"Producing Luxury Fashion, Skilled Workers, and Good Housewives: The Girls' Institutes and the Histories of Labor and Consumption in Turkey"

The Girls' Institutes were public schools established in Turkey after the 1927-28 academic year. Combining the basic post-elementary curriculum with an intense vocational and home economics education, the Institutes were expected to participate in the modernization and nation-state building efforts by training qualified housewives adorned with "the scientific knowledge" and "the modern taste" that would enable them to transform their families and thereby the society. The graduates would also be able to participate in the workforce as qualified blue-collar labor. They could take part in the statist industrialization efforts or work in the growing service industry. Housing multiple workshops and dozens of employees, the Girls' Institutes also operated as haute couture fashion houses, posing a challenge to independent tailors as well as the non-Muslim hegemony in the fashion industry. Combining Western forms of dress with "authentic Turkish" designs, fabrics and handcrafts, the Institutes developed what they promoted as "the modern Turkish style." This project analyzes how the combination of the gendered politics of modernization and nation-building, and the centralized, protectionist economy resulted in the creation of the Girls' Institutes, how these institutions facilitated the transformation of female labor, how they legitimized and promoted luxury consumption, and the role they played in the nationalization and Muslimification of the fashion industry. Read less » Abstract »

Rustem Ertug Altinay
New York University
rea270@nyu.edu

"Between the city and the countryside: The economic strategies of the rural elites in the kingdom of Valencia during the14th and 15th centuries"

From the last years rural elites have become one of the main lines of research in rural history. Different perspectives converge in this issue. The leading groups of the village communities can be studied from the point of view such as social history or history of power. However, since these families based their predominance over the rest of the community on their wealth, the economic approach has been the way most frequently transited by historians. Although as early as high middle ages the presence of well-to-do families inside the communities has been demonstrated by the historiography, they came more to the foreground during the medieval autumn. The aim of this research project is to analyse the economic strategies of the rural elites in the kingdom of Valencia during the 14th and 15th centuries. In order to do so, we have to pay attention to their economic activities which were related with not only farming but also lending money, manufacturing and trading. In short, a combination of occupations that they could attend thanks to the attorneys named amongst their colleagues for representing them wherever they had their business. This project also seeks to explain the role of these village elites in the rural commercialisation and in the relationship between town and countryside, process which emerged more clearly in the late Middle Ages. The research combines a prosopographical approach with an analysis on the micro-level of the rural community, in other words, the local history procedure. The data will be drawn from archival sources held in archives across the Valencian Country, mainly from the Midlands. Analysis of the database will allow a greater understanding of not only Valencian but also European society during the Middle Ages. Read less » Abstract »

Frederic Aparisi Romero
University of Valencia
frederic.aparisi@uv.es

"'The Dust Was Long in Settling': Human Capital and the Lasting Impact of the American Dust Bowl"

The Dust Bowl, a period of drought and dust storms battering the US's Great Plains region throughout the 1930s, represents one of the great environmental catastrophes—and human tragedies— in American history. Economic hardship was widespread: poor agricultural productivity meant low incomes, little food—and, for many, farm foreclosure and migration. More directly, the dust-choked air caused life-threatening illness and disrupted schooling. Current research on the adverse long-term effects of early-life shocks to income and health suggest that the Dust Bowl likely had tangible short- and long-term consequences for human capital formation, affecting childhood (and later-life) health and education directly, as well as indirectly through low incomes. Accordingly, I seek to examine: in what ways did the Dust Bowl scar the human capital of the generation of children who lived through it? What were their actual later-life outcomes, and is there evidence that they were able to counteract the calamity in the long term through responsive investments in nutrition, health, and education? Did gender play a role in these investments? To investigate these issues, I use two methodologically distinct and complementary threads of inquiry. One analyzes later-life human capital outcomes to test for the adverse long-term impacts of the Dust Bowl, and the compensating investments made to mitigate these effects. A second, anthropometric and epidemiological, line of inquiry tests for short-term deprivation and insults to human capital. In quantifying the human capital cost of this natural disaster, my research contributes to filling gaps in scholarship on the Dust Bowl, which thus far has tended to focus on issues of agricultural recovery, conservation, and migration. Read less » Abstract »

Vellore Arthi
University of Oxford
vellore.arthi@merton.ox.ac.uk

 

"From St Helena to Bencoolen: The British East India Company’s Practices of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century”

The purpose of this project is to explore how and why spaces within the control of the East India Company such as Bengal and Bencoolen developed different, if not entirely divorced, patterns of slavery and slave trading; and were deployed very differently in political economic discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century. Reactions to the revolt in Saint Domingue in the 1790s resulted in a discursive comparison between free labor in Bengal and slave labor in Bencoolen. But for all of the emphasis on free labor in Bengal, everyday governance in Bengal entailed confronting the sheer prevalence of various kinds of enslaved labor and slave trading. Slavery, in the multiple forms that it took in Bengal and Bencoolen, offers a prism through which to examine contestation over sovereignty, commerce and cultivation, military recruitment and defense, the family and the household. Given the close political, administrative and commercial connections between the Bengal Presidency headquartered in Calcutta, and Bencoolen, a subsidiary Presidency, the question of divergence is one worth exploring. This project will investigate regional economies and the colonial system connecting Bengal and Bencoolen, as well the broader connections and transfers, of both populations and commodities, binding together far-flung outposts such as St. Helena in the South Atlantic and other colonized spaces of the global British Empire. Read less » Abstract »

Tiraana Bains
Yale University
tiraana.bains@yale.edu

"Planning for Chaos or Progress? Rethinking the Exchange of Ideas about Indian Development Planning"

The project is concerned with debates surrounding development planning in India. It is commonly thought that there was little real debate on the model of development India should adopt post-independence. The esprit du temps, according to the conventional narrative, held that a state-led, capital goods focused, import-substituting heavy industry model financed by a high savings rate would be the key to rapid development. And placement of the state at the center of the economy, whether exemplified by the Soviet Gosplans or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Keynesian “alphabet agencies,” seemed to be widely accepted. Indeed, when the architect of India’s plans, PC Mahalanobis, invited Western economists including John Kenneth Galbraith, Austin Robinson, and Joan Robinson, to India to help with the plans, they seemed to broadly agree with these ideas, as evidenced by the lectures they delivered and the articles they wrote. Such consensus, it seems, was held until the early 1970s.

However, the historical record is much less clear and the existing narrative overly simplistic. The Mahalanobis invitees’ private papers reveal much less advocacy of state-led planning. Private sector industrialists like JRD Tata and GD Birla, who in 1944 drew up a fifteen year plan for India’s development firmly positioning the state at the center of economic activity, evolved into such a state’s bitter critics by the late 1950s. The results of the first two plans helped shape the free market liberal ideas put forth at the center of the platform of the Swatantra Party, India’s major political opposition party in the 1960s, particularly in the writings of Minoo Masani and C. Rajagopalachari. Economists like BR Shenoy and public servants like John Matthai warned of the perils of planning as early as the First Plan. This project seeks to challenge the widely held assumption that there was little debate until 1970 about the strategies for development of the newly independent Indian economy, arguing instead that there was a vibrant debate from very early days, however marginalized some of the individuals that contributed to the said debate ultimately became. Archival research will be conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Read less » Abstract »

Aditya Balasubramanian
JPAL, Delhi/Harvard University

"'They all belong to the school of Adam Smith': The dissemination of Adam Smith's ideas in Calcutta in the nineteenth century"

In studies of political economy in relation to the state, the influence of Adam Smith's ideas, especially in Europe and America, has been subjected to detailed investigation. However, the impact and dissemination of Smith's ideas in the other parts of the world have not received similar attention. I wish to investigate Smith's influence in the colonial British Empire, and it is for this reason I want to situate Smith in Calcutta from 1776 to 1920. From early Bengali newspapers and gazettes, it is clear that there was a lively interest in questions of free trade, finance and commerce in colonial Calcutta. From important eyewitness accounts of the Bengal Renaissance, like that of the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, we also know that the Bengali intelligentsia in the mid-nineteenth century debated the merits of Enlightenment figures such as Smith and Hume with some frequency. An interest in free trade and Enlightenment ideas of the newly emergent subject of political economy seems to have spanned across classes and interests in colonial Calcutta. In this project I shall primarily look at archival and textual sources. I will concentrate on finding mentions of Smith and The Wealth of Nations in Indian editions and translations of The Wealth of Nations, in entries on Smith and his ideas in early economic dictionaries either in English or vernacular languages published in Calcutta, textbooks of political economy used in colonial pedagogy, and in administrative documents such as early records on famine prevention and relief plans. I feel that such a study could potentially situate Smith in colonial India and help us chart the diffusion of his ideas in the Empire. I believe my project can help us map not only the spread of Adam Smith's ideas specifically, but also reception of Enlightenment ideas in Calcutta. The History Project grant will help me conduct archival research and present my findings in the form of a research paper or a scholarly article in a reputed academic journal. Read less » Abstract »

Mou Banerjee
Harvard University
moubanerjee@fas.harvard.edu

"Common Lands and Agricultural Productivity in Early 20th Century Spain"

The privatisation of common lands has traditionally been considered a precondition to foster agricultural productivity and economic growth. However, the negative view surrounding the communal regime has been challenged by a new wave of empirical research that considers common property regimes to be efficient and sustainable, thus revaluating the role that common resources had for the local communities that managed them. This project aims to contribute to this debate by analysing the effect that the privatisation of common lands had on agricultural productivity in 19th and early 20th century Spain. In this sense, common lands were a key component in the organic-based Spanish preindustrial economy, but the transformations caused by the transition to capitalism, and the emergence of a new liberal state, triggered their gradual dismantling throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the intensity of the privatization process, together with the agricultural performance of each region, was geographically diverse. This project attempts to analyse distinctive effect of privatisation on Spanish agricultural productivity between 1860 and 1930. Apart from quantifying the stock of common lands and agricultural output, data on the different inputs affecting the level of agricultural output will be gathered using primary and secondary sources. Read less » Abstract »

Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia
University of Oxford
francisco.beltran@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

 

"The Regional Roots of Mexican Neoliberalism: Northern Business Elites and the Rise of Market Values"

My research explores how, beginning in the 1970s, Mexican businessmen and their allies transformed conservative strategies for confronting the central state, and how their efforts helped to legitimate free market ideas in Mexico. The dissertation focuses on northern Mexico, where conservative opposition to central authority was strongest. It examines alliances which formed among businessmen, the clergy, and civic organizations to assess how these actors reshaped economic debates around a defense of traditional values. Looking beyond the abrupt policy changes of the 1980s and 1990s, it explores how challenges to the state's purview over societal values nourished resistance to government economic intervention, and how this process prepared the ground for Mexico's transition to a free market economy. Read less » Abstract »

Derek Bentley
University of Georgia
dbent@uga.edu

"Risky Credit: The Commercial World of the Bay of Bengal from 1800 to 1940"

How was 19th-century commercial ethics reshaped when financial transactions came to be organized through new developments in economic thinking? How did twentieth-century innovations in economics make risk a statistically calculable entity? How did statistics generate novel economic theories that diffused into popular discourses, creating new notions of economic behaviors and legitimacies? My project pursues these questions in tracing how the diffusion of statistical knowledge resulted in a conceptual and moral shift in which financial transactions were increasingly defined through a number-crunching rationality and contractual transparency, rather than through the social relations based on trust and reputation that governed earlier economic activities. Situating my work in the emergent scholarship on the new economic history of colonial capitalism, I pursue questions about how popular forms of economic knowledge regulated the commercial micro-practices in the colony. I wish to explore how turn-of-the-century innovations in economic theories trickled into popular understandings in two steps: first, into the political discourses of publicists, bureaucrats, policy-makers, and parliamentarians, and, second, to the new economic subjects of speculators, stock-market operators, and petty swindlers. Exploring the twofold issue of land profiteering and governing through a statistical understanding and management of risk, I want to investigate the relation between market ethics, risk and colonial liberalism.

The archive at the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge University holds a rich collection of private papers by entrepreneurs both big and small in colonial Bengal and of people employed in the financial institutions of Calcutta, as well as private papers, diaries, litigations and letters of the colonial merchants working for the premiere financial institute of Calcutta. These materials will shed light on the micro-practices of commercial transactions and popular understandings of novel economic ideas, crucial to documenting how the constitution of economic legitimacy and commercial ethics were gradually changing through the long nineteenth century. My investigation will also focus on the Parliamentary Papers to analyze the language of debates and arguments about economic crimes to trace the diffusion of a mathematical and "rational" rhetoric of econometrics into popular financial knowledge formation. My research on the diffusion of economic thinking into popular discourses tracks the formation of economic ideas by primarily focusing on the everyday transactions in litigation, petitions, popular press and private letters. Read less » Abstract »

Debjani Bhattacharyya
Emory University
http://history.emory.edu/home/people/graduate/bhattacharyya.html

 

"Information and News in 19th Century America: The Role of the Telegraph”

The telegraph altered the information environment in 19th century America in ways that rival the impact of the Internet today. Information that used to take days to acquire could be accessed in hours. How did this technological change impact news consumption and availability? Using two novel datasets on the early growth of the telegraph and on time delays in news reporting, I plan on examining the impact of the telegraph on various media outcomes, such as the speed, geographic coverage, subject composition, and, possibly, objectivity of news reporting. The method and data will provide a framework for future studies examining the impact of the telegraph on other economic and political outcomes. Read less » Abstract »

Levi Boxell
Stanford University

"Constructing Credit, Expanding Commerce: US Branch Banking in Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century"

My dissertation examines the expansion of U.S. branch banking in Latin America in the early twentieth century. I explore bankers’ attempts to codify credit, systematize trust, and expand the U.S. dollar as the dominant currency of trade. The decades surrounding World War I reconfigured the power of the world’s largest economies. Alongside this macroeconomic upheaval, the daily practices of banking, such as record keeping and information sharing, were also changing rapidly. My project examines U.S. bankers’ attempts to standardize credit information in Latin America against this backdrop. I argue that credit-evaluation processes took shape in response to cross- cultural negotiation, Latin American market pressures, and labor conflicts, among other forces. Further, these banking processes affected U.S. power in Latin America and the foundations for early twentieth century economic development. Read less » Abstract »

Mary Bridges
Vanderbilt University
mary.bridges@vanderbilt.edu

"Quebec, Bengal, and the Rise of Authoritarian Legal Pluralism"

England's common law became less common in the second half of the eighteenth century. Until the 1740s, most politicians agreed that English law should govern all British subjects. Colonies could enact locally appropriate legislation, but none could stray from the fundamentals of English law, such as trials by jury. By the 1770s, however, Britain had rejected earlier efforts to develop a unified imperial law. The Quebec Act restored French law to Canada; Hindu and Islamic law governed most Indian subjects; and in England itself, judges had narrowed the common law's scope by increasing the independence of courts martial from civilian oversight and by segregating commercial litigation from other lawsuits. A policy of legal pluralism had replaced one of legal uniformity. My current research seeks to explain this change, which had a profound impact on the development of Anglo-American arbitration, commercial law, and civil procedure. Read less » Abstract »

Christian R. Burset
Yale University
christian.burset@yale.edu

 

"Hungarian Bank and Colonial Projects during the First World War"

My project examines Hungary’s First World War experience in relation to competing geopolitical arguments amongst politicians, bankers, journalists, entrepreneurs and writers during the half century before the war. I am currently investigating how banks, particularly the Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank, affected Hungarian war aims. In contrast to scholarship arguing that the First World War was the culmination of a long history of Hungarian imperialism, my research in the archives of the Commercial Bank in Budapest and the Credit Bank in London, shows that bank leaders – especially Commercial Bank president Leó Lánczy - emphasized the loss of Hungary’s overseas, western European and Austrian markets and the threat of a German dominated Central European Economic Union to Hungary’s independence in an attempt to convince Prime Minister István Tisza and his successors to support economic and territorial expansion in the Balkans. In a world without the guaranteed market Austria provided, Hungary, Lánczy believed, needed to unchain itself from dependence on flour exports to Austria and invest in products desired in Western Europe. Hungary also required resources for industrial production, including oil. Romanian oil fields would replace Galicia’s. Sugar produced in Bulgaria, Bosnia and Serbia would become Hungary’s staple export, able to be shipped across the globe through Fiume. Dominance in the Balkans, Lánczy argued, would allow Hungary to gain independence from Austria and resist German encroachment. With funds from the History Project, I plan to investigate the state’s reaction to the banks’ proposals and how this reaction affected Hungary’s war aims. Read less » Abstract »

