Podcasts of Tawney Lectures
Weighty Matters: Anthropometrics, Gender and Health Inequality in History
Tawney Lecture 2013
Dr Deborah Oxley
Deborah Oxley examines health and gender inequality in Britain’s industrial revolution. She shows how human stature, weight and body mass were shaped by the economy, and in turn shaped history.
Watch the video (Flash file, 70 minutes, 30 seconds)
Historian, measure thyself! Innovation in the social sciences and economic history
Tawney Lecture 2012
Professor Sir Roderick Floud
Watch the video (Flash file, 56 minutes, 15 seconds)
Debt, Default and Empire: State Capacity and Economic Development in England and Spain in the Early Modern Period
Tawney Lecture 2011
Joachim Voth
Why did the British Empire succeed where the Spanish one failed? Both ruled vast territories, controlled enormous resources, and fielded great armies. Differences in the quality of initial institutions, Atlantic trade, and the Spanish government’s bankruptcies have often been held responsible for divergent trajectories. This lecture shows why the empirical basis for these claims is weak. What mattered instead was the ability to raise “state capacity” – to centralize financial administration, assert a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, and unify the legal system. The pressures of war led to increasing divergence. Territorial, constitutional, linguistic and cultural differences severely curtailed the ability of Spanish monarchs to modernize and centralize. In contrast, the grand institutional bargain of 1688 in Britain allowed a much stronger state to emerge.
Watch the video (Flash file, 56 minutes, 47 seconds)
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
Tawney Lecture 2010
Jane Humphries
Autobiographies by working men in which they described their first job, age at starting work, and family life document the extent of child labour in the British industrial revolution. While the classical accounts of industrialization gave child labour a central role, recent reinterpretations which downplay the cotton industry, factories and poverty have pushed it from the economic limelight. The autobiographies’ fresh evidence and unique perspective suggest that 1790-1850 saw an upsurge in children’s work. While mechanization and factories are implicated in this increase, new divisions of labour in workshop production also contributed. On the supply-side, fatherlessness and large sibsets, common in these turbulent times, cast children as breadwinners in struggling families.
Watch the video (Flash file, 64 minutes, 58 seconds)
Why was the Industrial Revolution British?
Tawney Lecture 2009
Bob Allen
Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and that structure is the key to explaining the inventions of the industrial revolution. British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very cheap. This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour. High wages also increased the supply of technology by enabling Brits to acquire education and training. Britain’s wage and price structure was the result of the country’s success in international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism.
Watch the video (Flash file, 66 minutes, 08 seconds)
Nature as Historical Protagonist
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008
Bruce M. S. Campbell
What role did natural environmental processes, both physical and biological, play in shaping the course of economic development over the last millennium and longer? Historical accounts often overlook the independent influence that natural agencies could exercise upon the supply of and demand for resources, via their effects upon the reproduction, health, and life expectancy of humans and the domesticated plants and animals required for subsistence.
Bruce M. S. Campbell explores the significant environmental component to the course of pre-industrial economic development, investigating the comparisons between the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests and the corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climactic variations, taking into consideration dendrochronology, the Greenland ice cores and the episode of the Black Death.
Watch the video (Flash file, 67 minutes, 34 seconds)
The Ripple that Drowns: Twentieth Century Famines as Economic History
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2007
Cormac O’ Grada
The twentieth century saw the virtual elimination of famine across most of the globe, but also witnessed some of the worst famines ever recorded. The causes usually given for these twentieth-century famines differ from those given for earlier famines, which tend to be more often blamed on harvest failures per se than on human agency. In this lecture, given at the Economic History Society’s annual conference in Exeter in March 2007 Professor Cormac O’Grada reassesses two of the last century's most notorious famines, the Chinese Great Leap Famine of 1959–61 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, in the light of these rival perspectives.
