Living in the past
Michael McCormick et al.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Autumn 2012, Pages 169-220
Abstract:
Growing scientific evidence from modern climate science is loaded with implications for the environmental history of the Roman Empire and its successor societies. The written and archaeological evidence, although richer than commonly realized, is unevenly distributed over time and space. A first synthesis of what the written records and multiple natural archives (multi-proxy data) indicate about climate change and variability across western Eurasia from c. 100 b.c. to 800 a.d. confirms that the Roman Empire rose during a period of stable and favorable climatic conditions, which deteriorated during the Empire's third-century crisis. A second, briefer period of favorable conditions coincided with the Empire's recovery in the fourth century; regional differences in climate conditions parallel the diverging fates of the eastern and western Empires in subsequent centuries. Climate conditions beyond the Empire's boundaries also played an important role by affecting food production in the Nile valley, and by encouraging two major migrations and invasions of pastoral peoples from Central Asia.
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Persistent Anti-Market Culture: A Legacy of the Pale of Settlement after the Holocaust
Irena Grosfeld, Alexander Rodnyansky & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the long-term effects of the presence of Jews in Eastern Europe before World War II, and of their disappearance during the Holocaust. We use the "Pale of Settlement," the area to which Jewish residents were confined in the Russian Empire, as a source of exogenous variation in the size of the Jewish population before the Second World War. Based on election and survey data, we find that current residents of the Pale, compared to their counterparts outside the Pale, vote more for socialist anti-market parties, have lower support for the market economy and democracy, are less engaged in entrepreneurship, but exhibit higher levels of trust. At the same time, the Pale has no lasting effects on average consumption, income, and education levels. Regression discontinuity at the Pale border helps identification. We show that the effect of the Pale is related to the former presence of Jews rather than the inflow of new migrant population into the formerly-Jewish areas. We suggest a possible mechanism and present evidence consistent with it: The non-Jewish population, at the time when two groups lived together side-by-side, developed a persistent anti-market culture and bonding trust, rooted in ethnic hatred towards Jews. We show that, consistent with the mechanism, current residents of towns closer to places of pogroms exhibit higher trust and anti-market attitudes even controlling for the historical share of Jews in the population and the Pale.
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Why Was It Europeans Who Conquered the World?
Philip Hoffman
Journal of Economic History, September 2012, Pages 601-633
Abstract:
By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eurasia fell behind Europeans in developing the gunpowder technology. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.
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James Ashley Morrison
International Organization, July 2012, Pages 395-428
Abstract:
While extensive scholarship has shown that it is possible to maintain global economic openness after hegemony, economic liberalization is still thought to be unlikely prior to hegemonic ascent. This assumption is based on the conventional narrative that Great Britain began lowering its trade barriers in the 1820s as it began its hegemonic ascent. This article shows that Britain began pursuing an open trading structure in the 1780s - in precisely the multipolar world that hegemonic stability theorists claimed would be least likely to initiate the shift. This change in commercial strategy depended crucially on the intellectual conversion of a key policymaker - the Earl of Shelburne - from mercantilist foreign economic policy to Adam Smith's revolutionary laissez-faire liberalism. Using the case of "the world's most important trading state" in the nineteenth century, this article highlights the importance of intellectuals - as well as their ideas - in shaping states' foreign policy strategies. It also provides further evidence of key individuals' significance and their decisions at "critical junctures."
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The Middle East and North Africa's Resilient Monarchs
Victor Menaldo
Journal of Politics, July 2012, Pages 707-722
Abstract:
This article helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA during the Arab Spring. The region's monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the "republics" have not. A theory about how a monarchy's political culture solves a ruler's credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950-2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than nonmonarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.
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International Trade and Institutional Change: Medieval Venice's Response to Globalization
Diego Puga & Daniel Trefler
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
International trade can have profound effects on domestic institutions. We examine this proposition in the context of medieval Venice circa 800-1350. We show that (initially exogenous) increases in long-distance trade enriched a large group of merchants and these merchants used their new-found muscle to push for constraints on the executive i.e., for the end of a de facto hereditary Doge in 1032 and for the establishment of a parliament or Great Council in 1172. The merchants also pushed for remarkably modern innovations in contracting institutions (such as the colleganza) that facilitated large-scale mobilization of capital for risky long-distance trade. Over time, a group of extraordinarily rich merchants emerged and in the almost four decades following 1297 they used their resources to block political and economic competition. In particular, they made parliamentary participation hereditary and erected barriers to participation in the most lucrative aspects of long-distance trade. We document this 'oligarchization' using a unique database on the names of 8,103 parliamentarians and their families' use of the colleganza. In short, long-distance trade first encouraged and then discouraged institutional dynamism and these changes operated via the impacts of trade on the distribution of wealth and power.
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Maarten Bosker, Eltjo Buringh & Jan Luiten van Zanden
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic World to Europe. Using a large new city-specific dataset covering Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic World's stagnation and Europe's long-term success are specific to each region; any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel vs. ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state, explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic World.
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Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
Remco Bouckaert et al.
Science, 24 August 2012, Pages 957-960
Abstract:
There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.
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Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?
Gary Cox
Journal of Economic History, September 2012, Pages 567-600
Abstract:
Douglass North and Barry Weingast's seminal account of the Glorious Revolution argued that specific constitutional reforms enhanced the credibility of the English Crown, leading to much stronger public finances. Critics have argued that the most important reforms occurred incrementally before the Revolution; and that neither interest rates on sovereign debt nor enforcement of property rights improved sharply after the Revolution. In this article, I identify a different set of constitutional reforms, explain why precedents for these reforms did not lessen their revolutionary impact, and show that the evidence, properly evaluated, supports a view of the Revolution as a watershed.
