, which enabled high capital exports to be combined...

Participation in ‘friendly societies’ (or other cooperative organisations) is often used as proxy for measuring the stock of social capital. This is too simplistic. Friendly societies underwent radical changes over the nineteenth century and contemporaries regularly bemoaned that...

Banking in the UK was stable for more than a century after 1866. Financial institutions were differentiated according to function. The core banks did not engage in maturity transformation, but in managing a payments system for business. Real estate was a potential source of instability due to...

This study estimates agency’s impact on the efficiency of sugar plantations on St.Vincent and the Grenadines during the early 19th century. Using a panel data set covering the years 1814-1829, a series of stochastic frontier models are estimated to investigate whether estates employing agents...

We examine the importance of geographical proximity to coal as a factor underpinning comparative European economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Our analysis exploits geographical variation in city and coalfield locations, alongside temporal variation in the availability of...

We review recent asymptotic results on some robust methods for multiple regres- sion. The regressors include stationary and non-stationary time series as well as polynomial terms. The methods include the Huber-skip M-estimator, 1-step Huber-skip M-estimators, in particular the Impulse Indicator...