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| Group photo, participants of the workshop |
This new series of workshop
s builds
upon the concept of the Sound Economic
History Workshop, which
is
aimed at PhD students and post-docs
, primarily from the Scandinavian countries, but
instead, it targets
researcher who may no longer claim for themselves the label “young”. It held
its first event September 23–24, at the Unit for Economic History, Department
of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg. The event was organised by
Jacob Weisdorf (SDU),
Joacim Waara (Gothenburg), and
Svante Prado (Gothenburg),
who are also responsible for the initiative and the organisation of future
workshops. Scandinavian scholars interested in hosting future workshops are
encouraged to contact the organisers.
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| Keynote by Tommy Bengtsson |
The conference accommodated nine speakers and Tommy Bengtsson from
Lund University was invited to give a keynote. We also enjoyed the company of a
guest from far away, namely Martin Shanahan from the University of South
Australia, who happened to be staying at
the department at the time of the conference.
The conference started with lunch at the Department of
Economy and Society.
The first speaker was Kerstin Enflo, who presented a paper
titled, “From conflict
to compromise: The
importance of mediation in Swedish work stoppages, 1907–1927”, co-authored with
Tobias Karlsson. The paper deals with the role of mediation in labour market
conflict resolution during first 20 years of state-sponsored intervention. The
empirical evidence consisted
of a geocoded panel dataset comprised
of all reported work stoppages in Sweden from 1903 to 1927. The result suggests that the
presence of mediation in a conflict resulted in an approximate 30% higher probability of a compromise
outcome. Thus, mediation
could have paved the way for a cooperative atmosphere in the local labour
market.
The second speaker was Jørgen Modalsli, with the paper, “Multigenerational persistence: Evidence from 146 years of
administrative data”. He used
Norwegian census data on occupational associations among grandfathers, fathers
and children between 1865 and 2011. He found significant grandparental
influence throughout the period. In particular, the excess grandparental
influence is strong for white-collar occupations. Grandparental effects remained when he restricted the study to grandparents
who were not present in their grandchildren’s neighbourhoods, suggesting that
mechanisms other than direct grandparent–grandchild interaction are part of the
explanation for the observed associations.
The third speaker was Stefan Öberg, who presented a new
research project called “Socioeconomic dimensions of diet and health during the
20th century: A
longitudinal study”. This was
a joint effort
with Christer Lundh, Paul Nystedt, Kjell Torén, and Hanna Augustin. The members of the
group belong to the fields of economic
history, economics, clinical nutrition and environmental and social medicine.
The overarching research problem is socioeconomic variations in diet and
health. The research task is
to examine the social patterns of health-related behaviours, living conditions
and diet, as well as
their consequences for health
later in life. The project will create create a historical cohort, with rich information on
health-related behaviours, living conditions and diet at baseline, and it will include a very
long follow-up time. The information on socioeconomic background and
consumption comes from household budget surveys carried out by the Swedish
Social Board between 1913 and 1934 (N≈2,500). The authors will link this household level
data to information on longevity and cause of death (and height and weight for
men) of the members of the households (N≈10,000).
The fourth speaker was Jacob Weisdorf, who presented a paper named “Unreal
wages?
A new empirical foundation for the study of growth and
living standards in England, 1260–1860”, co-authored with Jane Humphries. The
paper begins by recognising that we know very little about the length of the
working year, which makes previous estimates of historical living standards,
based on da
ily wages,
very uncertain. The novel part of the paper is to present a new series for
unskilled male workers employed by the year. This new series of annual
estimates track
s trends
in per capita GDP, unlike estimates of wages grossed up from da
ily rates through an
assumption about days worked. By implication, the new annual estimates give us
the number of workdays since
the year 1260. It turns out
that previous studies overestimate
d the medieval working year, but underestimate
d the industrial one.
