7 April 2008
Economic History Society Annual Conference 2008
PRESS BRIEFINGS
WOMEN WHO RAISED FAMILIES IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES FEEL AMBIVALENT ABOUT THEIR DAUGHTERS’ LIVES Women who raised their families in the 1950s and 1960s are ambivalent about working mothers and wonder whether the lives of their daughters have really improved. That is one of the central findings of new research by Dr Angela Davis, which is based on oral history interviews with 92 women from different locations in Oxfordshire who raised their families in the immediate post-war decades. The study demonstrates that in the 1950s and 1960s, women were living through a reconceptualisation of women’s work but they were uncertain whether these changes were good or bad. While women made significant contributions to family income and the rural economy during this period, they did not think of themselves as workers, prioritising home and family in their accounts. Paid work was viewed as offering a means of subsistence, a degree of financial independence or a break from domesticity, but few interviewees conceived of employment in terms of a career. The great transatlantic migration of Europeans a century ago was not strongly constrained by the costs of travel, according to a new historical study by Dr Drew Keeling. Legal restrictions on this migration were also minimal, yet the overwhelming majority of Europeans stayed in Europe. These historical findings suggest that policy-makers and scholars specialising in international migration, and on how to best control it, may be placing too much emphasis on laws and regulations, and not enough on economic fundamentals. Britain’s high wage economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the reason that Britons invented the famous inventions of the industrial revolution, according to Robert Allen, professor of economic history at Oxford University. The new ideas embodied in the spinning jenny and other inventions were simple. The difficult problem was making them work. This required experimenting with different designs – that is, research and development (R&D). The decision to undertake R&D was an investment decision: did the future benefits of the new technology outweigh the cost of developing it? One thing is clear about these calculations. If an invention was not used, then the future benefits were zero, and it was not worth inventing. Since the famous technologies of the Industrial Revolution like the spinning jenny were not profitable to use outside Britain, they were not profitable to invent there either. They were only profitable to invent in Britain. That is why the Industrial Revolution was British. It is commonly held that the world before 1914 (and not just that of 1950) was one of constricted nationally protected European markets, a UK focused more on Empire than Europe and an internally integrated and tariff-free US market that permitted the special growth of mass production and a distinctively large-scale and modern American system of manufactures that no European country could possibly match. But according to a new study by Professor Leslie Hannah, this picture of the early twentieth century is at best a half-truth and in many respects misleading. Most of Europe’s (and Britain’s) problems of restricted twentieth-century growth derive from the tariff escalations, wars, dictatorships, expropriations, partitions, nationalism and related problems of 1914-1945 – in other words, from an outbreak of European stupidity. Economic historians have long known that the world was impressively globalised at the end of the nineteenth century. New evidence brought together for the first time by Paul Sharp suggests, however, that globalisation might have started a century earlier. Much of the evidence for globalisation at the end of the nineteenth century has come from the impressive growth in trade in foodstuffs – especially grain – in these years. The most important trade was between the United States and the UK. But the new evidence suggests that this trade was important as far back as the eighteenth century. By the late seventeenth century, gambling was rife in England and a daily pursuit of both rich and poor. In fact, it was so popular that in 1684 alone, 1.2 million packs of playing cards had been produced; one for every five people living in England. Hungry for funds and eager to cash in on the popularity of gaming, in 1711 the government increased the tax on cards by a massive 2,300%. A pack of cards now cost around six times more than a loaf of bread. According to a new study by Nicholas Tosney, there were two immediate results: playing card production was halved and cases of tax fraud rocketed. These were not the desired effects of the tax increase. But looking at this as a story of social control and an attempt to price the poor out of gambling, the government’s policy starts to look more canny. Gambling, after all, was the rich man’s vice, not the poor man’s pleasure. INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL FLOWS IN A GLOBAL WORLD ECONOMY: LESSONS FROM THE BELLE ÉPOQUE The promises and the shortcomings of international financial integration were as much present in 1908 as the are in 2008, according to a new study by Rui Pedro Esteves. The research provides new evidence on the question of what matters most to attract (or divert) foreign capital from capital-poor nations in a period of increasing financial integration. Societies have long sought to eliminate child labour. Yet two hundred years after the first Factories Act, and despite a level of prosperity that our forefathers would have deemed unimaginable, there were an estimated 186 million child labourers worldwide –5.7 million in forced labour, 1.8 million in prostitution and 0.3 million soldiers. In designing policy to mitigate this persistent problem, it is vital to have a theoretical and empirical understanding of child labour and its consequences. Well-meaning but poorly-conceived interventions can cause more harm than good. Perhaps