James Callaway
New York University
tjc3912@nyu.edu

"Generating a New South: Hydroelectricity and the Making of Modern Georgia, 1900-1930"

In 1913, the Georgia Railway and Power Company completed a hydroelectric dam in the mountainous northeastern corner of the state of Georgia. The dam and powerhouse's machinery transformed falling water into electric energy to turn the wheels of progress in Atlanta and other cities in the US South. More than any other tool, hydropower enabled the creation of a "New South" by helping shift the center of economic life from farm to factory, but at the same time new created sites of labor strife and racial violence. Hydraulic energy thus was not simply imposed on Dixie as a technological miracle that unproblematically propelled Georgia and the South out from the old world and into the new. Power brokers had to invest much effort in fitting hydroelectricity into southern social structures in ways that would help soothe shared worries over a society in transition. Part of a larger dissertation in which I hope to add new insights both to southern history and the history of energy, this project considers how waterpower influenced changes in the economic life of the South. It also explores ways electricity was called upon to settle class and racial crises brought on by the advent of modernity, constantly increasing dependence on distant—and eventually nonrenewable—sources of energy. Read less » Abstract »

Casey Cater
Georgia State University
ccater2@gsu.edu

"Muleteers as Bandits and Mutineers: Global Capital and Social Transformation in the Ottoman Countryside"

My dissertation is a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joins the global market over the long nineteenth century, told through the prism of a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon – those obscure peasants who, owning one or a few mules, made their livelihood transporting goods and persons rather than working the land. The narrative will follow these actors over the first half of the century, documenting their role in the peasant revolts that arose as a subsistence economy turned to cash-crop agriculture and land came to be bought and sold. These peasant revolts failed. The last one, begun in 1858, degenerated into sectarian conflict. From the 1860s to the First World War, I will demonstrate, as elites at all levels struggled to assert their control over an increasingly valuable export trade, the muleteers turned to smuggling, and came to be perceived as social bandits defending the peasantry against the state’s taxation and capitalist extraction. Many of them, however, accumulated wealth and integrated an emerging middle class. Joined through their work to the basic rhythms of rural life, the muleteers effectively witnessed firsthand the dissolution of community bonds. Grounded in archival research, but also expanding the conventional historical record to include oral history, folk, and fiction, this history broadens the scope of political actors and actions to tell of the anguished crossover of rural societies into modern liberalism. Read less » Abstract »

Joan Chaker
Harvard University

"Evolving State Capitalism: Federalism in the Indian Coal Industry"

Indian state-owned enterprises still loom large in the national economy. While their contribution to the national product may have decreased over the years, their hold over critical industries and their increasing relevance in geopolitical calculations (particularly in energy) has meant that they still remain important economically. However, since liberalisation their character has changed substantially. In this project, I will track the evolution of the Indian coal sector from independence. Both statistical and historical evidence will bear out the fact that Indian state capitalism has had to adapt massively since the withdrawal of subsidy support in the early 1990s. Technological choice, financial management, labour relations, and local politics have all been affected by the evolution of Coal India Limited (CIL) into its new corporate avatar. Partly through pressure through international organizations, and partly through the burgeoning domestic demand for energy, CIL has had to untangle itself from its socialistic roots. In the process, this has inevitably led to the re-entry of the private sector into coal mining through the practice of "outsourcing". By tracking this evolution, I hope to point out some of the salient characteristics of the Indian flavour of state capitalism, and its move towards allowing backdoor privatization. Read less » Abstract »

Rohit Chandra
Harvard University
rchandra@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

"Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration in British Malaya"

Between 1890 and 1939, hundreds of thousands of Chinese females crossed the South China Sea (Nanyang) to colonial Singapore despite multiple legal barriers controlling Asian mobility into the British Empire. They travelled as wives, domestic bondservants, and sex workers in an era when modern migration control was first emerging as a system of racial and gender exclusion. While the government in colonial Singapore monitored and eventually restricted the migration of Chinese male laborers, it selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement in its territories. This project asks two interrelated questions: 1) Why were Chinese women and children subjected to a different mode of colonial surveillance than their male counterparts? 2) What do these gendered and racialized policies reveal about broader colonial anxieties surrounding laboring bodies and border management across British Asia? Drawing on immigration and marriage records, ship logs, and government proceedings, “Across the Nanyang” explores the historical relationship between sexual economy and migration control. In doing so, it repositions Chinese women and children as central to our understanding of inter-Asian labor migrations. Read less » Abstract »

Sandy F. Chang
University of Texas at Austin
sandy.chang@utexas.edu

"The contribution of infrastructure investment to Britain’s urban mortality decline 1861–1900"

My research examines the political economy of the provision of sanitation infrastructure within Victorian England after 1870. England during this period faced many of the problems of rapid urbanization and deteriorating sanitary environments faced by developing countries today. The need to invest in expensive sanitary infrastructure sparked taxpayer opposition and intense political debate. At the same time political reform was leading to changes in the composition of the electorate, resulting in a shift in political power towards the poor. A new dataset will be constructed, incorporating town-level sanitation expenditure, mortality rates and the extent of the franchise. This data will be used to empirically assess the effect of sanitation expenditure on mortality and the effects of political change on both the size of government and health outcomes. Read less » Abstract »

Jonathan Chapman
California Institute of Technology
jnchapma@caltech.edu

 

"The Business of Life: South Asia in the Age of Global Capital"

I examine why life insurance became popular in the late-nineteenth century as a way to understand the complex processes through which a global capitalist structure locked into place in an imperially dominated colonial socio-economic context in the late nineteenth century – as well as its implications for how we understand new forms of economic behavior become popular. Life insurance experienced a surprising surge in popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century in South Asia. British and Scottish companies had been in operation in major commercial centers since the 1830s but had refused to insure Indian lives as being ‘too risky’ for most of the century. In the context of South Asia’s historically strong intergenerational family support networks, one has to ask, what produced this seeming anomaly of a sudden desire for an externalized institutional form of ‘insurance’ that has typically been seen to function within the context of urban, industrialized, middle class modernity in the West? My hypothesis is that besides the usual business of insuring lives, life insurance lent itself in peculiar ways to becoming a credit instrument in urban and agrarian contexts in South Asia. More than 40 indigenous life insurance companies and 500 ‘provident societies’ were formed between 1896 and 1912. ‘Life’ in that context was quite often a broader category than is focused on in histories of life insurance: some of these life societies insured life events such as births and marriages in the agrarian countryside. By the time it was nationalized in 1956, most ‘foreign’ life insurance businesses had been pushed out of India through a series of legislation viewed as protective of this important new indigenous industry. Advocates of this industry had been in fact explicitly making the economic claim in a moral register “to invest Indian capital in Indian lives” from the 1920s onwards. I show how South Asia’s specificity can only be understood within a global framework of regional and imperial connections at the intersection of financial institutions, popular economic discourses and changes in legal regimes. Positing life insurance as a unit of analysis, my project is interested in the relation between capitalist development and cultural change by illuminating aspects of the universalizing properties of capital articulated dialectically as particular forms of socio-economic life. Read less » Abstract »

Meghna Chaudhuri
New York University

"Fossil Fuel Communism: The Druzhba Oil Pipeline and the Making of the Eastern Bloc, 1948-1994”

How did Communist Party leaders coordinate economic activity between the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc? More specifically, how did the implementation of what they called an “international socialist division of labor” shape their countries’ individual, centrally-planned economies differently? My research sheds light on these questions by investigating what one Soviet bureaucrat called the “clearest manifestation” of that transnational effort, namely the Druzhba or “Friendship” oil pipeline network, the largest in the world. Built in the 1960s, Druzhba linked Russian oilfields with refineries in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany. It is still in use today. Ultimately, my research contributes to ongoing debates among social scientists about the varieties of capitalism in post-communist Europe. Read less » Abstract »

Tom J. Cinq-Mars
Duke University
tjc30@duke.edu

"Indian Trust Funds and the Routes of American Capitalism, 1795-1865"

My research approaches the transition to capitalism in the United States as a process of indigenous dispossession. I am currently at work on my dissertation, “Indian Trust Funds and the Routes of American Capitalism, 1795-1865,” which examines the practice of conferring trust funds to Native polities as compensation for ceded land. I trace the investment of Indian trust fund money in state-financed carriers of westward expansion: roads, canals, rails, and banks. With the support of the History Project, I will be visiting archives in Washington, D.C., Albany, New York, Montgomery, Alabama, and Chicago, Illinois, in order to piece together the network of bankers, brokers, and state officials who solicited these investments. By exploring the almost entirely overlooked story of Native investment in internal improvements, my dissertation asks new questions about the making of a national market in the United States. Read less » Abstract »

Emilie Connolly
New York University
ec1893@nyu.edu

"War, Blockades, and Hunger: Nutritional Deprivation of German Children 1914 - 1924"

Mary Cox
University of Oxford
mary.cox@history.ox.ac.uk

At the beginning of the First World War, the British imposed a blockade against Germany intending to prevent all imports from entering the country. Germans began to call the British naval action the 'Hungerblockade', claiming that it seriously damaged the well-being of women and children through lack of adequate nutrition. These German claims that Britain used hunger as a weapon of war against civilians have sometimes been dismissed as propaganda. However, newly discovered anthropometric measurements made of German school children during the war gives credence to German contentions that the blockade inflicted severe deprivation on children and other non-combatants. Further, these data show that the blockade exacerbated existing nutritional inequalities between children of different social classes; working class children suffered the most profound effects of nutritional deprivation during the war. Once the blockade ended however, working class children were the quickest to recover, regaining their pre-War standards in weight by 1921. They surpassed their own pre-War height standards by 1923, and approximated the weight of middle class children by 1924. This recovery of working class children is likely due to the outpouring of international aid targeted at poor German children. These data also indicate significant gender inequalities starting at age fourteen in nutritional status, with male adolescents suffering far greater deprivation from 1914-1924. Read less » Abstract »

 

"Britain's Empire of Oil: The History of Its Exploration and Exploitation and Its Impact on the Global Middle East"

This research project examines the changes in British imperialism from 1901 to 1947 in the Arabo-Persian Gulf—and on a more global scale, in the Middle East. I argue that the evolution in the forms of British domination is due to the development of various policies by Anglo-Indian and British authorities, linked to the exploration and exploitation of oil. During the long nineteenth century, British imperialism in the Gulf was essentially "maritime". It became "territorial" from the beginning of the 20th century, because of the creation of this "oil policy". Furthermore, in this research, my aim is to analyse the spatial changes created in the Gulf by the exploitation of oil. But I also want take into consideration the neighbouring spaces and their links with the Gulf in order to demonstrate that this "second stage" of British imperialism created a new geographical organisation of the Middle East. Read less » Abstract »

Guillemette Crouzet
guillemettecrouzet@yahoo.fr

 

"Gens sans maîtres: les communes des Antilles et la production du commerce sous le régime colonial"

In the seventeenth century, the Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Danish all attempted to forcibly integrate the Caribbean region of Latin America within their broader Atlantic empires. Their story has largely been told. The globalization proposed by the rulers of European empires was not the only globalization possible, however. My dissertation focuses instead on networks of pirates, rebel slaves, and indigenous peoples; how they interacted with one another and with the expanding colonial systems. It surveys the changing economic geography of the region in the transition from indigenous autonomy to Spanish monopoly to the contested realm of warring European powers. It then juxtaposes beside these three models the alternative system posed by the sustained connections among common people who rejected imperial authority and sought to remake the world in their own collective interest. The emergence of these networks of masterless people in the Caribbean region, their roots in the great social upheavals and forced migrations of the era, and their significance to the establishment and development of the Atlantic colonial economies combine to make them one of the most interesting and important frontiers of research in transnational social and economic history today. For more information: http://www.isaaccurtis.com/.
Read less » Abstract »

Isaac Curtis
University of Pittsburgh
isaac@isaaccurtis.com
http://www.isaaccurtis.com/

 

"Pauperism and the poverty line: Pauper household incomes in the 1850s"

The New Poor Law of 1834 has been described as the most important piece of social legislation ever enacted in England and Wales. It ushered in the era of the union workhouse, the institution destined to be forever associated with poor Oliver Twist. However, it is now well known that most paupers did not enter the workhouse. The vast majority continued to receive outdoor relief in their own homes as they had under the pre-1834 Old Poor Law. My research focuses on these outdoor paupers. Taking a regional approach, it seeks to address how much people in receipt of outdoor relief were expected to survive on during the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the extent to which their incomes met a level of subsistence based on the 'poverty line' as devised by Joseph Rowntree in his late-nineteenth century sociological study of York. Within this, the regional dimension is crucial. Recent work on the Poor Law has emphasised variation in poor relief administration at regional level across England and Wales. Far from a uniform national system, the provision of relief differed from one place to another. A particular sharp distinction has been drawn between a reputedly parsimonious industrial north of England and a more generous agricultural south, and the validity of this claim will form part of the analysis. Read less » Abstract »

Lewis Darwen
Nottingham Trent University
ldarwen@outlook.com

 

"Commodification, Slavery, Credit, and the Law in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1780-1830"

In 1818, just one year after Mississippi achieved statehood, Philadelphia merchants pushed their regional interests by filing a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of that state against a Natchez client. Despite being "contrary to Mississippi law," the merchants claimed that, on the basis of "the customs of merchants in Philadelphia," they had the right to collect interest on an account, even if the principal had not been paid. The Mississippi jury awarded the case to the plaintiffs. The need to cross the border from one legal sphere into another and alter an already codified rule of law in favor of an outside custom was not new; on-going struggles over alternative, autonomous, and "indigenous" ways of doing business had long characterized the Atlantic's heterogeneous mercantile communities. What was new appeared in the form of a more complicated political and economic context. Beginning in the 1790s, districts along the Delta were rapidly gaining a share in the British cotton market. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had ushered in a rapid succession of settlers and new investors. The influx of British capital in the 1820s and 1830s further expanded investment in cotton. These events transformed the Lower Mississippi Valley from a series of remote outposts into vital exporting enclaves. They also created an increased demand for larger amounts of working capital and forced economic actors to contend with an ever-widening assortment of legal politics.