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| Christer Lundh and Tommy Bengtsson |
The final speaker of the first day was Tommy Bengtsson,
delivering the keynote, titled “From hunger and disease to modern economic
growth”. His presentation traced the rise of a new research field of historical
demography, health and living standards, using combined time-series and
event-history analyses of longitudinal, nominative, and microlevel data. For him, it started
with a growing interest in the issues of health and living standards that were conventionally
measured in the 1980s. An important point of departure in Tommy’s presentation
was Robert Fogel’s (and Fogel and Costa 1997) description of the evolution of
human physiology the last 300 hundred years as “techno-physio evolution”, made
possible by advances in technology: “a synergism between technological and
physiological improvements that is biological, but not genetic, rapid,
culturally transmitted, and not necessarily stable”. In this model, nutritional
status is a function of diet, disease and lifestyles, and nutritional status is
measured as length of life and height. Improved nutritional status increases
output, which in turn increases nutritional status, increasing output, and continuing endlessly. The
early trigger of improved nutritional status is improved diet. Poor people, whether
in pre-modern Europe or in today’s
less developed countries, are caught in a nutritional trap, preventing them
from improvements in nutritional status and thereby stunting economic growth.
However, historical evidence did not provide unambiguous support
for the idea of
nutritional traps. Part of the problem, Tommy argues, pertained to the
different concepts and measures of standards of living used to investigate the
presence of nutritional traps historically: wage and price data, family
budgets, mortality rates, heights, food prices and population totals etc. No
wonder there is a lack of consensus. The time was ripe to develop a new and
different concept of standard of living, designed for longitudinal and
microstudies, as well as for comparative
purposes. The new concept was
borrowed from Amartha Sen’s ideas of functioning and capabilities. In short,
demographic responses of individuals and households to short-term economic
stress depend on access to
resources. Effects of short-term economic stress on migration, nuptiality,
fertility, and mortality can therefore be used as in indirect measure of
individual living standards. Instead of looking at the relationship between
economic conditions and demographic behaviour at the aggregate level, this research
approach requires combined time-series and event-history analyses of
longitudinal, nominative, microlevel data. These data allow for the finely
grained differentiation of mortality, fertility, and other demographic
responses by social class, household context, and other dimensions at the
individual level – a
data-demanding framework, indeed.
Tommy formed a Swedish team to collect these data from
family reconstitutions,
in combination with population registers in a handful of parishes in Southern
Sweden (Scania). Then,
they collaborated with scholars from Belgium, China, Italy and Japan, in which
appropriately detailed historical population register data exist for selected
communities. This international collaboration, started in 1994, was coined
EurAsia Project on Population and Family History – from macro to micro. Since
the early 1990s, several books and many articles have examined the demographic
responses – mortality,
fertility and marriage –
to social and economic pressures. Some of the conclusions that have emerged
from this body of research are
that (i) public welfare systems were more developed in the East; (ii) land was more unequally
distributed in the West; (iii) households were more complex in the East, and were larger in China; (iv)
marriages were planned and dependent on economic factors, both in the East and the West, as was
fertility; and (v) living standards and life expectancy were about the same in
the West and the East.
But what about the role of diet in the improvements of
nutritional status? Was Robert Fogel right in assigning diet as the chief trigger for improvements? Although the jury is
still out on that,
Tommy seems to have gravitated towards a response in the negative. Mortality has not seemed to vary systematically with income in
the past. Only after 1950 has
the socioeconomic gradient become visible. This would question whether food
intake is as important as what was posited. His recent research, as well as the research of
others, places great emphasis on life conditions during very early life stages,
because development of organs and cells are fastest during the foetal stage and early in
life, and then gradually slows.
The disease burden early in life seems to be important, more so than diet.
After the keynote
, the participants finished off with a glass of wine at the
Department of Economy and Society. Then
, everyone walked across the city centre to Fiskekrogen, a
restaurant famous for serving gourmet food, in particular fish and shellfish.
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| Christopher Lloyd |
Christopher Lloyd’s presentation sparked off the second day
of the conference. The title of his presentation was “From old extractive
capitalism to generalised new extractivism: Continuity, transformation, and globalisation in the resource
grab settler world”. He begins by recognising that all settler societies were, and many still are, commodity–dependent export
economies with peculiar structural connections to the world economy. This is a
remarkable fact in the 21st century, especially considering the long history of
import-substitution protection of manufacturing that they all employed from the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, with varying success. His paper aims to add
to the analysis of export dependence the important concepts of generalised
neo-Ricardian and imperialist rent. The use of these concepts will help to
reveal the totalising social nature of rent extraction in these zones today,
especially those without strong states and well-organised labour movements to resist
the generalisation of rent extraction.