the past provides some lessons. A new study by Jane Humphries uses the reminiscences of 617 working-class men who lived through the industrial revolution to provide insight. Despite the fact that most countries have passed legislation banning the employment of children, child labour continues to be pervasive in developing economies. New research by Juan Manuel Puerta focuses on the effect of child labour legislation on industrial growth in early twentieth century America, and suggests some reasons why enforcing legislation may end up being very difficult. In particular, the study finds that the costs of eliminating child labour could be very large and fall disproportionately on some industries. Economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has famously cautioned against the ‘dangerous obsession’ with viewing nations as big competing corporations. Yet league tables of national competitiveness continue to play an important role in governments’ perceptions of the nature of their nation’s economy. A new study by Neil Rollings shows that concerns with national competitiveness are not new – and illustrates how misguided they can be. In the 1960s, the internationalisation of production raised important issues about approaches to national competitiveness, challenging the British government to adapt to this new environment. The aftermath of the coal strike of 1984-5 has significantly disrupted the UK’s energy options, according to new research by Chris Wrigley. The pit closures went beyond the levels required by likely future demand and, as a result, British power stations came to rely on dearer imported coal. The coal industry increasingly looked to ‘clean coal’ technology in order to maintain coal as part of the UK’s energy mix. By December 2007 David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was pledging his party to clean coal. Although the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the workplaces and homes of tens of thousands of Londoners, the city was able to recover and rebuild within a decade. A new study by Jacob Field shows how London’s economy was essentially resilient to the effects of the Fire, thanks to its essential place in national financial and trading systems and the efforts of the civic government in aiding the resettlement of Londoners whose homes and businesses had been destroyed in the blaze. New research by Leonard Schwarz and Jeremy Boulton reveals eighteenth-century London as one of the great killing grounds of Europe. In the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, for example, which housed around thirty thousand people, about a thousand people died each year, For the first time, this research is able to track the progress of diseases at the level of the street and the courtyard. The researchers can compare the mortality of rich and poor areas, slum courtyards and wealthy streets to investigate the extent to which the mortality decline of the later eighteenth century was achieved by a decline in the mortality of certain ‘hot spots’, such as the workhouse, that may have been exporting fevers into their neighbourhoods. MERSEYSIDE MALAISE: HOW THE END OF EMPIRE BROUGHT LIVERPOOL LOW Liverpool’s economy in the early twenty-first century is on the up, epitomised by the city’s status as European Capital of Culture for 2008. Even so, much of Merseyside remains scarred by the dramatic downturn of the 1970s and 1980s. New research by Nicholas White focuses on one of the city’s premier and most celebrated firms, the Ocean Steam Ship Company, to explore what went wrong. Liverpool’s principal problem, he concludes, was that ‘it ossified as a marooned imperial seaport in a post-colonial age’. The root of the Merseyside malaise lay not in shipping containerisation, air travel or Britain’s integration into the European Community, but in what historian John MacKenzie has characterised for Glasgow as ‘specialisation in imperial markets’. February 2005 was a sad turning point in Manchester’s history as its famous Boddingtons’ Strangeways Brewery ceased production, ending a tradition that had begun in 1778. This was a controversial decision and an unwelcome development in Manchester’s heritage. But as new research by Deborah Woodman shows, it was the continuation of a process of change in the brewing industry that had its roots in the nineteenth century, and which later saw ‘progress’ in the form of the decline of single publican-brewers, the rise in commercial brewing and subsequent business takeovers and public house property acquisitions. RAPID GROWTH OF VICTORIAN CITIES POWERED THE BRITISH ECONOMY; GLOBALISATION STARTED IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THE HUGE POPULARITY OF GAMBLING IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND – AND HOW THE GOVERNMENT USED TAXES ON PLAYING CARDS BOTH TO RAISE REVENUES AND PROTECT THE POOR
CHILD LABOUR: LESSONS FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
URBAN CATASTROPHE: LONDON’S RECOVERY FROM THE GREAT FIRE, 1666
THE KILLING FIELDS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: ‘SUFFOCATED IN ST JAMES PALACE, GRIPING IN THE GUTS, SUDDENLY FOUND DEAD IN DRURY LANE’
BRITAIN’S BREWING HERITAGE: TRADITION VERSUS PROGRESS IN MANCHESTER PUBS AND BREWERIES
The fast-growing cities of Victorian Britain have many lessons for how we manage today’s economy, according to a new research report by Professor Nick Crafts and Dr Tim Leunig. They argue that the need for some cities to grow means that we have to be careful about the constraints we place on cities
Everyone in contemporary society is concerned with the problem of increasing recycling rates, but a key question is how this should be achieved. A new study by Tim Cooper argues that the historical experience shows that relying on technology and the free market would be a very bad way of delivering high rates of recycling, and that, in democratic societies, social intervention to control the outcomes of the market is almost always necessary to deliver good environmental outcomes.