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The Autocratic Legacy of Early Statehood
Jacob Gerner Hariri
American Political Science Review, August 2012, Pages 471-494
Abstract:
This article documents that precolonial state development was an impediment to the development of democracy outside Europe, because indigenous state institutions constrained the European colonial endeavor and limited the diffusion of European institutions and ideas. Some countries were strong enough to resist colonization; others had enough state infrastructure that the colonizers would rule through existing institutions. Neither group therefore experienced institutional transplantation or European settlement. Less developed states, in contrast, were easier to colonize and were often colonized with institutional transplantation and an influx of settlers carrying ideals of parliamentarism. Using OLS and IV estimation, I present statistical evidence of an autocratic legacy of early statehood and document the proposed causal channel for a large sample of non-European countries. The conclusion is robust to different samples, different democracy indices, an array of exogenous controls, and several alternative theories of the causes and correlates of democracy.
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National Institutions and African Development: Evidence from Partitioned Ethnicities
Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
We investigate the role of national institutions on regional development in a novel framework. We exploit the fact that the arbitrary political boundaries in the eve of African independence partitioned more than two hundred ethnic groups across different countries subjecting similar cultures, residing in homogeneous geographic areas, to different formal institutions. Using both a matching-type and a regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide institutional structures across the national border do not explain within-ethnicity differences in economic performance, as captured by satellite light density at night. Despite some evidence of heterogeneity, for the overwhelming majority of groups the relationship is economically and statistically insignificant. While our results do not necessarily generalize to areas far from the national borders, close to the capital cities or to other parts of the world, they suggest that the cross-country positive correlation between formal national institutions and economic development has to be carefully interpreted.
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Pablo Marquet et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The emergence of complex cultural practices in simple hunter-gatherer groups poses interesting questions on what drives social complexity and what causes the emergence and disappearance of cultural innovations. Here we analyze the conditions that underlie the emergence of artificial mummification in the Chinchorro culture in the coastal Atacama Desert in northern Chile and southern Peru. We provide empirical and theoretical evidence that artificial mummification appeared during a period of increased coastal freshwater availability and marine productivity, which caused an increase in human population size and accelerated the emergence of cultural innovations, as predicted by recent models of cultural and technological evolution. Under a scenario of increasing population size and extreme aridity (with little or no decomposition of corpses) a simple demographic model shows that dead individuals may have become a significant part of the landscape, creating the conditions for the manipulation of the dead that led to the emergence of complex mortuary practices.
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Portuguese living standards, 1720-1980, in European comparison: Heights, income, and human capital
Yvonne Stolz, Joerg Baten & Jaime Reis
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
When and why did the Portuguese become the shortest Europeans? In order to find the answer to this question, we trace the trend in Portuguese living standards from the 1720s until recent times. We find that during the early nineteenth century average height in Portugal did not differ significantly from average height in most other European countries, but that when, around 1850, European anthropometric values began to climb sharply, Portugal's did not. In a panel analysis of 12 countries, we find that delay in human-capital formation was the chief factor hindering any improvement in the biological standard of living in Portugal.
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Gentry culture and the stifling of industry
Eric Jones
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The paper determines the role of the gentry in stifling the manufacturing development of formerly industrial southern England. An increasing divergence in economic composition between south and north is discussed, with particular reference to deindustrialisation in the former. The expanding estate system and emergence of a specific culture among landowners is described. Finally the case is made that this gentry culture was instrumental in reducing or redirecting southern enterprise during the industrial revolution.
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Johan Fourie
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652-1795). This article shows that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable to some of the most prosperous regions of eighteenth-century England and Holland. This detailed picture of the material wealth of the Colony should inspire a revision of the standard accounts. The causes and consequences of this prosperity are also considered briefly.
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Jeffrey Robertson & Warwick Funnell
Accounting, Organizations and Society, July 2012, Pages 342-360
Abstract:
Capitalism's profound effect on society has encouraged economic and accounting historians to hypothesise about the importance of double entry bookkeeping to its development. According to Sombart the continual reinvestment of the profits earned depended on the existence of a capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping that would allow investors and managers to measure the return on investments as a means of making rational business decisions. More recently, with particular reference to the English East-India Company Bryer has argued that the adoption of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping was essential to resolving the social conflict between investing capitalist classes that arose with the rise of industrial capitalism in England in the late 17th and 18th centuries by providing the means to calculate the rate of return on socialised capital. This paper widens the historical context of these debates to The Netherlands in the early 17th century by examining accounting practices of the Dutch East-India Company, the epitome of modern capitalism in motives, organization and funding. It establishes that, although the 17th century Dutch were pre-eminent in Europe in their knowledge of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping, at no time during the period covered by the first charter (1602-1623) of the Dutch East-India Company, or thereafter, did the domestic operations of the Company use this form of bookkeeping across all chambers. This meant that the investors did not have the necessary information that would have allowed them to calculate the return on their investments. Indeed, the Company's investors neither expected nor demanded information to calculate the return on their investments and, hence, double-entry bookkeeping was not a necessary condition for Dutch capitalism in the manner suggested by Sombart, Weber and Bryer. Instead, the form which capitalism developed in The Netherlands recognised the social and economic impact of its unique geography which produced a society characterised by a monetary economy, a long tradition of joint ownership, and a free market for assets and capital rights.