The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule...

Although the importance of the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development is widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess, let alone to quantify the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets in this era. In this paper we demonstrate to...

(This paper has been accepted (May 2011) for publication in the Economic History Review) In the past one of the main challenges to households was how to cope with adversity. War, plague, famine, and flood were a constant threat, and could reduce what little improvements families had made in...

At the end of the eighteenth century, England and France both underwent revolutions: France the French Revolution, England the industrial revolution. This note sheds new light on these contrasting experiences in the histories of England and France by looking at the evolution of real consumer...

The emphasis on location-specific factors, such as climate or disease environment, in the explanation of development outcomes in colonial societies implicitly assumes that settler groups were homogenous. Using tax records, this paper shows that the French Huguenots who immigrated to Dutch South...

In this paper we analyse the functioning of private capital markets in Holland in the late medieval period. We argue that in the absence of banks and state agencies involved with the supply of credit, entrepreneurs access to credit was determined by two interrelated factors. The first was the...

Until recently, most economists work on Africa has taken 1960 as the starting point because data on national income and similar derivates are only available back to this point. To date, the quantitative literature on Africa has made heroic leaps of faith, asserting causal relationships across...