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Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of illustrations -- List of contributors -- Preface -- 1. Resilience to famine ca. 600 BC to present: An introduction -- 1. Central issue -- 2. Theories and concepts -- 3. Famine resilience in historical research -- 4. Some general patterns -- PART I: Premodern world -- 2. Responses to famines in core regions of antiquity compared -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The nature of famines in core regions -- 3. Societal resilience -- 4. Concluding comparison -- 3. Political, social and economic determinants of responses to food crises in the early Roman empire -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Famines and food shortages in the Roman world -- 3. The food supply of the city of Rome -- 4. Intervention by provincial governors -- 5. The role of free trade in resolving urban food crises -- 6. Public institutions and private benefactors -- 7. Benefactors, public grain-buyers and the grain market -- 8. Conclusions -- 4. Coping with famines in Ottoman Anatolia (1650-1850) -- 1. Introduction -- 2. "There is famine everywhere -- no bread to eat" - Bread prices and chronology of famines in Anatolia (1650-1850) -- 3. Crises in detail -- 4. Flight, migration and settlement pattern changes -- 5. Changes in economic activities -- 6. "If you are subjects of the sultan, so are we!" - Politics of famine resilience -- 7. "What do you mean by hunger?" - Politics of famine resilience -- 8. Conclusion -- 5. Inca responses to environmental hazards in the capital region and provinces -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Andean hazards and food supplies -- 3. Inca state interventions in the Cuzco region -- 4. Inca state intervention in provincial regions -- 5. Conclusions -- 6. Feeding the hungry: Poor relief and famine in northwestern Europe, 1500-1700 -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Southeastern England.

AbstractSince colonial times, substantial regional income disparities have been reported for Indonesia. However, in spite of a wide variety of available data and indicators, so far published data on Indonesian per capita GDP in colonial times are limited to macro-estimates for the entire archipelago or are confined either to Java or to the Outer Islands. In this paper we provide a first attempt to arrive at estimates of diverging income and living standards at a regional level. We implement the Geary and Stark method on a large body of data collected by the colonial government, to estimate GDP for ten macro-regions and five benchmark years between 1870 and 1930. Our findings, corrected for prices, confirm the image arising from the existing literature of major divergences within the Indonesian archipelago in general, and of a higher per capita GDP in most of the Outer Islands (all islands of the Indonesian archipelago except for Java and Madura) compared with Java in particular. This was definitely the case in 1870 and still the case in 1920, but the picture is less clear for 1930, which was the final year before Indonesia's commodity exports started to collapse.

AbstractDespite the existence of a rich literature on Chinese partial household division, there is still limited evidence of its effect on land and capital accumulation and well‐being. In this study, contrary to the dominant view, we find that household property size peaked around 1800s–1830s, suggesting that equal‐share system did not necessarily lead to land fragmentation. We find evidence that this rise in farm sizes is related to the opposing forces of increased well‐being and increased inequality.

AbstractHere, we discuss the role of both perspiration factors (physical and human capital) and inspiration factors (Total Factor Productivity) in the economic development of the Former Soviet Union area (FSU) and China, ca. 1920–2010. Using a newly created dataset, we find that during the Socialist central‐planning period, economic growth in both countries was largely driven by physical capital accumulation. This finding follows logically from the development policies in place at that time. During their transition periods, (i.e., starting from the late 1970s in China and the late 1980s in theFSU), China managed to keep technical inefficiency of production factors in check, largely by massively increasing its human capital, thereby lowering the physical‐to‐human capital ratio. In contrast, theFSUaccomplished a similar outcome largely through reducing its stock of physical capital. As a result, although there was little difference in technical efficiency between these two economies, China's emphasis on human capital formation made it easier for this country to improve its general productivity and to increaseper capitagrowth. This changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when theFSUbegan to recover economically, regaining its 1990 levels of output and productivity.

To date, the rise and fall of the (former) USSR has triggered a lot of research much of which has focussed on the accumulation of physical capital, growth, and consumption. Recently, also the accumulation of human capital has increasingly been incorporated in this picture. However, few datasets exist that cover this crucial variable for this vast area. Therefore, our main objective is to make available a new dataset that contains human capital related time-series for the USSR (and the Newly Independent States (NIS) after its dissolution), constructed mostly on an annual basis. These data are drawn together from various primary sources, available datasets and secondary literature where our focus was on constructing a dataset as consistent as possible. It is our hope that, by supplying these data in electronic format, it will significantly advance quantitative economic history research on Russia and all over the former Soviet Union area (FSU) and will inspire further research in various new fields relating to intellectual production.The data presented in this paper follow after the discussion of the information value of the primary sources utilised, and the various problems that arose when linking and splicing the data from various sources. After constructing series of human capital indicators we perform a time-series and spatial analysis in order to identify the long-term trends of education penetration and of the human capital development in the FSU area with a strong emphasis on inequality issues between the NIS. Applying these results in a simple growth accounting framework provides us with some preliminary insights on the role of human capital in economic development in the FSU area.