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Women’s Work: Still Hidden from Economic History
Thirty years ago Jane Humphries called attention to the fact that women were "Lurking in the Wings" of economic history, we still often get economic history wrong because we ignore women's work. This session will explore the say that women's work is overlooked, mismeasured, uncounted, and often unpaid, and the consequences that that has for our historical narratives.
Co-organizer Jane Humprhies
Sponsored by the Women's Committee
Sovereign debt and financial crises
The role of foreign debt in generating or accelerating financial crises in the 19th and 20th centuries is widely recognised. The proposed session aims to bring together two strands of research, a more established one focusing on high debt debt in the so-called emerging economies, and a more recent one on debt crises and financial workouts in the economies of Europe during and after the two world wars. the aim is to deepen the understanding of contemporary political and social discourse and of the perceived consequences of political intervention.
The economics of slavery
Finley (1976, p. 819) once stated that “in the context of universal history, free labor, wage labor, is the peculiar institution”. Labor coercion has been
the norm. Coercive contracts, however, range from slavery to serfdom. This broadness may allow some generalizations, yet it hinders our understanding as
to why slavery emerged in certain regions while serfdom, for example, dominated in others. To explore this topic, the organizers welcome papers that identify the uniqueness of slavery as an economic institution and contribute to the economics of coercion on a theoretical level. Both quantitative and qualitative
studies are encouraged.
De-industrialisation in the periphery
After being largely neglected in the academic debate, the importance of manufacture and manufacturing growth in the periphery has again received recognition among scholars. With the exception of South East Asia and China, episodes of industrialistion in the periphery have not been sustained, but were followed by periods of de-industrialisation. There is no consensus regarding the causes of de-industrialisation. The aim of this session is to bring together research on de-industrialisation in the periphery. We especially welcome papers that focus on developing new methodologies to capture the factors that can explain de-industrialisation in the global south.
(Anti)Nuclear Politics in the United Kingdom
This session combines innovative research on nuclear policymaking and anti-nuclear politics in Britain, concentrating on the period between the mid-1950s and late 1980s when nuclear rose and then fell from public and government favour. Important new archival research on British government informs Tom Kelsey's paper on the liberal rationale that informed opposition to nuclear within the Treasury. Ewan Gibbs and Linda Ross present new perspectives on opposition to nuclear power in Scotland, demonstrating how changing popular perceptions and constitutional politics shaped opposition within localities at the forefront of the UK's nuclear programme in the second half of the twentieth century.
Addressing Health: Morbidity and Mortality in the Victorian Post Office
This session provides an overview of the preliminary findings of the project ‘Addressing Health: Morbidity, Mortality and Occupational Health in the Victorian and Edwardian Post Office’. It investigates the history of sickness during the epidemiological transition focusing on the Post Office workforce. The three papers summarize our findings relating to three key workstreams: the spatial and temporal patterns of morbidity in the workforce; the relationship between morbidity and mortality among workers; and the practice and policy of the Post Office medical service. Taken together they offer new insights into the history of morbidity at the turn of the twentieth century
Social mobility and plagues in preindustrial times
Many speculated about the social-economic impact of major preindustrial epidemics, from the Black Death to the last great seventeenth-century plagues. The Covid-19 pandemic has made this research relevant to public debates. Recent works explored the distributive consequences of the Black Death and the opportunities for upward social mobility that it offered. This pandemic might have produced a “tidal wave” of social promotions. We know less about the effects on social mobility of later crises, like the seventeenth-century plagues, but they were probably quite different. Comparing different epidemics allows to avoid undue generalizations, and maybe to derive some lectures for today.
Economic History and Sustainability. Long run trends in resources and development
Genuine Savings has emerged as an indicator of Sustainable Development. It is based on the concept of wealth accounting and represents a measure of how the capital stock changes year-on-year. Current World Bank data to support the calculation of GS at the country level stretches back to the 1970s. However, the socioeconomic development is a long-run process where path-dependence, persistence and multiple equilibriums interact in the construction of “future”. What can we learn from history? The session will discuss on this subject to offer views about the economic history of regions and contribute in the debate about sustainability and development.
Measuring costs and benefits of local shocks in long-term
This session aims to explore the effect of local economic shocks in the long run. These shocks can be represented by either natural endowments advantageous for a specific technology, a physical capital investment shock , a human capital shock, a new institution, or a public capital expenditure related to specific industries or regions, among others. The session considers the local, regional and national consequences of assuming these shocks concerning the long-term evolution of particular locations in terms of development, urbanization, or structural transformations, seeking to answer the questions “Does policy work?” and “for how long?”
To the Finland Station: New Research in Russian Economic History
Russian and Soviet economic history is experiencing a revival, driven by the construction of fascinating new datasets and deepening relationships between Eastern and Western scholars. New work in this area borrows liberally from the toolkits of modern economics, finance, political science, and other fields, and is generating important reinterpretations of Russian history. This session will include presentations of four new projects that exemplify the exciting possibilities for social science history in the region. We hope that by bringing such a session to the EHS, we can further bolster the network of scholars working in and around Russian/Soviet economic history.