This study examines how Atlantic mercantile communities set-up and maintained regulatory structures for the exchange of cotton and credit in a de-centralized economy by tracing the networks which directly tied credit-granting regions with cotton-producing districts. The project spans the period between the 1790s and 1820s, focusing on the cities of London, New York, and Philadelphia, where capital accumulation was the strongest, and the plantations districts of Natchez, Mississippi and East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. The War of 1812, over speculation in cotton, as well as the impact of British investment in the 1820s were instances by which various groups vied for control. In doing so, they re-made routines inherent in trade. They also re-set the notion of mercantile authority. I explore these changes in merchants' arbitration proceedings, in the territorial and state records, as well as plantation mortgages, manuscripts of prominent firms, proceedings from various Chambers of Commerce and individual mercantile accounts. I hope to uncover a regulatory system not imposed "from above," but one that emerged out of the interactions between merchants in multiple jurisdictions responding to globalizing pressures and the internal dynamics of particular places. Read less » Abstract »

Elbra David
University of California – Irvine

 

"The Role of the London Metal Exchange in Mitigating Risk for Non-Ferrous Metal Traders, 1877–1919"

The process of trading non-ferrous metals such as copper and tin during the nineteenth century was often hindered by the risk of price change during transportation. This problem was partially alleviated with the advent of telegraphy and the ability of traders to locate buyers in advance of their commercial journey. However, this was not an easy feat for traders, as buyers often demanded very specific grades of ore. My research explores the response by European and American metal firms who sought to offset such risks by creating the London Metal Exchange (1877), a market which mandated standardized futures contracts and functioned as a space that paired hedgers with speculators. Read less » Abstract »

Nathan Delaney
Case Western Reserve University
nathan.delaney@case.edu

 

"Beyond the Nation: Anti-colonialism, Citizenship and Rights in Twentieth-century India"

My research seeks to untangle the history of political anticolonialism and citizenship from the confines of the Indian nation-state. By focusing on the anticolonial claims of migrants who were traveling in and through Southeast Asia and North America at the turn of the twentieth century, I explore how migration enables scholars to redefine the contours of Indian anticolonialism, citizenship, and rights on an imperial scale. The project brings forward well-known historical actors such as Bhagat Singh Thind who stood before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923 to argue that South Asian men were indeed eligible for American citizenship; the 5th Light Infantry that mutinied in Singapore in 1915 to bring an end to British colonial rule; and Gurdit Singh, a semi-affluent Panjabi migrant in Singapore who commissioned the Komogatu Maru to protest discriminatory immigration laws in British Columbia. Moreover, in my conceptual approach, I center ideas of race and masculinity and bring the histories of Indians in Manila, Hong Kong, Astoria, Singapore, Portland, Berkeley, and San Francisco that have been peripheral in our study of India to the fore. Read less » Abstract »

Hardeep Dhillon
Harvard University
hdhillon@g.harvard.edu

 

 

"Foligno County (Umbria, Central Italy) in the long 12th century (1070s - 1200s): An outline of the economic transition"

The long 12th century, lasting in Italy from the Investiture Controversy (1075 - 1122) to the pontificate of Innocent III (1198 - 1216), is a period of major societal transformation, expressed in urbanization (move of nearly a half population from countryside to cities and its engagement in non-agrarian activities), communalization (emergence of local political institutions based on the idea of jurisdiction proceeding from the people), and commercialization (commodification of land and food, as well as growth of trade in general). I study this process on the materials of Foligno county (Umbria, Central Italy). Charters of private land transactions, containing a lot of quantitative information, is the principal source of information about it. Most of these documents have already been published. Access to and transcription of their remaining part at the local archives allows to to complete my research. Read less » Abstract »

Nikita Dmitriev
Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (LAMOP), Pantheon-Sorbonne University (France)
nikitadmitriev@gmail.com
http://lamop.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?auteur82

 

 

"The Latin American Development Experience: social sciences and policy-making, 1939-1973"

This project studies the research practices, policy endeavors, and economic theories of social scientists in Latin America -particularly in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia- concerned with tackling the problem of development. International organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations were expected to lead the postwar reconstruction effort and form the basis of a new international economic order. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) gained traction among the region's policymakers and social scientists, partaking in debates around postwar world reconstruction. By organizing seminars, training courses, and technical missions, the Commission provided a fulcrum for the production and exchange of data, policy initiatives, planning techniques, and broader notions of development and underdevelopment. These concepts, widely known as structuralist and dependency theories, endorsed a global approach with a regional perspective to understanding and intervening in the region's path towards capitalist development. Plus, they reputedly provided the ideological buttress of the region's development model based on import-substitution industrialization.

Having said that, what is striking and particularly interesting about those who coalesced around ECLA is their concern with fine-tuning of economic and social theory based on policy and political experiences. How does policy-making affect knowledge production? In turn, how does knowledge shape policymakers? These scientists, and the problems of economic development they were concerned with, provide a privileged entry into problems such as how economic theory is produced, the role of economists in creating economic and social orders, and the way in which academic knowledge reaches the public sphere. The project focuses on the interplay between economic history and the history of economics and on the role of the 'interpreters' of capitalism in understanding the history of capitalism itself. Read less » Abstract »

Margarita Fajardo-Hernandez
Princeton University
mfajardo@princeton.edu

 

 

"Meaningful Monies: Cash, Credit and Mutual Obligation in the Dutch and German Countryside, 1650-1850"

Early modern Europeans used a baffling diversity of monetary media to carry out their everyday businesses: coins of all kinds and sizes, non-coin objects, mercantile paper monies, bank money, later bank notes and bonds – or they chose not to use money at all. Traditionally interpreted as "chaos" and a sign of immature economies, this multiplicity is now acknowledged by monetary historians as a functional "division of labour" between complementary currencies. To the users, the system appeared less complex because most monies were geographically and socially bounded. But how can we explain that even in the same place and among the same group of people, the available monetary media were accessed with greater and lesser ease, and used with diverging success? To answer this question, I analyse the household economies of a range of families who lived in the rural east of the Dutch Republic and in the Palatinate: 'serf-entrepreneurs' and Catholic nobility, merchants and Mennonite weavers. I consider money usage mainly as a register of communication in which the complex persona of transaction partners is reduced to the simpler role of buyer and seller, receiver and giver. In order to be successful, such specialised communication needs explicit and implicit rules and requires specific skills. While membership to networks and communities facilitated, or constrained, people's access to money in early modern Europe, it also depended on their monetary literacy, on their ability to follow the rules of a medium, and to use it skilfully. Monetary literacy comprised generic (literacy, numeracy, and accounting) and specific abilities (e.g. coin recognition). I argue that using money was a cultural technique whose differential mastery created, and reinforced, inequality among historical actors. Those with social power, a strong economic basis and access to skills were better placed to perform financial transactions to accumulate more of the same. In spite of this circularity, we can see efforts of 'empowerment through education' both in individual biographies and in contemporary discourses. It was in this domain that enlightenment thinkers thought "liberation" of the "people" was most likely to happen. The large demand for advice literature in the countryside and the adoption of saving banks suggest that their project was resonant with the needs of rural populations. Read less » Abstract »

Sebastian Felten
King's College London
sebastian.felten@kcl.ac.uk

"Steel and Sovereignty: Brazilian Debt and Steel in the 1930s, in a Global Mirror"

My project is about agents of globalization – the individuals, firms, and government bodies who between the 1890s and the 1950s, and especially in the interwar years, worked to spread steel manufacture from its heartlands in the U.S., Britain, and Germany, to Brazil. The history of how steel came to be produced in Brazil will stand as a case study of what I will call "nationalist globalization." Focusing principally on the interwar period, I demonstrate that, under the right conditions the economically nationalist nation-state itself was a dynamic agent of economic globalization. Brazil was like many countries in the interwar period in viewing a modern steel industry as the price of entry into the club of modern industrial nations. But achieving this nationalist goal required means – especially capital and technology – that had to come from abroad. Rather than resist this nationalist project, a variety of actors in the U.S., Britain, and Germany aided Brazil in achieving it. I follow those actors who established the transnational networks across which the necessary capital and technology could flow. Those networks prove to have been complex and globe-spanning, created in an international field of force structured by economic and political competition between great powers. The history of the steel industry in the interwar period runs counter to the consensus view of the economic history of globalization. My project challenges this history on the grounds of its economic bias in favor of competitive industries, its lack of a theory of international politics, its neglect of real actors, and its view that globalization is fragile and reversible. I argue for a different view of globalization that focuses less on quantitative ups and downs, and more on the ways in which globalization creates a context for all actors, especially political actors seeking national self-assertion through economic means. Read less » Abstract »

Ted Fertik
Yale University
ted.fertik@yale.edu

"Persistent Effects of Private Versus Colonial Rule: Evidence from 19th Century Indonesia"

In this research project, we document the interplay between private enterprise and the state during the Dutch rule of Indonesia in the 1800's, and study its long-term effects on the economic well being of the population of the island of Java. Combining detailed historical data and modern surveys, we create a unique panel dataset that will allow us to compare regions that were controlled by private enterprises with those that were under direct Dutch rule. We exploit the fact that the timing of the establishment of the private estates as well as the duration of private rule was arguably exogenous to other factors, and use a regression discontinuity design to compare geographical units on either side of the private-public plantation borders over time. Read less » Abstract »

Thiemo Fetzer
London School of Economics
thiemo.fetzer@gmail.com, www.trfezter.com
Priya Mukherjee
Cornell University
pm374@cornell.edu

"Building a Ruin: The International Political-Economy or Soviet Economic Reform 1956-1990"

This research project traces how changes in the global economy were transmitted into the Soviet Union through the engagement of political and technical elites with the global economics profession. It argues that Khrushchev’s movement of the Soviet Union’s conception of the Cold War from “the Two Camps Doctrine” to “Peaceful Coexistence” and engagement through socio-economic competition necessitated the creation of an internationalized economics profession and the academic institutions to support it. It follows how these technical elites attempted to both understand the evolving global economy and reform the USSR’s domestic structures to adapt to these new climates. It will trace the clash of new political formations and the traditionalist institutions that emerged from Stalinist industrialization to understand how the gradual erosion of the phenomenon that struck at the core of the USSR’s uniqueness as a state: the planned economy and the opposition to the free market. Read less » Abstract »

Yakov Feygin
University of Pennsylvania

 

"Forging Loyalty in the Iberian Pacific World: Manila and the Moro War, 1750 to 1780"

In 1750 the Spanish Governor of Manila declared war on the moro (Muslim) maritime communities in the southern Philippine Islands whose slave-raiding attacks had suddenly become more frequent and widespread throughout the archipelago. This project explores the Spanish colonial state's war against the moros from 1750 to 1780. Members of the clergy, the multiethnic merchant class, Indigenous Filipinos, as well as Manila's large Chinese population, all contributed to the colonial war-effort. In order to expose and analyse the unique dynamics of Spanish colonial rule the Asia Pacific world, I examine how and why the war gained support from the complex colonial society that thrived in Manila and its hinterland. My research combines two distinct methodologies. Influenced by new cultural histories of "Hispanic patriotism" in colonial Latin America, I evaluate discourses of loyalty to the Crown that were constructed around the Moro War in Manila. I also mine manuscripts for economic information to reconstruct war financing, drawing upon critical studies of the "fiscal pact" negotiated between the Crown and colonial elites. By exposing the texture and practice of loyalty to Spain in the Philippines for the first time, this project complicates the crude narrative that Spanish colonial rule in Southeast Asia, and European imperial expansion in the Pacific world more generally, resulted from the violent coercion of imperial subjects. Read less » Abstract »

Kristie Flannery
University of Texas at Austin
kristie.flannery@utexas.edu
https://utexas.academia.edu/KFlannery

"The Poor Always With You: Poverty in an Age of Emancipation, 1833-1879"

Poverty and slavery are monumental problems – but today we assume they are separate problems. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, American and British observers struggled to distinguish the poor from the slave. My project recounts the history of this struggle by exploring how the problem of poverty haunted the so-called "age of emancipation." In locations across the United States, Britain, India, and Ireland, I show how debating and administering urban charity, famine relief, temperance reform, and emancipation policy created new ideas and practices that linked the conditions of poverty and slavery. I examine how policymakers negotiated – and poor people challenged – these linkages in contests over economic status, personal liberty, and racial identity. In doing so, I ask how the connections between slavery and poverty, in ideology as well as experience, unsettle the historical and historiographical boundaries of slavery and freedom. Read less » Abstract »

Christopher Florio
Princeton University
cflorio@princeton.edu

 

"Crowning the Pyramid: The Egyptian Beer Industry’s 'Mature' Period (1940–1952)"

This project maps the economic and social history of beer, and of beverages more generally, in Egypt during the period from 1800 to 2000. Using the previously unstudied history of the production and consumption of five beverages (beer as well as whiskey, wine, water, and carbonated beverages), I discuss how oscillations in these two aspects reflected larger changes in Egyptian social values and politics. I likewise use the study of the beverages Egyptians drank (and where they drank them) to engage many of the most important historiographical discussions about Egypt including constructions of masculinity and femininity, youth culture, leisure, class formation, dependency theory, and economic imperialism. Read less » Abstract »

Omar Foda
The University of Pennsylvania
ofoda@sas.upenn.edu

"The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Development, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment"

This project examines the effects of childhood lead poisoning on individuals, families, and the metropolitan region of Baltimore in the twentieth-century. Lead poisoning, which for parts of the century affected virtually every child in Baltimore, has large effects, interfering with cognitive development and seriously limiting the life chances of individuals. Many factors combined to expose children to lead in this period, but automobile-based suburbanization was probably the most important factor, leading to such hazards as traffic congestion that concentrated air pollution in the inner city as well as disinvestment in inner city real estate that resulted in deteriorated lead paint in housing. Drawing on reconstructions of these changing lead hazards and historical medical data, this analysis will elucidate the extent of lead exposure over time and the often disproportionate exposures of poor people, African Americans, and the inner city. The analysis will then seek to answer how the effects of lead poisoning on individuals in turn affected families, communities, local government, and metropolitan development in Baltimore more broadly. Read less » Abstract »

Leif Fredrickson
University of Virginia

"Weaving the first Global Age. The Ruiz, a network of textile merchants (1566-1600)”

The research project aims at exploring the commercial strategies performed by an international network of wholesale merchants of fabric based in the heart of Castilla, the centre of the intercontinental Hapsburg’s Empire, and extended to Europe and America. The network is analysed through a selection of both business correspondence and commercial documents (contracts, accounts, insurances...) from the exceptional archival sources on the Ruiz family (in Spain, first in Valladolid and Medina del Campo, and in France, Paris and Nantes). The sources reflect and build the Ruiz international trade: raw and elaborated fabrics, golden filaments, colorant products, and also 2.500 dresses for the Royal house. Textile branch was very important in Castile: from the fairs (in Medina), to the fashion, to the production of merino wool and its export to north, to the import of elaborated textiles (and the trade of nouvelle draperie), to the local production of textiles. The agency of the network (an international, complex, mobile network) is evaluated through both the commercial firms (the Compañía de Nantes y Castilla and the company of Seville) and different associations with foreign merchants (in Italy and Flanders). Read less » Abstract »

Gabriele Galli
Università degli Studi di Verona and Universidad de Valladolid
gabriele.galli@univr.it

 

"State Taxes, Wealth, and Public Debt after the American Revolution, 1783-1815"

My dissertation examines the ways in which state governments dealt with the vast debts incurred during the Revolution, and emphasizes these policies' implications for economic growth. In the absence of strong taxing authority under the Articles of Confederation, the burden rested entirely on the newly-formed state governments. Dealing with the debt proved particularly challenging in the decade following the Revolution, as consistent deflation magnified the states' obligations. State governments operated independently during this period, and pursued a variety of policy strategies to address their fiscal crises, with mixed results. Through using property tax records to measure changes in wealth levels, wealth distribution, and insolvency, my research surveys the lasting effects of state-level fiscal policy. While some states found ways to mitigate the effects of the tax burden on the populace, other states encountered violent resistance to tax collection and widespread insolvency as a result of their tax policies. Through implementing changes in their tax laws, seven states succeeded in eliminating their war debts completely by 1790. In the years that followed, additional states modified their tax collection practices, and increased revenues by shifting the tax burden from poor farmers to wealthy consumers. By comparing and evaluating the various strategies state governments employed, my project studies the effects of early fiscal policy in facilitating economic growth in the Early Republic. Read less » Abstract »

Frank Garmon
University of Virginia
fwg3gc@virginia.edu

"The economic incentives of assimilation - Name changers in the early 20th century Hungary"

We study how changing family name to a Hungarian sounding one, a key step in the assimilation process for minorities, affected labor market outcomes in Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th century. By doing this, we intend to show that identity, which often provides the grounds for discrimination, is endogenous to economic incentives. We build a unique data set out of administrative yearbooks and archival data, and use a natural experiment (a policy campaign) and an instrumental variables strategy (the Scrabble score of the name) to identify the effect. Preliminary results show that name changing is associated with significantly higher wages and promotion probabilities. Read less » Abstract »

Atilla Gáspár and Rita Petö
Central European University, Hungary
Gaspar_Attila@phd.ceu.edu /Peto_Rita@phd.ceu.edu

 

"Bushfalling to No Man’s Land: The U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery in Cameroon"