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| Klara Arnberg |
The second speaker of the second day was Klara Arnberg, with
a paper called “Advertising to advertisers: Intersectional perspectives on the development of Swedish market
segments, 1880–1939.” Her paper examines the history of the expansion of a
market for consumer goods and the history of the expansion of the press in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. When press publishers tried to convince
advertisers to put ads in their newspapers and magazines, they not only tried to attract with
circulation figures,
but they also tried to reach specific consumer groups, as in the above quotation.
Her paper follows how these ads framed and formulated different consumer groups
in terms of intersections of class and gender in the industrialisation process
when the purchasing power of different groups changed rapidly, when new
consumer goods were introduced at the market, and when ideas about consumer
behaviour were introduced in Swedish advertising. By studying how segments were
formulated to the advertisers by the press, she can trace early ideas about
consumption, gender and class.
The third speaker was Erik Bengtsson, presenting his paper
“The wealth of the richest:
Inequality
and the nobility in Sweden, 1750–1900”. This paper, co-authored with Anna
Missiaia, Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson, explores the wealth of the Swedish
nobility from agrarian society to industrial society by using a sample of 200+
probate inventories of nobles for each of the benchmark years of 1750, 1800,
1850 and 1900. The paper shows that the nobility – 0.5% of the population – was very dominant in 1750: the average noble was 60% richer compared to the average person, and the
nobles held 29%of
private wealth. In addition, 90% of the nobles were richer
than was the average
person. On the other hand, in 1900, the nobles’ advantage had decreased and the stratification
within the nobility had increased dramatically. There was a group of super-rich
nobles, often old nobility with lots of land, but there was also a large minority who were
not richer compared to
the average Swede. This goes against the older interpretation of mediaeval and
early modern Sweden, which has tended to downplay the political and economical
importance of the Swedish nobility relative to elsewhere in Europe.
The fourth speaker was Sakari Saaritsa, who talked about a
research project titled
“Socioeconomic capital, physiological capital and human capital: An
anthropometric perspective on schooling and social mobility in early 20th
century Finland”. The project will exploit school-based statistics on height
and weight by age to analyse the linkages between social inequality,
physiological development, and evolving mass education in early 20th century
Finland. Available aggregate statistics were available on height by age for a sample of thousands of
pupils of both sexes by educational track between ages 7 and 20, from the turn of the 1920s
and the mid-1930s,
enable the incorporation of
physiological capital into the analysis. Applying modern Finnish and WHO
benchmarks makes it possible to estimate the extent of stunting by group and by
sex in the two periods. In addition to measuring differences in height at age
of tracking, it is possible to analyse gender differences in the degree of
physiological inequality between secondary and non-secondary schooled children.
The analysis adds an important dimension to the dynamics of pre-welfare-state
inequality.
The fifth, and final, speaker was
Cristián Ducoing Ruiz,
who presented joint work with Sara Torregrosa Hetland, called “Voting for
welfare? Comparative performance in Ibero-American democratisations”. The paper
asks whether
or not democracy
lead
s to achieving
economic and human development
.
Do dictatorships leave long-run legacies behind? The paper explores the cases
of four Ibero-American countries
having common histories, but under different contexts: Spain,
Portugal, Brazil, and Chile. The two Iberian countries suffered long periods of
autocratic regime
s,
while the South American cases had relatively later and shorter dictatorships.
The authors intend to assess the extent to which these democratisations brought
about improvements in societal welfare, looking at several indicators. As an
indicator combining both
of these
dimensions, they propose the applicability of the concept of Inequality
Extraction Ratio, initially suggested for ancient societies, but adapted by
Milanovic (2013b) to the analysis of contemporary economies. The idea is that
democratisations might not have been able to achieve reductions in inequality,
but could have promoted decreases in the appropriation of economic surplus by
the national elites.
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| Svante Prado, Jacob Weisdorf, Sakari Saaritsa, Chistoffer Collin |
The conference ended with lunch at the Department of Economy
and Society.
This blog post was written by: Svante Prado, University of Gothenburg
In this way, the RDC course offers PhD students help in sharpening and refining their
