Suchergebnisse

Historical GDP estimates for China by Broadberry, Guan, and Li are problematic because of an implausible series for government expenditure. Revised estimates reduce GDP per capita, mainly during the Ming, by up to a third. Two peaks in income now stand out: the Song efflorescence and the years around 1700. If the latter peak is real, comparisons of the Yangzi delta with leading European countries show a Great Crossing in the Middle Ages, a Great Convergence in the seventeenth century, and a Great Divergence in the eighteenth. Otherwise, the Great Divergence may date from the sixteenth century.

The census manuscripts of 1841 and 1851 show that Cornwall was just a way-station for the Irish-born. They came from southern Ireland, put down few local roots and moved on, with only 30 per cent remaining in the county and 15 per cent in the same parish. Few found jobs in agriculture or mining, Cornwall's leading industries. Many were unmarried and, of those who were married, most had English spouses. In 1841 60 per cent of Irish husbands with Irish wives had military or government connections. Perhaps 20 per cent of the Irish-born were not migrants in the usual sense, being visitors, students or the children of English-born parents.

This reflection on Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved discusses the way in which Mokyr addressed three big issues in pre-famine Irish economic history: Why population grew so rapidly, why the Irish were so dependent on the potato and what role British control played in Irish economic development. It suggests that differences among Irish counties were small relative to the differences between Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, hence cross-section analysis within Ireland, Mokyr's preferred method, may not be able to capture the causes of rapid population growth and potato dependence. As for the influence of British control, the way in which seventeenth-century changes in landownership shaped subsequent economic development is neither fully elaborated nor tested empirically.

Shipping costs between Europe and Asia were reduced by two-thirds between the 1770s and the 1820s. Copper sheathing and other technical improvements which allowed ships to make more frequent voyages over longer lifetimes accounted for part of the cost reduction. British hegemony in the Indian Ocean, which ended an eighteenth-century arms race, accounted for the rest by allowing the substitution of smaller ships which cost less to build and required fewer men per ton. These changes were at least as important as the elimination of monopoly profits in narrowing intercontinental price differentials during the early nineteenth century.

The tonnage of shipping entering and leaving Ireland grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century until the mid‐1870s, after which there was a distinct slowdown. The mid‐nineteenth century was notable for a five‐fold increase in shipping per capita, an indicator of the Irish economy's increasing commercialization. The slowdown after 1870 would have been even greater without the industrial dynamism of Belfast, Ireland's leading port from the 1880s. The early and rapid introduction of steamships from the 1820s made possible large‐scale exports of live animals and fresh eggs, products that would account for 60 per cent of agricultural exports and a quarter of total exports by 1910.

Strange Times. There were back-to-back harvest failures in 1799-1800, coming fast on the heels of the insurrections of 1798. The result was massive and sustained inflation in food prices. The conundrum is why there was so little excess mortality. Our approach is to begin by discussing the harvest failures of 1799 and 1800, drawing some implications from the price movements of foodstuffs in Ireland and Britain. We then present evidence from our limited sample of parish registers that suggests that excess mortality was probably quite limited, as was the check to births. A further striking feature of the period, and hardly unrelated, was the role of the state. Though heavily absorbed with the "high politics" of the Union, politicians and policy makers took swift and determined action to stave off distress and public disorder. The range and effectiveness of these measures are assessed. We draw attention to a variety of local initiatives to grapple with problems of food scarcity and lack of purchasing power and offer an analytical sketch as to how the relationship between farmers and labourers might have shaped the outcome of the crisis in the countryside. The concluding section reflects on methods of calculating the impact of state-sponsored famine relief - the lives saved in a sense - and argues that a dynamic rather than a static approach is what is required. And second, the limitations of inflated food prices as indicators of famine conditions, at least under certain forms of peasant agriculture, are laid bare. These two sets of argument help unlock the conundrum as to why excess mortality did not give rise to mass mortality under environmental conditions as unpropitious as those of 1800- 01. There may be implications here for the understanding of food crises in rural societies with large subsistence sectors elsewhere in the pre-industrial world.

British slave traders were early and rapid adopters of the new technique of sheathing ships' hulls with copper. From the 1780s this innovation increased sailing speeds of British slave ships by about a sixth, prolonged the ships' lives by at least a half, and reduced the death rates of slaves on the middle passage by about half. It was, above all, the fall in death rates, and possibly the improved condition of surviving slaves, that made the investment so compelling. Copper sheathing may have paid for itself in a single voyage, even though it was usually good for several. By the 1790s few slave ships, even if making only a single voyage, were uncoppered. These results confirm that copper sheathing was one of the major improvements in shipping productivity before the use of iron and steam in the mid‐nineteenth century.

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.