As neoliberal reforms reconfigured Cameroon's economy in the mid-1990s, many people sought to depart in search of "greener pastures," and better opportunities abroad. Yet in the mid-1990s, it became increasingly difficult for Africans to travel abroad due to legal barriers in Europe and the United States. This was one of the essential paradoxes of globalization: capital, goods, and cultural products could glide more easily than ever across national borders, but at the same time people, particularly in poorer countries, faced new structural obstacles to geographic mobility. At the same time that communication and transportation technology promised to de-center the nation-state from the world stage, citizens of Cameroon were subject to a global migration regime based on nationality, with the United States serving as powerful gatekeeper. Unlike other contemporary migration policies, however, the DV lottery created the possibility of legal access to the United States to migrants who were otherwise unlikely to receive immigrant visas. Visa services entrepreneurs seized the visa lottery as an opportunity to profit from fellow Africans' desperation and aspiration to depart at a time of privation. They promoted and operated the lottery, recruiting applicants, helping clients collect proper documentation, mailing lottery entries, and preparing registrants for the screening process at the consulate. These visa services agents transformed the abstract policy into a concrete possibility. By engaging in private enterprise to serve their own economic and cultural needs, visa services entrepreneurs stepped in as accidental agents of U.S. public diplomacy, helping to link Cameroonians' imaginaries of the United States as a land of "milk and honey" to migration. The connection was particularly powerful given the United States' decision after the end of the Cold War to defund public diplomacy and shift its focus from Africa to the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe. With fewer diplomacy projects, the lottery became a major node through which African audiences imagined and understood the United States, particularly in Cameroon, a country with even fewer connections to the United States than Ghana. In contrast to Ghana, the political situation in Cameroon through the 1990s was unstable under President Paul Biya, with particular opposition coming from the Anglophone population of the country. I expect the story of the DV lottery to be slightly different in that context, and will be exploring the different experiences of the lottery as both economic activity and instrument of migration among Anglophone and francophone Cameroonians. Read less » Abstract »

Carly Goodman
Temple University
carlygoodman@gmail.com

 

"Skin in the Game: Liability Insurance, Extended Liability, and Financial Stability"

Between 1829 and 1862—well before the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933—governments in six U.S. states established their own, state-level deposit insurance programs. Utilizing balance sheet data compiled from reports of state banking authorities, I am analyzing relative changes in the number of banks, balance sheet size and composition of assets and liabilities, and bank failure rates in counties covered by state-level public deposit insurance compared to banks in adjacent counties not covered. The identification assumption is that border counties share relatively similar economic and financial fundamentals, so banks in neighboring counties would otherwise have experienced similar changes after 1829 if not for the intervention of regulatory regime change, controlling also for within-county fixed effects. Since the period from 1829 to 1862 was one of considerable financial volatility in the U.S., this project provides a unique opportunity to assess the benefits and costs of public subsidization of a particular type of bank financing, namely, deposit capital. Read less » Abstract »

Tyler Beck Goodspeed
Harvard University
tgoodsp@fas.harvard.edu

 

"Minority Economic Landscapes in Post-Independence Peripheral Bulgarian Cities: The Cases of Kardzhali, Razgrad and Smolyan"

Political events such as wars, secession, and formation of new states are not only shifts in political power in favor of one group to another, but also shifts in what dominates economic landscapes. Transformation of economic landscapes happens through changes of political power but also through demographic changes (massacres, migrations, relocations), and shifts in business and land ownership between majority (newly dominant but previously subordinated) and minority (previously dominant but recently subordinated) groups. While manifestation of domination and resistance may happen in a variety ways, this project focuses on domination as expressed through the construction of economic landscapes. I focus on domination as expressed through the construction of economic landscapes in peripheral cities where economic domination of majority groups remains incomplete compare to major cities. Through cases of three Bulgarian peripheral cities: Kardzhali, Razgrad, and Smolyan, this study seeks to answer whether there are general patterns of establishing domination and resistance through economic landscapes. If so, what are they and how do such patterns vary in different minority cities in different periods? I hypothesize that decrease in numbers of minority businesses correlate to increase in political pressure towards minorities. By applying Social Network Analysis to the data obtained from archives, newspapers and periodicals, I will visualize general patterns of establishing domination and resistance through economic landscapes in different minority cities in different periods in the post-independence Bulgaria. Read less »Abstract »

Cengiz Haksöz
University of Pittsburgh
CEH53@pitt.edu

"George Smith and the Chinese tea trade"

The article, which I am currently developing, tells the story of two country traders both named George Smith. It is not biographical; rather, it analyzes the developing links between the British Empire and China through the experiences and eyes of two British traders. Although not in the employ of the East India Company, the two George Smiths were intimately connected with the leading Chinese merchants in Canton, and corresponded regularly with the de facto head of the British Empire in the East at the time, Henry Dundas. They participated in a major crisis in Sino-British relations and attempted to influence Britain's developing policy towards China. With a research grant from the History Project, I will consult sources in the East India Company Records in the British Library and Bankruptcy Case Files in the National Archives in Kew. Read less » Abstract »

Jessica Hanser
Yale University
jessica.hanser@gmail.com

 

 

"Trading Across Boundaries: Sixteenth-century Commercial Letters of Safe Passage and the Challenge of Cross-cultural Trade"

My research focuses on the bureaucratic and legal mechanisms – particularly letters of safe passage – developed by sixteenth-century Mediterranean polities to uphold cross-cultural circulation and trade despite the unstable geopolitical conditions of the period. I also hope to identify what types of merchants decided to carry Venetian, Ottoman, or Hospitaller letters of safe passage while travelling across the Mediterranean, and why they chose to do so. Thanks to the support of History Project, I plan to begin building a database of letters of safe passage, and other similar legal instruments, issued by the Republic of Venice during the first half of the sixteenth century. This data set will complement the material I have previously collected in Malta relative to the Order of St. John, and will eventually become the backbone of a comparative study of sixteenth-century commercial letters of safe passage from Venice, Malta, and Istanbul. The generous support provided by History Project will also allow me to conduct a first foray into the State Archive of Dubrovnik, in order to evaluate if this important commercial city-state located between Venice and the Ottoman Empire might prove to be a valuable fourth case study for my project. Read less » Abstract »

Ian Hathaway
Yale University
ian.hathaway@yale.edu

 

"The Restoration of French Colonial Slavery, 1802-1848"

In 1802 the French state revoked the abolition of slavery in its empire and attempted to re-enslave the colonial populations. In 1804 revolutionaries in France’s major plantation colony Saint-Domingue declared their independence and founded a new republic, Haiti. In the following four decades the French government restored and expanded the slave-labor economies throughout the rest of its colonial empire. Using archival collections in France and its former colonies, my research attempts to make sense of this process of re-enslavement and the larger transformation of the French empire in the wake of the French Revolution. I suggest that the expansion of the plantation economies in Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and Bourbon was a result of attempts to replace the lost labor power, capital and prestige of the plantations of Saint-Domingue. I propose that projects to resurrect the empire proved remarkably successful and played a central role in the consolidation of French imperial power in the nineteenth century. Read less » Abstract »

Joseph la Hausse de LaLouviere
Harvard University
lahaussedelalouviere@fas.harvard.edu

 

"‘History in the garb of a novel’: Nationalism and Fiction in J. Victor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard"

J. Victor von Scheffel's historical novel Ekkehard became so popular among the late nineteenth-century German reading public that his publisher used a special high-speed printing press to meet demand. The book was reprinted in 179 editions during its first forty-five years of publication alone. Set in tenth-century Swabia, the eponymous protagonist was a monk who fell in love with a duchess after she poached him from a monastery in order to teach her Latin. The novel was scarcely less popular among English-speaking audiences and by the end of the century it had even been edited as a German textbook for American students. Ekkehard was translated not only into other languages, but into other artistic forms as well. The historical romance was adapted into an opera in 1878, into a choral piece in 1900, and into a symphonic overture in 1902. Ekkehard existed at the intersection of cheap print and academic press. Von Scheffel included in it a medieval epic poem, which he had translated into German and attributed to his semi-fictional main character. The poem, "Waltharius," became popular in its own right and von Scheffel later republished it in a freestanding critical edition, thereby bringing the poem into broad circulation. Von Scheffel acted as a cultural mediator between university-educated Germans and a wider public that read primarily in the vernacular. The novel's critical and popular receptions enable us to interrogate historical fiction's intersection with education, and institutions of reading and literacy. I argue that Scheffel's novel illuminates certain themes and strategies that resonated with a German reading public after the mid century. Situating my research in literary scholarship, and in a historiography that attends to the economics of mass distribution in Germany's industrial age, I seek to understand how reader reactions influenced artistic industries. New technologies for printing and distribution enabled publishing houses to respond quickly to minor changes in demand, and this research project will help us understand how this rapid response enshrined certain tropes in late nineteenth-century German historical novels. Using von Scheffel's book as a case study, I interrogate the Middle Ages' integral role in nineteenth-century historical fiction, particularly as it related to German cultural anthropology and historical research. Read less » Abstract »

Carla Heelan
Harvard University

"The Experience of Credit and Debt in the English Atlantic World, 1660-1754"

Following the return of the Stuarts to the throne in 1660, England witnessed a number of changes to traditional credit practices. What began with a series of pamphlets by the Josiah Child, William Petty, Charles Davenant and other political economists led to the monetization of the public debt under the Bank of England and South Sea Company and eventually Parliamentary legislation aimed at unifying credit practices throughout the British Atlantic. To understand this evolution and the experience of early-modern personal credit, my dissertation investigates three communities in the years between the Restoration and the Seven Years War: Philadelphia, Kingston (Jamaica), and London. It examines a cross-section of persons likely enmeshed in the web of finance—from subsistence farmers to slave masters, backcountry peddlers to metropolitan traders, and men and women of all types of faith. For them, it analyzes the need for and grant of loans, the building and mortgaging of property, and the buying and selling of goods and slaves. How exactly early-modern actors experienced the expansion of credit, and the culture and ideology that developed alongside it, is an open and unexplored question. Almost certainly, they did so variously, differently affected by the century-long growth of consumer culture, rise of slavery, development of public debt-based finance, and maturation of merchant capitalism. In adopting such an expansive geographic, temporal, human, and evidentiary scope, my thesis will capture the diversity of the "lived experience" of Anglo-Atlantic credit and analyze not only the ways in which legal, moral, cultural, ideological, and economic variations were negotiated, but also the process whereby they converged on a single, standardized culture of credit. Read less » Abstract »

Benjamin A. Hicklin
University of Michigan
hicklinb@umich.edu

"Electric Revolution: Energy, Environment, and the State in Post-Porfirian Northern Mexico"

The three-decade rule of autocrat Porfirio Diaz was an era of intensive investment and state-led modernization in Mexico. By the time he was exiled by the revolution in 1911, the arid border state of Chihuahua in particular was dominated by a booming mining complex tied to global industrial interests. This project traces the trajectory of promotion, construction, negotiation and eventual expropriation of the Boquilla dam in southern Chihuahua. Built through a consortium of Canadian investment, U.S. management, British engineering and Mexican promotion, this state-of-the-art dam was originally built to electrify local gold and silver mines. Delayed by sabotage, train stoppages, flooding, and attacks by Pancho Villa's forces, Boquilla finally began supplying power near the end of the revolution in 1920. In the following years, Boquilla remained in foreign hands, but was forced negotiate with competing government interests in increasing electrical output, expanding irrigation, and preserving the land rights of newly-newly settled ejido lands, held and worked in common. The dam was integrated into ever wider and more complicated electrical, irrigation, and colonization schemes until being forcibly purchased by federal fiat in 1960, by which time the bulk of its production had already been shifted to the expansive cotton-growing region of La Laguna around Torreon. This project takes the Boquilla dam and its expanding hydroelectric network as a privileged site for understanding the expansive scales of what are often described as state practices – practices which far transcend the national. The dam did not simply represent change, but itself produced new social, political and material realities which were continually made and remade by a variety of actors. The electrification of northern Mexico, and competing claims on the environment this produced, reveal not only the practices of state, as it were, but the myriad of actors, both Mexican and otherwise, through which these practices are effected. Read less » Abstract »

Jonathan Hill, Jr.
The City University of New York
jhill@gradcenter.cuny.edu
jhilljr.wordpress.com

"Indian Labour Migration to Ceylon, Malaya and Burma: A Study of Kangani and Maistry System in Global Perspective (c. 1880-1940)”

The project aims to critically scrutinize and reappraise the parameters which have conventionally defined the characteristics of Indian migration during the 19-20th century through a comparative study of the intricate pattern, functioning and nature of the Indian emigration to Ceylon, Malaya and Burma which was largely informally regulated through the Kangany and Maistry system and constituted a majority of the total Indian mobility during the colonial period. I also intend to broadly complicate and deconstruct the Eurocentric perceptions on non-European migration in the global migration studies. Simultaneously the attempt is also to draw global parallels particularly related to the content and substance of these migration systems, and to trace the interactions and interconnectedness of the Indian Ocean colonies, men and commodity to the global political and economic scenario of the times. Read less » Abstract »

Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal
University of Delhi
riteshjais@gmail.com

"Growth Industry: Unearthing the Origins of Fertilizer-Fueled Agriculture in America, 1865-1950"

After the Civil War, cotton and tobacco farmers working the worn soils of the American South adopted an emerging agricultural technology to feed their plants: Commercial fertilizers. Although the new seasonal dose of plant food helped keep the faltering agricultural regime afloat (and poor farmers in debt), the newfound dependence on inputs unwittingly pulled farmers into a vast global economy of nutrients. By the First World War, the fear of losing access to imported fertilizer sources—many of which were also valued as explosives—compelled government actors to take inventory of scientific and natural resources that could be mobilized to feed plants and weapons alike. By documenting a foundational agroecological change and the rise of a new agricultural technology, "Growth Industry" will tell the story of how America became a country fed and fueled by fertilizer. Read less » Abstract »

Timothy Johnson
University of Georgia
timjohns@uga.edu

 

"Adoption of the French Commercial Code of 1807 in the Duchy of Warsaw as a Significant Factor in the Development of Commercial Law in the Polish Territories"

In 1809, two years after the Duchy of Warsaw was established by Napoleon, the French Commercial Code was introduced in this area. It entered into force without the heated discussions that accompanied the adoption of the Code civil or a failed attempt to introduce the French criminal law. Moreover it remained in force on Polish territories until 1934. The main aim of this project is to examine the impact of the French Commercial Code on the development of the Polish commercial law system in general. It should be noted that such a system did not exist in Polish territories before. The French Commercial Code introduced several legal institutions previously unknown on the east European lands. It led to the establishment of the Warsaw Stock Exchange and the development of negotiable instruments, insurance law, company law, and commercial litigation. Criticized for many reasons in France, the Code de Commerce brought a breath of modern Western legal thought to the Polish lands. The first half of the XIXth century was a period when many different doctrines and institutional arrangements were discussed, however the reception of the French Commercial Code is one of few examples where theoretical ideas actually entered into force. I believe that the funds from the History Project will allow me to conduct research in the National Archives in Paris and Archives de Ministère des Affaires étrangères in La Courneve concerning, in particular, the records on the implementation of the Commercial Code, and correspondence between the French authorities and the members of the Polish government. Read less » Abstract »

Anna Klimaszewska
University of Gdansk
http://prawo.univ.gda.pl/pracownik/annaklimaszewska.html

 

"The Evolution of Public Health Policies in Cameroon from 1960 to 2014"

The characteristics of the development of health policy in Cameroon from the French era to the first two decades after independence seemed to confer the potential to strengthen a health system in the long term to the ambitions of the local administration. However, from the post-independence period, and when analyzing the events experienced in the field of health policies since 1975, there have been many twists in terms of health coverage and lack of political influence in health management. In view of the current configuration of the health system in Cameroon marked by various sectorial policies, vertical and inconsistent, it is appropriate to question how the organization of health management in Cameroon has been shaped and arranged from the independence period to the years 2015. In other words, how can we characterize the political and institutional approach experienced by the health policies? Also, has poor orientation of the technical support provided by donors and bilateral and multilateral partners limited from the outset the ability of the state to reconfigure its health system depending on local realities? Read less » Abstract »

Luc Fongang Kontcheu
University of Yaounde I
lucserge@yahoo.fr

"Many Regimes of Apprenticeship: Skilling Artisans and Mechanics”

The project aims to understand various regimes of apprenticeship in colonial India that were articulated through the indigenous trade-guilds and ustád-shágird (master artisans and disciple) relationship and the European industrial schools, government workshops, and the 1850 Apprenticeship Act. Suggesting that the labour process, especially learning of skills, was not a purely economic activity, my project will explore various economic, cultural, legal, and familial dimensions of the labour process and industrial training. In the project, I will reflect upon the following absent questions of Indian economic history: how were the positions and rights of master-artisans and disciples defined in apprenticeship regimes? How were skills constituted and how were they to be transmitted to the next generation of workers? What morals, economic rationales, rituals, moral obligations, and rules guided the ustád-shágird relationship? The overall aim of the project is to explore how the body, ethics, and morals of an artisan or a worker was constituted and how work/skill was learned. Read less » Abstract »

Arun Kumar
University of Gottingen
arunkumar019@gmail.com

"Social Mapping the History of Economists at Cambridge, 1903-1950"

This project will use social mapping technology to explore the network of economists based at Cambridge in the first part of the twentieth century. Drawing not only on the great quantity of scholarly attention paid to the so-called Cambridge School, but also from archival sources located at Cambridge and elsewhere, this project will compile and organize connections and commonalities, be they geographic, familial, theoretical, or ideological, between Cambridge economists and their correspondents and colleagues around the world.

