We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers in the cities of Luanda and Benguela spanning the years 1760 to 1975. Angolan...

Debates about the nature and economic role of money are mostly informed by evidence from the 20th century, but money has existed for millennia. We argue that there are many lessons to be learned from monetary history that are relevant for current topics of policy relevance. The past acts as a...

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694 the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralized British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in...

How did the Spanish money supply evolve in the aftermath of the discovery of large amounts of precious metals in Spanish America? We synthesize the available data on the mining of precious metals and their international flow to estimate the money supply for Spain from 1492 to 1810. Our estimate...

I provide the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history. I propose two main estimation methods. The first, which I call the 'direct method', is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only....

The Bank Restriction Act of 1797 suspended the convertibility of the Bank of England's notes into gold. The current historical consensus is that the suspension was a result of the state's need to finance the war, France's remonetization, a loss of confidence in the English country banks, and a...

PhD dissertation summary forthcoming at: European Review of Economic History

Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait of early modern England. This growth pattern was...

We exploit a recurring natural experiment to identify the effects of money supply shocks: maritime disasters in the Spanish Empire (1531-1810) that resulted in the loss of substantial amounts of monetary silver. A one percentage point reduction in the money growth rate caused a 1.3% drop in real...

Why did the countries which first benefitted from access to the New World - Castile and Portugal - decline relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands? The dominant narrative is that worse initial institutions at the time of the opening of Atlantic trade explain Iberian...