NATURE AS HISTORICAL PROTAGONIST:
THE IMPACT OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ON A MILLENNIUM OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Weather and disease played a crucial role in the course of economic development over the five centuries or more prior to the Industrial Revolution, according to Professor Bruce Campbell presenting the Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008 at the Economic History Society’s annual conference.
Previous research has acknowledged that famines and epidemics have periodically punctuated history with sometimes devastating results. But this is the first study to make an explicit link between economic development – chronologies of prices, wages and population for the last 450-800 years by economic historians – and the natural environment – including a new chronology of annual grain harvests and corresponding chronologies of growing conditions, North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures, and atmospheric pressure.
BRITISH IDENTITY WAS FORGED BY OVERSEAS ENCOUNTERS IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE
There is a paradox in the idea of British identity, according to a new study by Valerie Johnson. She argues that concepts of 'Britishness' were formed by cross-cultural encounters with non-British peoples in the imperial era. The idea of Britishness can therefore be seen to be both defined and undermined as British by these encounters.
This is history that has enormous relevance for current social and political debates on Britishness and the assimilation and integration of different ethnic groups, many from former imperial territories, into British society. The study emphasises how Britain's diverse past in other countries has helped to form the notion and reality of Britishness in Britain today.
Improvements in health over the past 100 years have generated prodigious increases in living standards in England and Wales – far more than is indicated by conventional measures such as national income statistics. New research by Dr Kerry Hickson shows that a crucial driver of these gains has been the virtual elimination of many infectious diseases, most prominently tuberculosis.
National income statistics do not include the value of health gains of the nation, an important part of the standard of living. Omitting health improvements means that the rise in gross domestic product (GDP) over the twentieth century understates the real rise in living standards and that the contribution of the National Health Service (NHS) is underestimated (because the cost of the NHS is considered but there is no estimate for the return or output of the NHS in national income statistics).
NOTTINGHAM: FROM ROBIN HOOD TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
When the Economic History Society (EHS) last visited Nottingham in 1994, it was a city that could still just about claim to be characterised by ‘bikes, baccy and Boots’ – otherwise known as Raleigh, Players and the famous high street chemist.
In his keynote lecture at this year’s EHS annual conference, Professor John Beckett will look at what has happened since – including the disappearance from the city of bicycle-making, the almost complete disappearance of cigarette manufacturing and the major changes at Boots.
HIGH STOCK MARKET RETURNS AND HIGH DIVIDENDS IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN
High stock market returns are not unique to the last three decades. New research by John Turner and colleagues finds that the average annual real total return on the UK market in the years 1825-70 was 16.8% compared with 10.3% for the period 1946-99. In contrast with the modern period, when dividends seem to be disappearing, dividends in that nineteenth century period constituted close to 70% of total returns.
‘THE BOATS THAT DID NOT SAIL’:
Boats bearing news on English companies like the East India Company, the Bank of England and the South Sea Company were the only source of new information for traders in these stocks on the Amsterdam stock market. But according to new research by Peter Koudijs, even when bad weather kept these boats from sailing for several days and there was no news, the companies’ stock prices still changed significantly.
Measures of living standards based on changes in average human heights reveal the point in time when the Middle East fell back relative to Europe. The study by Mojgan Stegl and Joerg Baten finds that a temporary economic setback at the start of the twentieth century significantly influenced consumption patterns and led to permanent changes in the nutritional status of the Middle Eastern populations.
