We pose a seemingly ageless question in economic history.To what extent did newentrants in the late nineteenth-century cotton-textile industry threaten the customary markets of the European core? Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on textile imports to Spain, we find that as trade costs fell, new rivals began to sell a greater variety of products. Along this dimension, competition can be sa…
This article examines the health and height of men born in England andWales in the1890s who enlisted in the army at the time of the FirstWorldWar, using a sample of recruits from the army service records. These are linked to their childhood circumstances as observed in the 1901 census. Econometric results indicate that height on Onlistment was positively related to socio-economic class, and neg…
Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain but was reduced to a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century due to vaccination programmes post-1798. While the success of vaccination is unquestionable, it remains disputed to what extent the prophylactic precursor of vaccination, inoculation, reduced smallpox mortality in the eighteenth century. Smal…