The object of this project is two-fold. It is meant to serve as a web-based, fully searchable reference of the many known ways in which economists working at Cambridge or in the Cambridge tradition interacted and related to each other over time. Yet it is also meant to provoke new ways of conceptualizing these connections by letting scholars visualize the full sweep of the patterns that characterized the community of Cambridge economists. Read less » Abstract »

Ian Kumekawa
University of Cambridge
ik306@cam.ac.uk

"Economic developments and the growth of colour prejudice in the French empire, c.1635-1767"

This project explores the ways in which economic contexts shaped colour prejudice in the early modern French empire. More especially, it assesses the extent to which the socio-economic system of three colonies and the demographic data resulting from these systems fashioned the development of colour prejudice. It is a comparative study based on French Louisiana, Guadeloupe and Île Bourbon. The economy of Louisiana was initially based on the fur trade between the French and the relatively large population of Amerindians. French settlers in Louisiana also relied on the indigenous people for victuals and military support against potential English attacks. On Île Bourbon, economic activity was initially based on food crops needed to provide supplies for ships travelling between Europe and the East Indies. In the eighteenth century, plantation slavery developed considerably in Guadeloupe and, to a lesser extent, in Île Bourbon and Louisiana. As a result, the number of slaves grew significantly in the three colonies. These demographic contexts and the need to maintain the developing socio-economic systems generated tensions. My work shows how the different socio-economic frameworks moderated and/or exacerbated colour prejudice. It examines the development of colour prejudice in the mentalities of the different people present in the colonies, in social relationships, as well as in legislation and judicial outcomes. Economic difficulties generated by factors such as war or climatic upheaval are taken into account too, since they may have reinforced social antagonisms. The research draws upon an important variety of primary materials including censuses, parish registers, political correspondences and judicial, legal and notarial records, as well as several travel accounts. Since few historians have examined the emergence of colour prejudice in the early modern French empire, my work should make a substantial contribution to the field of world history. Read less » Abstract »

Melanie Lamotte
University of Cambridge
ml510@cam.ac.uk
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/ml510@cam.ac.uk

"The Pricing Revolution in Marine Insurance"

Marine insurance has been underwritten for centuries, and is a critical component of trade finance. It is one of the key elements of economic development and growth, but no comprehensive database of historical marine insurance prices has ever been assembled. By compiling and digitizing thousands of entries from the ledgers of marine insurance underwriters who were active in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this project will create such a resource. The data will be drawn from archival sources held in archives across the United Kingdom, and formatted to allow like-for-like comparisons of actual marine insurance prices set at different points over a long period. Analysis of the database will allow a greater understanding of how marine insurance pricing developed and advanced, and how merchants and underwriters understood risk and probability in the early modern period. This in turn will unlock new aspects of our understanding of the development of trade, of naval warfare and state-building, of the relationships between business centres, of the evolution of investment and finance, and of institutional development and sustained success. Read less » Abstract »

Adrian Leonard
University of Cambridge
abl28@cam.ac.uk

"'Indian title', Regime Change, and the Origins of the Cotton Kingdom: Land Tenure in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790-1830"

Native American land titles played a central role in the Lower Mississippi Valley’s contentious transition from Spanish military colony to U.S. Cotton Kingdom. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase Treaty outlawed private purchases of Indian land, settlers petitioned for U.S. approval of their Spanish-era Indian land purchases. At the same time, Native Americans also used the private land claims process to gain approval of their own Spanish-era land grants. While scholars often treat settler property-making and aboriginal land negotiations as categorically separate, my project describes an alternative process, in which Native land was both appropriated and defended within the development of private land markets. Read less » Abstract »

Julia Lewandoski
University of California, Berkeley
julia.lewandoski@berkeley.edu

"The Historical Legacy of Colonial Medicine Campaigns in Central and West Africa"

For as long as colonial governments existed in Africa, so did attempts at controlling the disease environ- ment. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, colonial regimes undertook extensive medical campaigns aimed at managing tropical diseases for a combination of self-interested and public minded reasons. In French Equa- torial Africa (which includes modern day Gabon, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Chad), Cameroon, and present day Democratic Republic of Congo, these campaigns included both prophylactic and therapeutic treatments for diseases such as sleeping sickness, leprosy, yaws, syphilis, malaria, yellow fever and tuberculosis. While the campaigns were generally well intentioned and may have been effective at reducing the prevalence of some diseases, they may have also had a series of unintended effects on the disease environment, institutional capacity, spread of contagious diseases and beliefs about Western medicine. What is the overall legacy of the colonial medical campaigns on contemporary economic and social outcomes, and what are the channels through which these effects persist? Read less » Abstract »

Sara Lowes
Harvard University
http://scholar.harvard.edu/slowes

"The Making of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1887-1899"

For economic historians, the history of stock exchanges has often portrayed the financial history and the economic climate of the financial centre in which they are situated. Despite many recent revitalised studies of stock exchanges in Western Europe and North America, Africa in general and Southern Africa in particular, has received just about no attention. The discovery of gold in Johannesburg in 1886 was to intensify the pace of economic and social change by attracting foreign capital, manufacturers and settlers, and by drawing more labour from African agricultural communities. Woven interchangeably with the history of gold mining in Johannesburg is the story of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Wedged in between hopeful industrialists, British loyalists, European bankers, colonial administrators and President Kruger's firm stance on the development of white Afrikaner economic nationalism, the JSE was strategically integrated into the greater Anglo-Afrikaner conflict which would manifest itself with the South African War in 1899, Britain's costliest war since the defeat of Napoleon. This project traces the JSE's foundation, rise and interaction with Southern Africa's gold mining revolution, and most importantly, investigates the dynamics of the extensive financial networks between the JSE, London and Paris. Read less » Abstract »

Mariusz Lukasiewicz
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
mariusz.lukasiewicz@graduateinstitute.ch

"The energy challenges of the French-American relations from 1969 to 1974"

My project examines the role of energy questions in the French-American relations from 1969 to 1974. The purpose of my dissertation is to explain how Richard Nixon's and Georges Pompidou's presidencies managed to face the impact of decolonization on their energy policies, adapted to the new balance of powers in Africa and Middle-East, and faced up to the 1973-74 oil crisis. It exposes the alliances and confrontations between France and the United States of America in the early 1970s by using the energy questions (oil, gas and nuclear ones) as a timeline and as a topic of discussion between the two trans-Atlantic powers. Read less » Abstract »

Pierre Manenti
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan
pierre.manenti@ens-cachan.fr

"Colonial Labour in Perspective: Towards a Global History of the Maritime Labour Market ”

This project studies the economies of colonial maritime labour. The labour of colonial lascars became crucial for British shipping through the 19th and 20th centuries. Recruiting lascars from Britain’s Indian Ocean colonies at between a fifth of a European sailor’s wages gave British shipping companies a competitive advantage against their Dutch, Norwegian, American and Japanese rivals. Their cheapness made them eminently attractive to shipping companies, and by the Second World War, these seafarers, or lascars, made up a quarter of the merchant shipping workforce. Part of research for my doctoral thesis, this project examines the construction and enforcement of their economic inferiority in a global maritime labour market. Read less » Abstract »

Naina Manjrekar
School of Oriental and African Studies
manjrekar.naina@gmail.com

"The Economic Reforms of the Viceroy of Peru and the 1687 Earthquake of Lima"

The Duke of the Palata, viceroy of Peru between 1681 and 1689, initiated a series of economic reforms that aimed to improve the fiscal system and the condition of the Royal Treasure of the Viceroyalty. When the 1687 earthquake hit Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty, the new measures were producing a significant increase in the tax collection that helped fund the treasury. Nonetheless, the reconstruction period in the aftermath of the earthquake affected the implementation of the reforms and their long–term effects. The purpose of this project is to explain the increase in the remittances to Spain amid the period of disaster created by the earthquake. At the same time, I seek to critically analyze the Viceroy's contradictory stance on the state of the Royal Treasury, which he bemoaned as bankrupt while he continued sending money to the peninsula. His administrative decisions and ingenious measures in economic and political matters, before and after the earthquake reflected the Spanish crown's vibrant colonialist economic policies, whose mercantilist and imperialist character appears far from inept. Read less » Abstract »

Judith Mansilla
Florida International University
jmans005@fiu.edu

"Mestizos and the Spanish Imperial Race for Reconstruction: Habilitation Payments, Crown Fundraising, and the Armada, 1588-1594"

In the 16th century, conquering Spaniards fathered children with Indian women. Initially, names for these offspring were fluid, creative, and abundant. Beginning in the 1530s, however, colonists in the New World began to petition the King of Spain and his magistrates, describing these offspring as ‘mestizos’ and asking the Crown to issue laws on them. In a process that scholars have scarcely explored, the Crown transferred these petitioners’ words almost verbatim into their royal decrees, allowing colonists a central role in writing imperial law and designing the social categories of the Indies. The final segment of my research, from 1591 to 1595, explores fees Spanish-Indian offspring petitioned and paid for the right to bear arms. I ask if these payments facilitated the Spanish Armada’s reconstruction. I also place these fees at the center of Quito’s important tax-related 1591-5 Alcabala Revolt, which I argue was partly the result of the failure of the arms-sale scheme. Lastly, I ask: how Spanish-Indian offspring grapple with the legal category 'mestizo' in these payments and petitions? Read less » Abstract »

Adrian Masters
University of Texas at Austin
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/history/graduate/gradstudents/profile.php?id=am55278

"Electrical Palestine: Jewish and Arab Technopolitics under British Rule"

The project aims to understand the role of electricity generation and distribution in Palestine during the period of British rule, 1917-1948. It suggests, first of all, that electrification should be understood not simply as a technological process, but as a social formation that includes political and cultural aspects, as well. Consequently, a history of Palestinian electrification stands to offer new insight with respect to the character of social, economic, and political life in modern Palestine, not least with respect to group formation and interaction. I also hope to make a historiographical contribution with relevance beyond Palestine, by emphasizing the multiple feedback loops connecting such seemingly discrete categories as ‘the economy,’ ‘nature,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘technology.’ It will draw on the records of the Palestine Government, the major Jewish and Arab political and philanthropic bodies, court records, and the press, found in a number of state and municipal archives in Israel/Palestine and the UK. In addition, the archives of the Israel Electric Corporation constitutes a particularly rich, yet previously neglected source. Read less » Abstract »

Fredrik Meiton
New York University
fwm214@nyu.edu

"Democratic Planning: University Planning Forums and India's Second Five-Year Plan, 1956-1961"

The decision to pursue a policy of economic planning was made well before India gained independence from colonial rule. The intellectual spadework had begun much earlier, during sessions of the Indian National Congress. From the late 1930s onward, planning had become a watchword in their deliberations regarding India's economic future. By the time independence was visible on the political horizon it had become integral to the Congress' blueprint for post-colonial development. The Congress party wasn't alone in thinking along these lines. Their belief in a planned economy (with large-scale state intervention) was echoed by leading domestic industrialists, who presented their views in the 'Bombay Plan' of 1944. My project tracks the development of 'planning thought' in India - from its first formal articulation under the aegis of the Congress' National Planning Committee, to its culmination in the first two Five Year Plans. This project's objectives are twofold: firstly, to trace the genealogy of ideas relating to economic planning, and study its ascendance over competing economic models. Secondly, to relate the optic of planning to the nascent Indian state's political concerns and projects. Planners were aware that this was a unique experiment. And contemporaries shared in the belief that they were undertaking something momentous. To India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, planning was more than just a means of organizing India's economy – it was also part of the process of refashioning India's polity and its citizens. My inquiry seeks to highlight the ways in which the ends of economic planning were also social and political. Read less » Abstract »

Nikhil Menon
Princeton University

 

"Saltwater Empire: The Caribs and the Politics of Smuggling, Insurgency, and the Slave Trade in the Circum-Caribbean, 1763-1833"

My research project explores how the largest and most powerful native community of the Lesser Antilles, the Caribs, or Kalinago, transformed the eighteenth-century Lesser Antilles and the nineteenth-century Bay of Honduras into a fluid space by blending violence, diplomacy, trade, and kinship. This community transformed a world of plantation slavery and imperial monopolies into a contested space and colonial resource drain. Far from being trapped between imperial powers, the Caribs consciously determined the course and outcomes of political events. They supported the French and American insurgents in overthrowing Great Britain’s dominion over the West Indies in the American Revolution. During the French Revolutionary Wars in the Antilles, the natives allied with the French Republic against British and French colonists who were loyal to the king. Frustrated by the natives’ raids on sugar plantations and their disregard for imperial trade policies, the British took the drastic measure of forcefully relocating the entire Carib community to the Spanish Bay of Honduras in 1797. Once on Spanish soil, the natives established effective patronage relationships with the Spaniards, joined colonial militias, and functioned as intermediaries between Spanish, British, and North American smugglers. Throughout these events, the Caribs imposed their notions of space and sovereignty onto European hegemony and ultimately transformed the Lesser Antilles and the Gulf of Honduras into de facto borderlands. I suggest that this community derived their power from Old Regime practices and institutions such as smuggling, slave trading, and monarchical loyalism, while ideas of enlightened freedom and the emergence of modern nation-states paradoxically undermined their autonomy and political influence. Read less » Abstract »

Ernesto Mercado-Montero
University of Texas at Austin
emercado@utexas.edu

"Mikhail Gorbachev's Agricultural Reforms and the Politics of Perestroika"

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, many have suggested that Moscow should have followed China's example in moving from a centrally-planned to a market-based economy. Yet documents I have collected from Soviet archives, including records of high-level Politburo meetings, show that during the 1980s, Soviet economists and policymakers carefully examined China's economic policy, and deliberately copied China's reforms when trying to improve the efficiency of their own economy. These findings suggest that the divergence in the two countries' outcomes – with China experiencing several decades of rapid growth, and the Soviet Union collapsing in the midst of a terrible economic slump – are best explained by differences in the two countries' domestic politics and the role played by powerful economic interest groups. Read less » Abstract »

Chris Miller
Yale University
cr.miller@yale.edu

"Patriotic Pepper: The Economics of Revolution in Colonial Mahé"

