On the status and the future of economic history in the world

How many economic historians are there in the world? In which countries or world regions are they concentrated? Can we explain differences in the number of economic historians who are participating in world congresses, and which determinants encourage or limit participation propensity? Using an e-mail questionnaire, we analyse the global situation of this discipline. Overall 59 countries were available to be surveyed in this overview. We estimate the overall number of economic historians in the world to be around 10,400 scholars.Economic history, world, survey

Anthropometric methods and the interdisciplinary conversation between archaeology and economics

In this paper we use possibilities of interdisciplinary work between archaeology and economics, focusing on the development of European living standard in terms of nutritional status in long-run perspective (1st to 18th century AD), and its determinants. We applied anthropometric methods using a data set of nearly 9500 human height measurements as proxy for mean nutritional status, and a data set of more than 2 million animal bones to measure the impact of changes in cattle production. Milk cattle husbandry, interacted with sparse population density, has had positive effects on mean height: (1) Proximity to protein production resulted in a low local shadow price of milk, as it could not be transported over distances. (2) This low price resulted in a low inequality of nutritional status; in contrast pork induced nutritional inequality, because it could be preserved and traded, thus becoming expensive and affordable only for the rich

Understanding the decline of interpersonal violence in the ancient middle east

How did human societies succeed in reducing interpersonal violence, a precondition to achieve security and prosperity? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains virtually outside our purview. To fill this gap, a literature intersecting economics, archaeology, and anthropology has devised reliable methods for studying traumas deliberately inflicted in human skeletal remains. In this paper we reconstruct the early history of conflict by exploiting a novel dataset on weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the whole pre-Classical period (ca. 8,000-400 BCE). By documenting when and how ancient Middle Eastern populations managed to reduce intersocietal violence and achieve remarkable levels of development, we broaden historical perspectives on the structural factors driving human conflict

Back to the ‘Normal’ Level of Human-Capital Driven Growth? A Note on Early Numeracy in Korea, China and Japan, 1550 - 1800

This paper draws on a unique data set, hojok (household registers), to estimate numeracy levels in Korea, 1550–1630, and evidence on Japan and China from the early modern period until 1800. We found that a substantial share of East Asians rounded their ages to multiples of five. However, the extent of age-heaping was quite low by global standards, even considering the potential sources of upward bias inherent in the data. Therefore, the unusually high level of numeracy in East Asia in the early 21st century was already present in the early modern period. The findings imply that in the Korean case, for example, the foundations of the human-capital based catch-up growth were laid very early. More broadly, we argue that Korea, Japan, and China returned to the growth-path at different points of the 20th century, and this return was pre-determined by their early numeracy development

On the status and the future of economic history in the world

How many economic historians are there in the world? In which countries or world regions are they concentrated? Can we explain differences in the number of economic historians who are participating in world congresses, and which determinants encourage or limit participation propensity? Using an e-mail questionnaire, we analyse the global situation of this discipline. Overall 59 countries were available to be surveyed in this overview. We estimate the overall number of economic historians in the world to be around 10,400 scholars

Леся Українка та Олена Пчілка в контексті західно- української мемуаристики першої половини ХХ ст.

Розглядаються жанрові особливості та поетика деяких мемуарів західних теренів України (зокрема Галичини та Буковини), у яких постають образи Лесі Українки та Олени Пчілки.Рассматриваются жанровые особенности и поэтика некоторых мемуаров западного региона Украины (в особенности Галиции и Буковины), в которых постают образы Леси Украинки и Олены Пчилки.The article tells about genre peculiarities and poetics of memoirs of the Western Ukraine (in particular, Halychyna and Bukovyna), in which characters of Lesya Ukrainka and Olena Pchilka appear

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie