This paper presents a unique database that explores how industrialisation affected municipalities' incomes, expenditures and education spending. Using the importance of the mines and steelworks in Biscay in northern Spain between 1860 and 1910 as indicators of industrialisation, the findings show that there was a positive relationship between these dimensions and towns' incomes, which was indirectly transmitted to municipalities' expenditures, showing that municipalities were able to benefit from industrialisation. However, the thriving mining and metallurgy sectors did not support an increase in education spending. The lack of short-term results from spending on education may have led town councils to divert the revenues of industrialisation into more urgent areas, or those that could deliver faster results.

This article contributes to the debate on regional disparities in living standards in Italy at the time of national unification (1861) by examining the health standards of army conscripts born between 1843 and 1871. Data regarding the conscripts born in 1843-1856 show that 35.4 per cent of youths examined were unfit for military service. Overall, the rejection rate in the peninsular south was similar to that of the northern regions. In the south, however, the share of conscripts rejected for insufficient height was notably higher. It is very likely that the persistent north-south gradient in average height in Italy is related to genetic factors.

The aim of our paper is to study some aspects of the textile industry of the city of Segovia and its land in the second half of the 16th century, interpreting them through spatial economy theories and specifically the industrial district approach. It is about seeing the competitive advantages of the integration and diffusion of the business organization in its geographical framework. The district's competitive advantages are linked to both transaction and production costs. One of them is to maximize the benefits of labor market segmentation with the emergence of a primary market for skilled labor. Another is the ease of diffusion of both technology and organizational and commercial techniques.

Foundling hospitals spread across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, taking in hundreds of thousands of children each year. In Spain, the hospitals of major cities had staffs of more than 1,000 external wet nurses, who worked mainly in rural localities. Their cash wages were key for the household economies of the poor rural and urban populations. This article presents a methodology to interpret wet-nurse wages and explains their utility with respect to other occupations for men and women. Our results include a series of nominal and real wages for wet nurses and a calculation of their contributions to family income. The level of wages these institutions could offer was a major determinant in the supply of wet-nurse labour.

Historical literacy in Spain is characterised by enormous regional disparities and important differences by sex. This paper addresses these issues, focusing initially on the 1887 census returns and also making use of local empirical data and of in-depth interviews of elderly informants. The goal is to propose an interpretation of historical patterns of literacy based, to a large extent, on the existence of important differences in the perceived value of literacy and education, very high in some regions and very low in others. The author argues that these cleavages go beyond the importance of economic structures, have deep historical roots and continue to be present in contemporary Spain despite the substantial growth in educational attainment taking place during this past century.

Este trabajo presenta un análisis de la desigualdad regional en Castilla en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, a partir del estudio del consumo per cápita provincial calculado con las recaudaciones de dos rentas que supusieron los mayores ingresos fiscales del estado: alcabalas y cientos. La desigualdad regional presentó unos niveles reducidos y constantes durante la segunda mitad del siglo, analizando la productividad del trabajo, no encontrando elementos que alterasen significativamente la diferencia entre regiones. Asimismo, podemos señalar que se advierten las dificultades relacionadas con el sector agrario, con limitaciones a la producción y bajos rendimientos. Esas dificultades trataron de minimizarse con actuaciones reformistas que, no obstante, no tuvieron un claro impacto sobre la desigualdad, que permaneció homogénea.

Knowledge of the long relationship between gender equality and economic growth is hampered by the lack of information and resources on the various dimensions of gender equality. This paper is a first attempt to assess the size of the gender gap and investigate its relationship with economic growth from a historical perspective. Exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 86 French counties in the mid-nineteenth century, I construct a historical gender gap index measuring the size of the gap between men and women in three critical areas: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and health. A county comparison allows me to identify the strengths and weaknesses of French counties in closing the gender gap. I find that France can be divided into two main areas, the North and the South. In particular, the Northern counties that have done most to narrow the gap display better economic performance. Boys' and girls' education and family structures appear to be crucial determinants of gender equality. Gender equality is positively and significantly associated with economic performance. Accounting for the multi-dimensions of gender equality is crucial for economic development.

This paper sheds light on a crucial period of Spanish economic history, analysing changes in intergenerational occupational mobility. We use newly collected empirical evidence from Valencia, a region that followed a path of growth based on agrarian capitalism focused on international markets. We show that occupational mobility improved between 1841 and 1850, but that this situation reversed during the following decades. The opportunities offered to individuals from poorer families quickly disappeared. Put in international perspective, occupational mobility in Valencia was far lower than in other European countries, where both downward and especially upward mobility were considerably higher. By 1870, Valencia had become a polarised society, where the lowest part of the income distribution suffered increasing pauperisation and downward mobility.

We provide, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive overview of the demography of more than 50,000 towns, villages, and manors in 1871 Prussia. We study religion, literacy, fertility, and group segregation by location type (town, village, and manor). We find that Jews live predominantly in towns. Villages and manors are substantially segregated by denomination, whereas towns are less segregated. Yet, we find relatively lower levels of segregation by literacy. Regression analyses with county-fixed effects show that a larger share of Protestants is associated with higher literacy rates across all location types. A larger share of Jews relative to Catholics is not significantly associated with higher literacy in towns, but it is in villages and manors. Finally, a larger share of Jews is associated with lower fertility in towns, which is not explained by differences in literacy.

Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.

This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.

We assess the numeracy (age heaping) of religious minorities, particularly Jews, and other defendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and compare it with the general Iberian population. Our database includes 13,000 individuals who took part in Inquisition trials, and 17,000 individuals recorded in censuses and parish registers who serve as a control group. We thoroughly discuss the representativeness of our samples for the populations we aim to capture. Our results point at a substantial numeracy advantage of the Judaism-accused over the Catholic majority. Furthermore, Catholic priests and other groups of the religious elite who were occasional targets of the Inquisition had a similarly high level of numeracy.

This monographic issue of the RHE-JILAEH presents new case studies in order to compare regions of Asia, Europe and the Americas through analysis of global demand for western goods in China (goods of European and American origin) as well as demand eastern goods (of Chinese and Indian origin) in Europe and the Americas. The global circulation of goods included accumulation of American silver in the hands of Chinese merchants and private institutions. Thus, this issue re-evaluates origins of the first globalisation during the 16th century, as opposed to the 1820s. Global trade networks and long-distance alliances in Asia, the Americas and Europe date back to the 16th century when Manila galleon routes were established.

New global history studies have provided theoretical models related to different paths of economic growth and consumer behaviour between East Asia (mainly China and Japan) and Europe during the period of the first industrialisation. However, more research challenging the Eurocentric views of the origins of globalisation is needed. In this article, I examine the exchanges of Chinese silks and porcelains and European wines and liquors for American silver through the Swedish Grill Company. This company had extensive business activities in Canton and Macao establishing strategic links and intermediation with other relevant companies from China, Manila, Seville and Marseille. On the global level, such exchanges played a crucial role for the accumulation of American silver in China during the Qing dynasty, and the outflows of Chinese goods to the Americas and Europe fostered market integration and globalisation that occurred earlier than 1820.

Recent literature has clearly charted the growth of pawn credit in nineteenth-century developing countries in Europe. Such expansion has frequently been associated with governments’ concerns to prevent malpractice and promote the establishment of public agencies that mirrored the Italian Monti di pietà. Precisely at the time modernizing European societies adopted the model of Italian public pawn banks, Monti were being dismissed as a relic of a bygone age in their home country. Assembling and comparing data from an 1896 national survey, we conclude that, contrary to traditional assumptions, Italian pawn banks were not obsolete or out of place in the European context of nineteenth-century pawn credit. However, ideology and hostile legislation did hamper the access to credit of those most in need, and the choice hardly assisted the modernizing spurt of Italian society.

This paper deals with the permanent existence of deliberate fertility control arising from short-term economic stress among rural farm workers. The micro-level analysis uses the family reconstitution method for ten rural Spanish localities. The husband's socio-economic level is regarded as an indicator of the family's socio-economic status. According to the available data, human agency between 1801 and 1909 resulted in a negative fertility response among all farm groups, with this negative response being especially strong among the landless and semi-landless. The existence of a rapid fertility control response suggests that such control was a voluntary decision. Since the end of the 19th century, the number of economic shocks due to high prices has reduced.

Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait of early modern England. This growth pattern was in part driven by specialization and structural change accompanied by an increase in market participation at both the intensive and extensive levels. These, I argue, were supported by the gradual increase in money supply made possible by the importation of precious metals from America. They enabled a substantial increase in the monetization and liquidity levels of the economy, hence decreasing transaction costs, increasing market thickness, changing the relative incentive for participating in the market and allowing agglomeration economies to arise. By making trade with Asia possible, precious metals also induced demand for new desirable goods, which in turn encouraged market participation. Finally, the increased monetization and market participation made tax collection easier. This helped the government to build up fiscal capacity and as a consequence to provide for public goods. The structural change and increased market participation that ensued paved the way for modernization.

Recently, new research has challenged the traditional narrative; Spain did not suffer from a ruler that threatened his subjects’ property with excessive taxes and forced loans. Instead, Spanish economic development was held back by decentralised and non-predatory governance, unable to solve the coordination problems blocking the way to more integrated markets. Through the analysis of the governance and loan portfolios of an ecclesiastical order, this paper examines the extent to which mortgage credit markets were fragmented in early modern Spain. This order not only collected resources that it subsequently lent but also pooled them. Indeed, it developed into a nationally integrated organisation able to offer everything from small loans to farmers to substantial amounts to the king and the Madrid elite.

Labour market transformation and inequality were fundamental aspects in the transition to the industrialisation. This article reconstructs the Barcelona’s area economic structure across the 18th and 19th centuries through the Marriage Licences of the Barcelona’s Cathedral. These documents registered a proportional tax paid by the spouses’ according to their occupational and social status. Since 1780, an important decrease in the primary sector and an increase in the secondary and tertiary sectors are observed. Inequality between economic sectors rose and also within the secondary sector (textile) due to the proletarianization of the workers. Conversely, there was not an increase in inequality in the primary sector while it decreased in the tertiary sector.

Numerous primary investigators collected and processed long-termed time series on German educational statistics in the context of their studies. As a result, there are a multitude of quantitative empirical studies. On the one hand, there is the project group on German Educational Statistics.1 Its projects were targeted at describing and analyzing the long-term structural changes of the German educational system on a broad empirical and statistical basis. On the other hand, there are comprehensive data compilations of individual research projects, focusing on a wide variety of special educational research topics. The online database “histat” provides central digital access to these datasets on German educational history. Currently, it offers more than 120,000 long-term time series on the German educational system for a period of 200 years. The striking size of the database shows its key importance for researchers in the field of education. Thus, this paper aims to provide useful insights into the background of the database, the special characteristics of the data compilations and their analytical potential. Additionally, examples are given of how the data have already been used by researchers.

This article analyses the biological welfare and inequality of the male population of the irrigated area of Valencia between 1859 and 1939. It studies the effects that the agrarian development process had on physical welfare and the relationship between height and access to land ownership. Height data for conscripts in five municipalities constitute the source for the study. The results reveal that there was a growing trend in the evolution of heights in the irrigated area of Valencia at the beginning of agrarian capitalism. Nutritional inequalities can be observed between farmers and farm workers: land owners were taller than landless labourers. However, this biological inequality diminished over the period under study.