In a draft of the celebrated physiocratic treatise La philosophie rurale (1763), François Quesnay wrote that national trading companies holding monopolies on foreign commerce were "enemies of the state." Adam Smith made a similar claim in The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which he derided these corporations as the "most effectual" expedient "that can well be contrived to stunt the natural growth of a colony." For both authors, companies embodied the worst excesses of the mercantilist system, serving as straw men whose glaring deficiencies were used to justify the adoption of free trade practices. How did trading companies acquire this reputation for abusive behavior and outmoded economic thinking? This project seeks to answer this question by examining the embattled public image of the Compagnie des Indes, the privileged trading corporation that oversaw French trade in India during the eighteenth century. Scholars have often explained the Company's declining status within the public imagination as the ineluctable working of market forces: as people became aware of the flaws inherent in monopoly-driven commerce, they called for the dissolution of trading corporations in favor of a laissez-faire economy. As I argue, however, this focus on opposing economic principles obscures the personal squabbles that were the main cause of the Company's floundering reputation. Both critics and apologists for the Company rarely possessed a clear idea of market conditions on the subcontinent. Disputes over the Company and its practices were driven less by ideological conviction or commercial expertise than by personal interest—the desire to discredit a rival or to curry favor with a well-placed patron. The Company's eventual dissolution was not simply the triumph of a superior economic logic. Rather, it was the product of an assortment of successful lobbying efforts that concerned themselves little with the commercial realties facing the Company. This project is about the rancor, conflict, and specious reasoning that paved the road to economic modernity. Read less » Abstract »

Greg Mole
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
gmole@email.unc.edu

"The Impact of the French Revolutionary Period on Communication Patterns Among Mercantile Networks in the British and French Atlantic World, c.1763-1804"

This project examines the influence of the French Revolutionary period (1789-1804) on the circulation of news and information within and between the British Empire and the overseas French empire from 1763 to 1804. It compares the operation of communication networks in the West Indies among British and French merchants, investors, planters, and colonial and naval officials. It explores how these historical actors corresponded with each other, the impact of effective communication networks on lawful and illicit trade (i.e. sugar, coffee, cacao), and the colonial and metropolitan governments' attempts to control the movement of information, especially in light of the metropoles' ban on trade with other nations. This project then looks at how these communication patterns changed in light of the outbreak of the French Revolution, such as the increase in censorship and surveillance of mail, government control of the colonial presses, and the implementation of legislation to closely monitor mercantile enterprises in the West Indies. Read less » Abstract »

Francesco Morriello
University of Cambridge

"Connecting indenture across oceans: letter-writing between India and three Guianas”

It is commonly repeated within the historiography of Indian indentured labour to the Caribbean that the trauma of the three-month voyage from India to the Caribbean was a definite break between homeland and new home. The Indian and Atlantic Oceans have been portrayed as physical barriers, vast bodies of water that severed ties between migrants and their families. Distance, however, is not an accurate measurement of loss of contact. Within the three Guianas (British Guiana, Suriname, and French Guiana), Indian migrants were able to send letters through respective immigration departments or consular services to the immigration agent for British Guiana at Calcutta who then forwarded the correspondence regionally. This project maps this movement of letters from the three Guianas to Calcutta and beyond through an examination of the papers of the immigration agent. It is an exploration of the bureaucracy that upheld the movement of words as physical objects between colonies and across empires while also examining the ways in which migrants and their families appropriated certain tools of communication, in this case writing, to perpetuate ties of kinship. Read less » Abstract »

Louise Moschetta
University of Cambridge
lpgm2@cam.ac.uk

"Business Management Expertise in the U.S. Defense Establishment, 1950-1990"

My dissertation examines the exchange of management expertise between the U.S. military and the private sector during the Cold War period. After the Korean War, defense leaders turned to business leaders for insight in how to manage the new national security state. The defense establishment recruited business executives (most notably Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara) and encouraged military officers to get MBAs. These business-savvy defense managers initiated a wide range of reforms that included financial inventory accounting systems that made managers account for materials and labor in dollar terms, extensive privatization of many non-combat functions, and “work measurement” systems more ambitious than many private industry attempts at scientific management. By the end of McNamara’s tenure, the Department of Defense had been reorganized in the image of a large industrial corporation: functionally organized and quantitatively controlled. My research uncovers the consequences of the application of capitalist business concepts in the heart of the American state. In order to understand the course of the American Century we have to look at the military as a major economic institution that was employing, buying, selling, building, manufacturing, transporting, and, of course, destroying. Read less » Abstract »

AJ Murphy
Columbia University
ajm2221@columbia.edu

"Building States through International Assistance: The United Nations between Trusteeship and Self-Determination, 1945 to 1965"

My project uncovers the United Nations as a significant historical actor rather than merely an intergovernmental forum. It examines UN development assistance from 1945 to 1965, asking how UN employees negotiated the mandate to respect state sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter, and their task to further development, thus reaching into the heart of sovereign affairs. Although in theory merely assisting sovereign states with advice, I show how the organization often assumed a more proactive, interventionist role shaping how member states formulated their interests and even placing foreign experts into national administrations. I argue that UN assistance was neither a triumph of international understanding nor a neocolonial imposition, but the result of a negotiation mediated by international civil servants between sovereign states of vastly different bargaining positions. UN assistance, I suggest, came to function as a voluntary state-building system in which the tension between tutelage in the name of expertise and the self-determination of sovereign states was continuously renegotiated. Although it has been argued that post war internationalism sprang from a conviction that the nation-state system was becoming increasingly obsolete, my dissertation argues that the establishment of UN development aid actually supported the proliferation of the nation-state form on a global scale. Read less » Abstract »

Eva-Maria Muschik
New York University
emm442@nyu.edu

"Explaining the Socio-Economic Demographics of Victorian Naval Medicine"

The nineteenth century has been approached as a period of extensive professionalization of British medicine by existing scholarship. One facet of this development was an expansion of medical education in Scottish universities, London teaching hospitals, and Dublin. The resulting increase in the number medical students being trained, when added to existing practitioners, oversaturated Britain's domestic medical profession's labor market. These labor dynamics, in turn, shaped medical students' career options and choices. The broader question of how Scottish-educated surgeons came to dominate naval medicine's bureaucratic administration and seaborne practice following the Napoleonic Wars frames this research. The aim of this particular project is to quantify and analyze Britain's labor market for medical practitioners with the hypothesis that oversaturation of the labor market played a significant role in steering Scottish-educated surgeons into naval and military service. There is anecdotal evidence that the armed services were the best employment opportunity for many surgeons from middling backgrounds. This finding related to labor dynamics will be the starting point for dissertation research regarding how Scottish surgeons were able to reform naval medical institutions and practices during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Read less » Abstract »

Christopher Myers
University of Pittsburgh
chm73@pitt.edu

"Land contracts and land conflicts. Land politics in Central Highlands of Vietnam. History of the Bahnar in Kontum, Central Highlands of Vietnam, 1850-1945 "

Previous researches examine the history of Central Highlands in Vietnam from different angles: the relationship between Catholic Church and the State, migration policy, and the process of highlanders turning into minorities. This study addresses research gaps on the change in highlanders’ land ownership under the impact of the external factors namely Catholic Church, French colonial state, immigrants and the interactions among different interest groups. Choosing the case study of ethnic minority group - Bahnar, I argue that land ownership is the core issue in the highlanders’ history. Accompanying the loss of the ownership of their land to the Catholic Church, French colonial state and the immigrants was the process of losing political independence. This research into a question of economic history thus has strong political implications. The research uses two key methodologies: historical (archives) and anthropological (fieldwork). Read less » Abstract »

Anh Minh Nguyen Dang
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE)
nguyendanganhminh@gmail.com

"Poor Politics: Historical Origins of Contemporary Conceptions of the Poor”

My project investigates the 18th and 19th century origins of modern views of the relation between the poor and the state. In particular, I concentrate on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree on poverty and deprivation – and explore how, if at all, they might have influenced the development of subsequent legal and political discourse about the poor in England and the U.S. In doing so, I take a capacious view of poverty including gender inequality, inequality of education, and deprivation of rights thought fundamental to citizenship such as property, contract, and voting. Drawing upon legal work in Property, Contracts, and Poverty Law, I aim to elucidate how certain statutes, policies, and cases at common law rest on political assumptions about the poor -- and ask whether those assumptions may have heretofore unrecognized antecedents in the thought of Rowntree, Wollstonecraft, and Paine. Read less » Abstract »

Aditya Pai
Harvard Law School

"Anglo-Portuguese Trade And Monetary Transmission During the Eighteenth Century"

By the early eighteenth century Portugal was importing from Brazilian mines annual quantities of gold which were higher than those Spain had ever received from Spanish American colonies. Brazilian gold inflows increased as the century advanced, peaking around mid century and then slowly declining, as shown by recent archival research. Portugal imported large quantities of English goods and in return two-thirds of Brazilian gold, a significant windfall, ended up in English hands. English coin output increased significantly as a consequence, and Portuguese coin circulated in England during this period. Still, most was melted to be re-minted as English currency, and significant quantities were re-exported.Read less » Abstract »

Nuno Palma
Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisbon
https://sites.google.com/site/npgpalma/

"Sinking Pisa: The Decline of a Commercial Empire in the Thirteenth Century"

My dissertation utilizes legal documents to determine the underlying economic causes and the effects of the destruction of Pisan mercantile and naval power at the end of the thirteenth century. In doing so, I am able to rebuild the economic networks in late thirteenth century Pisan society, a period of declining control of Mediterranean markets for the commune. I achieve this through a meticulous examination of the extant notarial registers, personal documents, and public diplomatic records from the period surrounding the Battle of Meloria (1284), commonly held as the key event after which Pisa's commercial vitality declined. I intend to utilize the methods of the nascent field of historical dynamic network analysis to create a clearer picture of the restructuring of merchant networks at the time. In doing so, I hope to answer larger questions of why certain economies declined and others (e.g.: Florence) flourished during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era. Read less » Abstract »

Matthew Parker
Saint Louis University
mparke26@slu.edu

 

 

"Race, Risk, and Financial Capitalism in the United States, 1880-1940"

Financial capitalism was a source of anxiety for nineteenth-century Americans. Between 1890 and 1940, industrialization and corporate integration elevated the role of finance in economic life and amplified those concerns. This project examines how Americans attempted to regulate this sector of the economy and how those efforts were shaped by the rise of Jim Crow, which influenced regulation in two ways: by compelling southern political elites to resist the reach of federal authority into a segregating society, and by furnishing anxious Americans with rhetorical tools for naturalizing financial risk as a privilege of whiteness. By tracing the impact of Jim Crow on the evolution of financial regulation, I show how modern understandings of economic freedom and liberal citizenship, as well as key sectors of the modern economy, developed alongside modern systems of discrimination rather than apart from them. Read less » Abstract »

Daniel Platt
Brown University
daniel_platt@brown.edu

"The economic life in Russia in the light of the Domostroi (1550-1800)"

The research I intend to realize thanks to the grant delivered by the History Project consists in examining into details the economic aspect of the Domostroi – the famous sixteenth-century Russian domestic book my PhD dissertation is dedicated to. First of all, it implies a comparison of the economic life depicted in the Domostroi with the information that can be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian documents dealing with trade, loans and various movables and immovables transactions. Such a comparison represents a new attempt to evaluate how close to the Russian economic life of the 16th-17th centuries the Domostroi was. As the manuscript tradition of the text runs from the late 16th to the end of the 18th century, it becomes possible to see if the economic part of the Domostroi underwent any changes during this time and to study the relationship between these changes and the Russian economic and legal history. Read less » Abstract »

Eugène Priadko
University of Paris (Paris IV)
eugenepriadko@gmail.com

"Standing Room Only: Debating Population Control, Religion, and the Family in Pakistan, 1950-71”

In the early 1960s, Pakistan became the second country in the world to adopt official policies for population control. This experience mirrored concurrent global trends in which development discourse, egged on at times by Malthusian notions of a ticking population bomb, saw population control as essential to ensuring productive livelihoods and healthy households. My project charts the interactions between local and global actors as they popularized and contested family planning projects in Pakistan from the early 1950s-1977. I explore the place of population control in theories of modernization in Pakistan, and how networks between social scientists, women’s activists, religious scholars, and politicians worked at different levels to produce new notions of the individual, family, and citizenship. By placing the household at the heart of my narrative my project examines how development, through projects of family planning is understood, implemented, and debated at the level of the everyday - while still firmly connected to national and global currents. Read less » Abstract »

Amna Qayyum
Princeton University
aqayyum@princeton.edu

 

"Damming the Cauvery: Water, Development, and the Remaking of Agrarian Territory in Colonial and Postcolonial South India"

The research I intend to realize thanks to the grant delivered by the History Project consists in examining into details the economic aspect of the Domostroi – the famous sixteenth-century Russian domestic book my PhD dissertation is dedicated to. First of all, it implies a comparison of the economic life depicted in the Domostroi with the information that can be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian documents dealing with trade, loans and various movables and immovables transactions. Such a comparison represents a new attempt to evaluate how close to the Russian economic life of the 16th-17th centuries the Domostroi was. As the manuscript tradition of the text runs from the late 16th to the end of the 18th century, it becomes possible to see if the economic part of the Domostroi underwent any changes during this time and to study the relationship between these changes and the Russian economic and legal history. Read less » Abstract »

Aditya Ramesh
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
aditya.ramesh.2@gmail.com

"From Relief to Reconstruction to Development: Defining and Implementing Aid in Post-war Italy"

In the years following the Second World War, an array of states came together to create institutions that would first rebuild war-ravaged Western Europe and then promote economic growth and political stability in the “less-developed” world. Unprecedented amounts of foreign aid were poured into these new initiatives, and the discipline of development economics emerged. My dissertation asks how, why, and from where this post-war paradigm for economic development aid emerged, and in answering those questions points to the connections between European reconstruction and development practices employed elsewhere. Aid and lending to Italy by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Marshall Plan, and the World Bank form a bridge between reconstruction and development. I use the case of assistance to Italy to demonstrate the interactions between intellectual concepts and on-the-ground constraints in institutional formation and economic policy creation. Read less » Abstract »

Emily Riley
Princeton University
emilych@princeton.edu

 

 

"Negotiating Authority over Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856-1951”

My project investigates why the American theatre rejected the copyright-author narrative from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. I seek to explain how this resistance emerged through the negotiating practices of theatrical mediators including agents of playwrights, publishers of plays, trade union associates, government bureaucrats, and theatrical producers. A deeper archival examination of the ways in which creative industries such as the American theatre historically organized and negotiated the movement of copyright reveals profound uncertainties about the economic, legal, and artistic authority of authors. My study contributes an alternative history to a broader intellectual property history literature, in which the conventional view is that copyright’s reach has inexorably expanded over the last two centuries. Understanding how mediators created authority structures over dramatic copyright requires an archival examination of mediator manipulation of a range of objects and processes of production in the theatre. Such objects and processes include printed and published dramatic scripts, prompt scripts, dramaturgical notes, advanced royalty notices, theatrical contracts, ticket stubs, as well as accounting and rehearsal processes. My research examines the ways in which mediators would recast the contours of economic and artistic authority over intellectual creation by how they interacted with their surrounding materials – a fusion of the historical mediator and the tools of their trade. It is these interactions that are the engines behind how intellectual creation moved in the theatrical economy, and how authority was asserted, in the history of American theatre practice. Read less » Abstract »

Brent Salter
Yale Law School
brent.salter@yale.edu

 

"The Long Life of Yazoo: Land Speculation, Finance, and Dispossession in the Post-Revolutionary South, 1789-1840"

In 1795 the state of Georgia sold roughly 35 million acres of western lands over which it claimed sovereignty for $500,000 to four land companies in one of the most notoriously corrupt land deals in US history—what would become known as the Yazoo land fraud. Although a new legislature passed an act to nullify the sale, these land companies had dispersed their claims to millions of acres of land possessed by southeastern Indians across nascent financial markets in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, where the claims would remain in legal limbo until validated by Chief Justice John Marshall in Fletcher v. Peck (1810). My project probes the Yazoo land sales and their legal afterlife to explore how financial markets, land speculation, and business networks shaped the dynamics of settler colonialism, state development, and the expansion of slavery in the southeastern United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Yazoo sales show that the transformation of the Southeast from Indian Country to Slave Country was made possible not only by constitutional bargains between North and South, or a broader ideological commitment to property rights, but by actual legal and financial entanglements that ensnared a range of lawyers, merchants, planters, and other investors. Their involvement in the sales would encourage the coordination and consolidation of vested interests in the Yazoo lands that were then pursued through vigorous lobbying efforts that shaped a range diplomatic negotiations, judicial actions, and legislative deliberations throughout the early republic. Finance facilitated this process by intensifying and expanding the commodification of all types of property, rendering each more fungible, salable, and movable in powerful ways. In escalating the scale and scope of financial transactions that expanded both the geographic and social orbit of claims to Indian owned territory, this structural shift also encouraged a particular way of thinking about Indian lands that would provide intellectual and legal justifications for their expropriation. In the Yazoo sales of 1795, finance, speculation, and territorial expansion became permanently entwined, wedding capital markets, land values, and a speculating public to the process of dispossession in the post-Revolutionary South. Read less » Abstract »

Franklin Sammons
University of California - Berkeley
fsammons@berkeley.edu

 

"The politics of last resort lending and the Overend & Gurney crisis of 1866"

News of the insolvency of Overend, Gurney, & Company on 10 May 1866 generated a scramble for funds in the City of London and urgent appeals to the Bank of England. The banking panic triggered by the collapse of the prominent British discount house became one of the Bank’s most tumultuous modern crises. This article investigates the politics of the Bank’s liquidity provision during the 1866 crisis, and in the ensuing months of financial stringency. By assessing the correspondence, speeches, and publications of Governors, City figures, and financial journalists, the article finds that the Bank’s evolving approach to crisis lending was decisively shaped by its commercial objectives and a prolonged struggle to preserve its autonomy. When confronted with the 1866 crisis, the Bank adopted a pragmatic stance towards the market, which accommodated the credit needs of the City without sacrificing either its privileged legal status or its shareholders’ interests. Its Governors’ rhetorical pursuit of ‘constructive ambiguity’ during the post-crisis months succeeded in both limiting moral hazard and consolidating the Bank’s discretionary powers.

