British business cycles, 1270-1870

Annual estimates of GDP constructed from the output side are used to analyse British business cycles between 1270 and 1870. After c.1670 the scale of recessions tended to diminish as the economy grew, diversified and became more resilient. Until c.1730, business cycles were driven largely by agricultural fluctuations, but shocks to industry and commerce became more important over time as the structure of the economy changed. A number of severe recessions can be identified, associated with harvest failures, disease outbreaks, wars and disruptions to commerce. Monetary and financial factors also played a role in some of these severe recessions

Reconstructing medieval April-July mean temperatures in East Anglia, 1256–1431

This paper presents the first annually resolved temperature reconstruction for England in the Middle Ages. To effect this reconstruction the starting date of the grain harvest in Norfolk has been employed as a temperature proxy. Using c. 1,000 manorial accounts from Norfolk, 616 dates indicating the onset of the grain harvest were extracted for the period 1256 to 1431 and a composite Norfolk series was constructed. These data were then converted into a temperature series by calibrating a newly constructed comparison series of grain harvest dates in Norfolk from 1768 to 1816 with the Central England Temperature series. These results were verified over the period 1818–1867. For the British Isles no other annually resolved proxy data are available and the onset of the grain harvest remains the only proxy for assessing April-July mean temperatures. In addition, this is the first time-series regarding the onset of grain harvests in medieval Europe known so far. The long-term trend in the reconstructed medieval temperature series suggests that there was a cooling in the mean April-July temperatures over the period 1256 to 1431. Average temperatures dropped from 13°C to 12.4°C, which possibly indicates the onset of the Little Ice Age. The decline in values was not steady, however, and the reconstruction period contains decades of warmer spring-early summer temperatures (for example the 1320s to the early 1330s and the 1360s) as well as colder conditions (for example the late 1330s, 1340s and the 1380s). The decline in grain-growing-season average temperatures would not have been a major problem for medieval agriculture, rather the phases of very high interannual variability partly found in the medieval time-series, such as 1315–1335 and 1360–1375, would have proved disruptive

Aspirations, Attainments, and Satisfaction: Life Cycle Differences Between American Women and Men

Well-being, Aspirations, Gender, Life course,

Climate and Famines: a Historical Reassessment

This study, dealing with the question of the impact of climate and extreme weather events on famines, has two objectives. The first objective is to review recent literature on the topic, distinguishing between economic and political science papers aimed at addressing contemporary famine events in the Third World countries, and historical research dealing with famines of the past. The former category of literature is characterized by a tendency to take the connection between the two variables for granted. The latter category, however, tends to exercise more analytical caution, but it still exhibits a degree of environmental determinism. The second objective of the article is to reassess the role and impact of climate and short-term weather anomalies on famines in pre-Industrial societies, in both European and non-European history. At first, it appears that famines went invariably hand-in-hand with climatic changes and anomalies. A closer analysis, however, reveals that those climatic events created environmental shocks (harvest failures and blights), which implied shortages, rather than famines. Whether those shortages were bound to transform into full-fledged famines was determined by nonenvironmental factors: primarily, human institutions and demographic trends. Climate alone, it is argued, is incapable of creating famines. The often unquestioned connection between the two variables appears to be an imaginary cultural and political construct of our era, when the fear of global warming and the awareness of climate change dominate the public and scholarly discours