https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/8600.pdf

Capitalism and freedom

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations—world history—the recent “global turn” has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical “traditions.” This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new “grand narrative” but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.

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A Global Perspective: Reframing the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease.

Virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is Pareto efficient. Within many African households, agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots. I find, in contrast, that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men. The estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household. The paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results.

/pdf/gender-agricultural-production-and-the-theory-of-the-2qev0ck25u.pdf

Gender, Agricultural Production, and the Theory of the Household

The condition of the working class in England.

This article compares chronologies reconstructed from historical records of prices, wages, grain harvests, and population with corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climatic variations derived from dendrochronology and Greenland ice-cores. It demonstrates that in pre-industrial, and especially late medieval, England, short-term environmental shocks and more enduring shifts in environmental conditions (sometimes acting in concert with biological agencies) exercised a powerful influence upon the balance struck between population and available resources via their effects upon the reproduction, health and life expectancy of humans, crops, and livestock. Prevailing socio-economic conditions and institutions, in turn, shaped society's susceptibility to these environmental shocks and shifts.

Nature as historical protagonist: environment and society in pre-industrial England

We provide annual estimates of GDP for England between 1270 and 1700 and 
for Great Britain between 1700 and 1870, constructed from the output side. The GDP 
data are combined with population estimates to calculate GDP per capita. We find 
English per capita income growth of 0.20 per cent per annum between 1270 and 1700, 
although growth was episodic, with the strongest growth during the Black Death crisis of 
the fourteenth century and in the second half of the seventeenth century. For the period 
1700-1870, we find British per capita income growth of 0.48 per cent, broadly in line 
with the widely accepted Crafts/Harley estimates. This modest trend growth in per capita 
income since 1270 suggests that, working back from the present, living standards in the 
late medieval period were well above “bare bones subsistence”. This can be reconciled 
with modest levels of kilocalorie consumption per head because of the very large share of 
pastoral production in agriculture.

/pdf/british-economic-growth-1270-1870-6sb6p6bbl9.pdf

British Economic Growth, 1270-1870

This paper reconstructs GDP from the output side for medieval and early modern Britain. In contrast to the long run stagnation of living standards suggested by daily real wage rates, output-based GDP per capita exhibits modest but positive trend growth. One way of reconciling the two series is through variation in the annual number of days worked, but there are also reasons to doubt the representativeness of the sharp rise and fall of daily real wage rates in the late middle ages, which creates the impression of no trend improvement of living standards. Acknowledgements: This paper forms part of the project "Reconstructing the National Income of Britain and Holland, c.1270/1500 to 1850", funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Reference Number F/00215AR. It is also part of the Collaborative Project HI-POD supported by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme for Research, Contract Number SSH7-CT-2008-225342. We are grateful to Richard Britnell, Ben Dodds, John Hatcher, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Philip Slavin, Richard Smith, Jan de Vries and seminar/conference participants at Cambridge, Durham, Evanston, LSE, Tokyo, Reading, Utrecht, Venice, Warwick and Yale for helpful comments and suggestions.

British economic growth, 1270-1870: an output-based approach

Estimates are assembled for England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and for Britain and Ireland as a whole, of the numbers of religious houses, regular clergy, parishes, towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants, and townspeople, and the value of dutiable exports and volume of currency at the watershed date of c.1290. Absolute and relative levels of economic development are then compared. A range of possible population estimates are considered and corresponding set of per capita estimates thereby derived. The results highlight significant differences in the pattern of economic development between and within these four countries.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/ehr_407.pdf?abstractid=1276710&mirid=4

Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.12901

In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition', Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy.

Bruce M. S. Campbell

Papers

Nature as historical protagonist: environment and society in pre-industrial England

British Economic Growth, 1270-1870

British economic growth, 1270-1870: an output-based approach

Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.12901

The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World