This abstract is based on the author’s article, ‘The Politics of Last Resort Lending and the Overend & Gurney Crisis of 1866’, published Open Access in The Economic History Review (2021) and available here.    Read less » Abstract »

Sabine Schneider
University of Cambridge

"Making Jesus Springs: How Economic Change Stoked the Culture Wars"
(Appendix)

Between the late 1980s and early 1990s dozens of evangelical Christian ministries moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, earning the city the nickname "the Evangelical Vatican." Why did these ministries move there? And what were the consequences of this migration? I seek to answer these questions by exploring the relationship between economic change and cultural conflict in the late-twentieth-century United States. The "evangelization" of Colorado Springs was, first and foremost, an economic phenomenon. The city's Chamber of Commerce reached out to evangelical ministries as a way to rebuild the local economy, which had been devastated by the savings and loans scandals and real estate busts of the 1980s. The ministries, for their part, moved to Colorado Springs to escape the rising cost of living in regions like southern California. My research will explore these economic decisions--but it will also examine their cultural consequences. As evangelical Christians resettled in Colorado Springs, some among them sought to "Christianize" the city; they engaged in massive prayer rallies and campaigned in favor of anti-gay rights laws. Their efforts were resisted not only by liberal activists but also by local business leaders, who feared that a reputation for conservatism would hurt Colorado Springs in the competition for global capital. The resultant clashes over gay rights, abortion, and school prayer made Colorado Springs a symbol of the culture wars during the 1990s. My dissertation, then, will offer a new interpretation of these culture wars, viewing them in light of the changing American economy. Read less » Abstract »

William J. Schultz
Princeton University
wjschult@princeton.edu

"Framing the Colonial Economy in Nineteenth Century India”

This project will analyse the imperial economy of colonial India through the counterfeiting of the emblematic silver rupee, at the three Presidencies: Madras, Calcutta and Bombay in the nineteenth century. It intends to explore how the establishment of the Company rupee as the legal tender, from a multiplicity of currencies, was always an unsettled practice. It tracks the struggles over minting between the princely states in India and the East India Company and its successor regime, along with a thorough examination of the design and material properties of the rupee in relation to the hegemonic aspirations of the colonial regime, and the economic and political exigencies of the time. Yet thwarting these grand plans of hegemony was the shadowy figure of the counterfeiter. If the counterfeiting operations had to be dismantled, the ‘legal’ mode of production and circulation of the Indian rupee, had to be more distinctly defined. Hence, this project also hopes to locate the shifts in the laws of minting and definitions of the offence of counterfeiting to delineate the fine boundaries between the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’ economy. Read less » Abstract »

Sukhalata Sen
Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

"Trade, politics and the English Mayor's Court: Law and trading practices in the 18th century Bay of Bengal"

The emphasis of the project would be to identify the correlations between the transformations in the trading practices and the changes in the legal-political regime in 18th century Bay of Bengal. It will take a close look at the economic practices of various groups in the Bay of Bengal trading arena such as the Armenians and other indigenous traders and also European agents like the English, or the Portuguese trading companies. It will look at a juncture in the history of this zone when particularly the coastal enclaves of Madras and Calcutta encountered a formative colonial legal regime represented by the English East India Company's Mayor's Court. The changes in the political character of the region- first with the disintegration of the Mughal state and then the emergence of Company rule encouraged the rise of new actors in the economic scene. The rise of the Europeans was coincided by the introduction of new legal and administrative instruments. This indicated the possibility of a strong correlation between the changes in the economic character of the region with the broader institutional changes. The period also witnessed an increasing rate of centralization of the notion of 'justice' in the realm of the new legal institutions. Changes in the notions of 'law' and 'justice' could alter the economic practices, ideas of morality and trust and also redefine the various relations in the region among the economic and political actors. The project therefore aims to identify the transformations in the trading practices in the zone under the impact of the emergent legal-political structure. The project would also interrogate how the legal regime altered the socio-economic and political milieu at large. It will also assess how the legal encounters transformed the identities of the 'self' and the 'other' among these actors, realigning the power relations among the indigenous groups and European powers, in turn structuring the political-economic scenario. A study of the colonial archives situated in - Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and New Delhi, will help in establishing a standpoint beyond the debates on decline that has marked the historiography of the period, allowing the construction of longue duree narrative towards the formation of the Empire. Read less » Abstract »

Santanu Sengupta
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
parasant21@gmail.com

 

"From Commercial Custom to International Laws: the Shrinking Business of Ottoman Captivity, 1730s to 1870s"

My project focuses on the Ottoman Empire's unique role in the history of international law, considering one particular way in which the abstract Islamic, treaty, and customary laws of war interacted to have very real effects on individual lives: captivity. Using Ottoman, Russian, British, and Austrian archival sources, I argue that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a major transition in the Middle East, Balkans, and Black Sea—from a frontier law based on a ransom economy, to an "international," or perhaps more accurately "inter-imperial," law based on legal and political categories of identity. The result was that Ottoman captivity increasingly came to resemble a recognizable "prisoner of war" system, until, in the 1850s, Russo-Ottoman practice was eventually annexed to the growing body of western European international law. At the Center, I will be conducting research in Harvard's libraries as I prepare to revise and extend my doctoral dissertation for publication as a monograph. Read less » Abstract »

Will Smiley
Yale University
william.smiley@yale.edu

 

 

"Slaves, "Prisoners of War," and Inter-Imperial Law in the Ottoman Empire, 1699-1856"

My History Project Research Grant will help fund a visit to the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, Turkey for the month of August 2014, and further research in late October 2014. This will help me to extend my dissertation's exploration of critical changes in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century law and practice of ransom and captivity in the Ottoman Empire, up through at least 1856. Based on Ottoman, British, Russian, and Austrian archives, I examine the origins of a legal "prisoner of war" system in the Ottoman Empire, in the context of intense imperial rivalry with Russia, changing discourses of Islamic and international law, and shifting relationships between the Ottoman central state, its subjects, and imperial intermediaries. This is part of a larger book project, which I began last summer at Harvard (with History Project funding), and will continue in 2014-2015 as I write the manuscript. The resulting book will appeal to scholars of the Middle East, Eurasia, slavery, the laws of war, and international law. Image Caption: Fatwa (Islamic legal opinion) issued by the Ottomans' chief jurist on the legality of returning enslaved Austrian children following a peace agreement in 1791. Read less » Abstract »

Will Smiley
Princeton University
wasmiley@princeton.edu

"Book Markets and Popular Learning in Nineteenth-Century Lima and Bogotá"

Improvements in typography and paper manufacturing as well as expanding readerships and legal stipulations for freedom of the press stimulated the explosion of nineteenth-century print culture across the Atlantic World. An assortment of instructional media that promoted commerce, industry and the development of a skilled labor force surfaced much in the way that the internet has emerged as a medium of informal, educational alternatives today. Scholarly emphasis on formal education, however, has obscured the significance of alternative modes of didacticism for broader social and economic history. My project takes late, nineteenth-century Peru and Colombia as case studies, probing the relationship between the boom in didactic print culture and changes in popular professions and urban economic life. Authors of didactic media addressed diverse topics ranging from the production of foods and liqueurs to metalsmithing, telegraphy, shopkeeping and even prestidigitation. The availability of official and unofficial didactic content suggests this genre had broad popular readerships. Through analysis of informal education facilitated through didactic media (books, textbooks, pamphlets, newspapers, and manuals), bricks-and-mortar establishments (publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, home schools), and enthusiasts of education (teachers, writers, editors and publishers), this project highlights the relevance of “popular didacticism” for economic life and the diversification of urban professions in nineteenth-century Peru and Colombia. Read less » Abstract »

Gracia Solis
Florida International University
gsoli002@fiu.edu

 

"Wheat, Bread, and the role of the State in 20th century South Africa"

“How did these cereals pass, from the crops growing in the field, to the laborer’s homes? At first sight it appears simple. There is the corn: it is harvested, threshed, taken to market, ground at the mill, baked and eaten. But at every point within this process there are radiating complexities, opportunities for extortion...” (Thompson, 1971:83).

This project traces some of the key historical developments in the South African wheat-to-bread commodity chain, which begins with the farmers who grow the grain and ends with the consumers who buy the bread. It explores the tensions between different interest groups in the chain over time, how they were affected by wider economic and political dynamics, what the effects of regulation on the different interests represented were, and how this has changed as a result of more recent economic liberalisation. The analysis is divided into three basic periods: pre-apartheid, apartheid, and post-apartheid. The pre-apartheid period provides a background against which to study the powerful regulatory structures that began to shape this commodity chain - most pertinently the 1937 Marketing Act. During the apartheid era these inherited mechanisms of control were managed in the interests of white commercial agriculture, with political, economic, and social issues impacting on the relationships within the chain. One apparent consequence of the extensive state coordination and support during apartheid was that it gave rise to increasing concentration and the entrenchment of powerful agricultural interest groups. This continued into the post-apartheid period and was augmented by the economic liberalization that took place after 1994, both of which hindered agricultural transformation and highlighted the pernicious effects of a monopolized and ‘de-regulated’ agribusiness. Issues of regulation (and de-regulation) remain largely unexplored prior to, during, and after the apartheid regime, yet they have done much to shape the social and economic history of South Africa.Read less » Abstract »

Benjamin Stanwix
University of Oxford
benjamin.stanwix@trinity.ox.ac.uk

 

 

"Law and Trade: Legal and Economic Institutions Regulating the Trade of Ottoman Subjects with Venice between 1573 and 1645"

My research project aims at exploring and collecting a large array of archival sources on the commercial undertakings of Ottoman subjects trading with Venice during long peace between 1573 and 1645. During this period Venice was probably the most important center of Ottoman commercial deployment in Western Europe; it hosted large groups of Sephardic Jews from Istanbul and Salonika, Anatolian and Balkan Muslims, and Orthodox Greeks from continental Greece. I seek to understand what legal and economic institutions, including international treaties, partnerships, credit contracts, powers of attorney, and state and merchant courts, enabled merchants from the Ottoman Empire to sojourn and do business in Venice as a matter of routine. The bulk of my sources will be court and notarial records, personal documents, and public diplomatic correspondences. My ultimate goal is to write a dissertation that challenges current views of the "long divergence" between Ottoman and European commercial world, according to which due to rigidity of legal and economic institutions the Islamic countries stagnated from the Late Middle Ages onwards. I believe that a more accurate description of the economic organization of private merchants, the administration of justice, and diplomatic negotiations will highlight considerable similarities between the "East" and "West." Read less » Abstract »

Tommaso Stefini
Yale University
tommaso.stefini@yale.edu
https://yale.academia.edu/tommasostefini

 

"Agriculture and development in an age of empire: policy, practice, and agricultural change in colonial Korea, 1910-1945"

This project studies the economic and social changes to agricultural production in Korea during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945). Throughout this time, the colonial government sought to transform agricultural production in a number of ways, be it through policies designed to increase rice production for export to the Japanese mainland or the development and promotion of new agricultural techniques to modernize farming methods. This project will examine the implementation of government policies from the perspective of the farmers affected by such changes. To increase rice production the colonial government attempted to influence farmers to adopt new methods of production. However, this was not a simple process. Farmers who would do so also found it necessary to rely on new sources of capital and agricultural inputs, such as improved seeds and water from new irrigation systems. By capturing the processes by which individual farmers became incorporated into a colonial and regional economy, this project will investigate the various impacts of "agricultural development" for local producers. Read less » Abstract »

Holly Stephens
University of Pennsylvania
hstep@sas.upenn.edu

"Everyday Afterlives: Tracing Diasporic Lives through India's Imperial Archives"

Julia Stephens
Yale University
julia.stephens@yale.edu

 

 

"Slums, Squatters and Urban Redevelopment Schemes in Rangoon, 1894-1960"

The outbreak of the third plague pandemic in Hong Kong and its subsequent spread to other port cities across South and Southeast Asia in the mid-1890s brought with it a newfound interest the kinds of living conditions that made plague, and other diseases, so easily communicated across urban areas. The city hardest hit by the plague epidemic, Bombay, responded in 1898 by creating the Bombay City Improvement Trust (BIT), a move followed by the creation of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) in 1912, the Rangoon Development Trust (RDT) in 1920 and the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) in 1927. These trusts, tasked with making their cities healthier places to live, often dwelt upon ameliorating the conditions that many faced while living in slums by creating new 'hygienic' public housing. To date, little has been written about the RDT, particularly in comparison to the literature on its sister institutions. This project will examine Rangoon's history of urban development in the context of other South and Southeast Asian cities, from the late-nineteenth century through the early years of Burma's independence, with a focus on the economic conditions of squatters and slum dwellers underlying the development of public housing in the city. Read less » Abstract »

Michael Sugarman
University of Cambridge
mws34@cam.ac.uk

 

 

"Credit and Property Rights: Analysing Institutional Development in Colonial Punjab (1900-47)"

Rural indebtedness and landlessness among Punjabi peasants rose rapidly after annexation of the Punjab by the British in 1849. The monetization of the economy and widespread institutional reform aggravated the crisis till the British were forced to pass the Punjab Alienation of Land Act in 1900 to curb land transfers in the province. This project critically analyses the fortunes of Punjabi peasants in the years after the passage of this Act (1900-47) and will also digitize household and farm level data collected by colonial officers and statisticians between 1920 and 1947. The digitization of this data will enable the use of sophisticated quantitative techniques to analyse how the material lives of small-scale cultivators changed during this period before the end of colonial rule in the region in 1947. Quantitative analysis of this data will enable a rich and nuanced understanding of the impact of institutional changes in the provision of property rights and access to cheap credit on the economic welfare of peasant cultivators. The project will also focus on understanding intra-household allocation of resources and changing consumption patterns among the peasants in this period. Read less » Abstract »

Atiyab Sultan
University of Cambridge
as2066@cam.ac.uk

 

"Le modèle économique des Comores dans la période précoloniale"

Ce travail vise une étude historico-archéologique quantitative de l’économie des Comores. Il se portera sur des faits qui se reflètent à la réalité de la société comorienne ancestrale. Beaucoup des aspects économiques qu’on les ignore ses origines et ses fonctionnement font l’objet de nouvelles découvertes pour les intéressés de l’étude économique des Comores ainsi que d’autres. Le cadre chronologique pris en compte se limite, avec toute évidence, de la période du 19eme siècle de notre ère chrétienne. A notre connaissance, nous pensons vous faire sortir des informations qui étaient toujours endormies dans les mémoires du passé. Ces informations permettront d’avoir un portrait sur l’économie des Comores précoloniale afin de tirer d’avantage d’analyse pour assurer une autosuffisance économique des Comores qui est un pays, aujourd’hui, dépendant majoritairement de l’économie de l’extérieure. Read less » Abstract »

Tabibou Ali Tabibou
CNDRS- Moroni
tabibou.tata@hotmail.com

 

"From Wartime Experimentation to New-Era Normalcy: U.S. Mobilization for WWI and the Political Economy of the 1920s"

This project explores the lasting political and economic consequences of the American mobilization for World War One. The experiment with national industrial planning during the war was an unhappy experience for many American business leaders. In response, during the post-war decade of the nineteen twenties, business leaders and their allies attempted to apply lessons learned during the war by reforming the American state. As has been well documented, these elite reformers took care to avoid direct federal intervention in the economy in order to avoid the perceived danger that labor and other interests would exploit expanded federal power for selfish purposes. At the same time, however, they also sought to expand national capabilities—in order to meet domestic as well as international challenges—by bringing "business efficiency" to the federal government. This dual reform agenda was the driving force behind political and economic development in America during the years between World War One and the New Deal. But existing accounts have tended to focus on what elites tried to avoid, leaving their constructive goals unexamined. My project seeks to explain the origins and development of this agenda by following the paper trail left by a key group of policy makers and policy advocates, and by assessing how their wartime experience shaped their policy preferences in the post-war period. Read less » Abstract »

Jesse Tarbert
Case Western Reserve University
jtt34@case.edu

 

 

"Corporatism in the South Atlantic: Development, Social Welfare, and Constitutionalism in Portugal and Brazil, 1922-1945"

My research examines the economic and social projects that emerged as alternatives to capitalism in Portugal and Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on corporatism. The political and economic crises of the interwar years left exposed the limitations of classical liberalism, and it was not a foregone conclusion what new system – if any – would triumph. On both sides of the Atlantic, social scientists, intellectuals, and politicians turned to corporatist ideas for organizing economic development and implementing constitutional reforms that fundamentally reshaped the role of the state in society. The corporatist system provided an alternative to liberalism: society was organized into state-directed collective groups, differentiated and ranked according to economic professions and social roles. The state became the arbiter between labor and capital and, in this way, the corporatist experiment sought to carve a "third path" between capitalism and socialism for mitigating social pressures and controlling economic growth. Corporatism has been framed as a failure and its proponents dismissed for their fascist sympathies and repressive methods. But alongside these authoritarian elements, in Portugal and Brazil the corporatist model was also an impetus for the expansion of economic and social rights through state-led development projects.

The interwar period is often cast as the moment when nations turned inward and nationalism eclipsed internationalism. My current research project challenges this characterization and reveals the South Atlantic as a space for policy exchange and unorthodox economic thinking. The transnational scope of my work requires extensive archival and library research in both Portugal and Brazil, with the History Project supporting research in Lisbon. I seek to reconstruct the crisscrossing networks of economists, social scientists, politicians, and intellectuals who spanned the South Atlantic during the interwar period and facilitated exchanges of corporatist ideas, often entangled with broader debates on progress, "backwardness," welfare, and race. This circulation of knowledge and expertise influenced projects for economic development, as well as the emergence of new corporatist constitutions in which economic and social rights were enumerated for the first time. Casting corporatism in a transnational and comparative framework, I seek to reveal the ways in which these national experiences were part of a more global story of how interwar governments tackled economic decline and political unrest. Read less » Abstract »

Melissa Teixeira
Princeton University
teixeira@princeton.edu

 

 

"Revolutionary Internationalism: Mexico and the Creation of the Postwar Multilateral System, 1919-1948"

This project is an investigation of how the interwar nationalism and internationalism of the less-developed world influenced how the world powers sought to organize global economic governance at the close of the Second World War. Against the notion that liberal multilateralism was antithetical to economic and political nationalism, my preliminary research has uncovered successive efforts by post-Revolutionary Mexican intellectuals, economists, and diplomats, from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 through the Bretton Woods economic conference in 1944, to structure multilateral systems of economic and political cooperation—and to thereby codify a Mexican "revolutionary internationalism" that would address the global distribution of power and resources.

Funding from the History Project will directly support research at the British National Archives concerning Mexico's participation in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Despite Mexico's exclusion from the official conference proceedings, diplomat Alberto J. Pani was sent with a team of envoys by Mexico's President Venustiano Carranza to lobby against the official incorporation of the Monroe Doctrine in the charter of the League of Nations, and to argue in the international arena for the legitimacy of the new Mexican vision of state-vested property rights, which had been recently codified in the constitution of 1917. I argue that Mexico's uninvited work at Versailles represents the first in a series of Mexican international projects that challenged and shaped the U.S. vision of multilateral liberalism, by embedding in it the idea of "development" and by urging its extension into economic and social realms. Read less » Abstract »

Christy Thornton
New York University
cthornton@nyu.edu

 

"Coerced Labor Recruitment in the English Atlantic: The Impressment of Soldiers, 1585-1660"

The English grasped both near and far when they first wanted laborers to complete undesirable work in their new American colonies. Historians of early America and the Atlantic have accordingly studied the indentured servitude of Europeans and the enslavement of Africans, often with the assumption that all significant labor in the colonies took place on farmsteads and plantations. In this project, I propose to broaden the scope of the study of coerced labor recruitment in the English Atlantic world, to include the impressment of English soldiers. Men rarely volunteered to fight. Impressment—a form of legal, centrally-decreed and locally-administered forced service—was essential to raising early modern armies for civil, international, European and imperial warfare. This project specifically focuses on the practices of impressment at the local level in England in order to investigate possible connections to similar practices in the Atlantic world. I will examine the papers of lieutenants, petitions, and legal records, to reconstruct specific methods of pressing. These methods varied, from negotiations, bribery, and payment for serving as a "substitute" for richer men, to intoxication, physical intimidation, and propaganda. The project will also study how targeted men, their families, and their communities responded to the pressures of military recruitment. Read less » Abstract »

Sonia Tycko
Harvard University
soniatycko@fas.harvard.edu

 

"Constituting Credit Capitalism: The Political Economy of Bank Creditcards in Postwar America"

My research, "Constituting Credit Capitalism," explores the development of the bank credit card industry in the United States from the late 1940s through the mid-1980s. It attempts a political, economic, and cultural analysis that considers the efforts of stakeholders – bankers, merchants, consumers, local and federal regulators and legislators, criminals, and others – to guide the direction of the industry's development in ways that served their interests.
This process played out politically as these stakeholders tried to shape the boundaries of acceptable credit-card practice through legislation, regulation, and litigation, and economically, as people used cards licitly and illicitly to buy, borrow, and steal their way toward the material trappings of the American Dream. In this way, credit cards, particularly bank-issued cards, helped remake the political economy of the postwar United States, shifting the locus of consumer purchasing power away from wages and community-based credit relationships and toward the private, disembedded currency of credit capitalism.
To demonstrate this transition, I first examine how banks and other card issuers sought to constitute the credit card market through regulation and business practice in the 1950s and 1960s, and later, how banks used cards as a weapon against what they saw as an overly restrictive regulatory regime in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this second part, I will also look closely at how the experiences of transnational banks in regulatory environments abroad gave these banks models for manipulating regulatory boundaries at home, and how the availability of huge amounts of cash in foreign financial markets, such as the Eurodollar market, gave globe-hopping financial firms a trove of funds to lend back into the United States. While scholars have explored the often deleterious effects of Eurodollar 'recycling' into the developing world, I hope to show that bankers similarly directed international money into the wallets of American consumers, where it helped to create the more recent domestic consumer debt crisis. Read less » Abstract »

Sean Vanatta
Princeton University
http://www.princeton.edu/histgrads/profiles/svanatta/index.xml

 

 

 

"Plantation Geographies: Race, Science and Agriculture in the South Carolina Lowcountry"

My dissertation explores the shifting forms of agricultural governance in the South Carolina Lowcountry – the port city of Charleston and its coastal hinterland – from the 1950s to the present. Scholars have typically understood the administration and regulation of agriculture as a political economic project. This dissertation, however, argues that agricultural governance is just as much a racial project: the changing role of the US state in late 20th century economic life cannot be fully understood without examining the dynamic racial ideologies which inform governance. This dissertation will examine the transition from truck farms to local food systems in the South Carolina Lowcountry as a window onto the relationship between state power and white supremacy in the US. Read less » Abstract »

Levi Van Sant
University of Georgia
leviv@uga.edu

"Credibility and Imperial Orders in the Second Half of the 19th century"

The English grasped both near and far when they first wanted laborers to complete undesirable work in their new American colonies. Historians of early America and the Atlantic have accordingly studied the indentured servitude of Europeans and the enslavement of Africans, often with the assumption that all significant labor in the colonies took place on farmsteads and plantations. In this project, I propose to broaden the scope of the study of coerced labor recruitment in the English Atlantic world, to include the impressment of English soldiers. Men rarely volunteered to fight. Impressment—a form of legal, centrally-decreed and locally-administered forced service—was essential to raising early modern armies for civil, international, European and imperial warfare. This project specifically focuses on the practices of impressment at the local level in England in order to investigate possible connections to similar practices in the Atlantic world. I will examine the papers of lieutenants, petitions, and legal records, to reconstruct specific methods of pressing. These methods varied, from negotiations, bribery, and payment for serving as a "substitute" for richer men, to intoxication, physical intimidation, and propaganda. The project will also study how targeted men, their families, and their communities responded to the pressures of military recruitment. Read less » Abstract »

Paula Vedoveli
Princeton University
vedoveli@princeton.edu

"Masters of Law: Legal Culture and the Law of Slavery in Colonial South Carolina and the British Atlantic World, 1669-1783"

The economic importance of slaves in colonial South Carolina meant that colonists of all sorts -- not just lawyers -- became adept at buying, selling, and bequeathing enslaved people. From merchant-planter elites to more humble colonists, South Carolinians sought legal expertise in order to expand their commercial and plantation enterprises and transfer wealth to their heirs. My project draws upon extensive manuscript research to reconstruct the everyday vernacular legal culture of colonial South Carolina, which centered on the quotidian practices of managing slaves. Working at the intersection of legal, economic, and cultural history, I trace how colonists acquired legal knowledge, and how they deployed that knowledge not only in the courtroom, but on the plantation, on the dock side, and on their deathbeds. Emphasizing daily practice, I look beyond the statutory law of slavery to reconstruct a world in which legal acumen and economic success were mutually dependent; in which "private" legal transactions were no less important than "public" law in maintaining slavery; and in which colonists became masters of law in order to achieve mastery over slaves, with untold tragic results that reverberated across the British Atlantic world. Read less » Abstract »

Lee B Wilson
University of Virginia
lwb7dc@virginia.edu

 

"The politics of taxation in the French Empire: the case of Indochina (1897-1939)"

Taxes not only had a direct impact on colonial policies in French Indochina, nor did they just determine the margin of manoeuvre left to colonial officials; they were the face of colonial rule. They formed an integrative part of the exploitative structure of the world economy in the age of imperialism and because their intended effect was to reshape the geography of the colonial economy, their implementation was eminently political and carried implications extending beyond immediate economic overlay. Tax law and policies did thus not only indicate economic differences but also served as a way to entrench racial and social hierarchies and due to the frail legitimacy of colonial rule and the often coercive methods used for tax collection, taxes – whether direct, indirect or through the form of corvée labour - were permanently resented by the colonized. In contrast, the minority of European settlers often sought to assert their entitlement to preferential treatment. In short, taxation encapsulated many of the inherent tensions of French colonialism in Indochina. This project seeks to identify the complex categories of colonial history that taxation helps to illuminate: the “cost” of Empire, the circulation of economic knowledge across metropole and colonies, the economic “boundaries of rule” and how these came to be politically negotiated within and without the colonial polity. In short, this project seeks to lay out a novel framework for the writing of the history of a crucial yet neglected aspect of the political economy of colonialism. Read less » Abstract »

Madeline Woker
Columbia University
mw2981@columbia.edu

 

"Water Quality, Morbidity, and Mortality in London, 1906-1926"

I examine the effects of chlorination on typhoid fever morbidity and mortality rates in London during the early decades of the twentieth century using a newly constructed panel data set at the borough-by-quarter-of-year level. A difference-in-differences identification strategy takes advantage of variation in the sources of water supply and the introduction of chlorination across parts of London in 1916. I find that chlorination accounts for 16 to 29 percent of the decline in the typhoid mortality rate during the sample period, with larger effects in the fourth quarter of the year when contaminated river water entered the water supply due to flooding. Read less » Abstract »

Anthony Wray
Northwestern University
awray@u.northwestern.edu
https://sites.google.com/site/anthonywray/

 

 

"The Impact of Banking Crises on Trade: Case of the 1866 Overend & Gurney Failure"

The National Debt Act of 1888 was a major piece of legislation in which the English government reduced interest rate payments to their Consols and temporarily suspended redemption. Very little has been written about this and similar legislation, and it does not register as a default in financial history. However, sovereign debt, unlike corporate debt, rarely has an option structure and a forced conversion would indeed be categorized as a modern-day default. Several aspects of nineteenth century English debt are exceptional: London was the financial center of the world, it upheld the gold standard, and perpetual bonds were a significant component of the government's debt portfolio. Yet these conversions were effective defaults that resulted in no financial sanctions. They also present an opportunity to explore the historical and theoretical aspects of how the bonds were priced during this period. Understanding these incidences of sovereign debt restructuring may also provide an opportunity to reassess the current policy recommendations for Europe. Read less » Abstract »

Chenzi Xu
Harvard University
cxu@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

"Nourishing Shanxi: State, Industrial Entrepreneurship, and the Making of Chinese State Capitalism, 1898-2004”

“Nourishing Shanxi” is an economic and business history of twentieth-century China that explores the transformation of Chinese entrepreneurship, business enterprises, and state-business relations. The story is told through an in-depth study of the Baojin Coal and Iron Company in Shanxi Province. Baojin, literally meaning “Nourishing Shanxi,” was the first and largest private industrial enterprise in North China before the collapse of the Qing empire. Founded as a joint-stock company by hundreds of Shanxi merchants in 1907, Baojin underwent two decades of rapid growth before falling into Japanese hands in 1937 and operating as a military management factory throughout the war. In 1948, it was taken over by the Communist Party and restructured into a state-owned enterprise. Then, Baojin Company sailed up and down through Mao’s revolution and Deng’s reform until it was shut down by the Shanxi government in 2004. Drawing on a broad range of primary materials, such as business archives, meeting records, production statistics, enterprise periodicals, and personal memoirs, “Nourishing Shanxi” recounts the extraordinary history of Baojin Company through the five successive states: the Manchu Qing, Republican, Japanese, Communist, and Post-Mao. In doing so, this project is situated at the intersection of economic and business history and explores the larger transformation of Chinese economy and capitalism in the twentieth century. Read less » Abstract »

Zhaojin Zeng
University of Texas at Austin
zzj@utexas.edu

 

"The Closing of the Gold Window and the History of Dollar Hegemony"

One of the most prominent features of the contemporary international monetary system is the primacy of the dollar and the hegemonic privileges this situation bestows on the Unites States. The project seeks to examine the origins and development of this system beginning with the Nixon administration's decision to end the convertibility of dollars into gold in 1971. The proposed research will investigate the policies and discussions of the Nixon administration with respect to the future of the dollar and the actions taken in the ensuing years to push the international monetary system toward its current state. Three key questions will be addressed: Was the Nixon economic team aware of the potential great power benefits of a floating dollar standard system? To what extent did the future of the dollar as a reserve currency and the expansion of these benefits under a floating dollar standard factor into the Camp David discussions preceding the closing of the gold window? Are there any points following the closing of the gold window at which American economic policymakers pushed for international monetary reform with these ideas in mind (especially under George Shultz)? Read less » Abstract »

Josh Zoffer
Harvard University
jzoffer@college.harvard.edu

 

 

 

Center for History and Economics
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University

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