Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the differences in gender inequality in wealth in three regions of the Ottoman Empire: Macedonia, western Anatolia and eastern Anatolia in 1650-1800. Using a dataset of probate inventories, it explores the components and determinants of inequality, and discusses their possible relevance for the different growth paths observed in the three regions. It thus seeks to contribute to comparative efforts to gender the fundamental economic transformations of the period. By bringing the Ottoman territories into the Eurasian picture and by exploring diversity within the empire, it offers two layers of comparison that engages with the debate on the role of women’s economic position and gender (in)equality in shaping regional patterns of economic growth and ‘divergence’ across the early modern world. (Show less)

Life History Theory holds that all living organisms react to natural selective pressures like climate change and shifts in the disease environment. We ask if it also applies to humans exposed to man-made socio-economic pressures caused by technological progress. We take the question to history, exploring the fact that the Industrial Revolution altered the socio-economic environment by raising income and employment opportunities for certain occupational groups while setting others back. We focus on the workshop-to-factory argument – that artisanal workers lost their jobs to unskilled factory workers – examining whether and how the two occupational groups responded to the altered income and unemployment risk in terms of their evolutionary strategies. Our empirical basis is household-level demographic statistics published on a decadal basis in British population censuses between 1851 and 1901. The data disclose the share of dependent household members, which we exploit as a synthetic representation of household income- or employment-risk. The data also reveal the number of family offspring and whether or not they received apprentice training. The latter statistics enable us to study the so-called child quantity-quality trade-off (how many children to raise versus how much education to endow them with), which we use to proxy the family’s reproductive strategy. Our empirical strategy builds on a diff-in-diff approach. This considers whether artisans living in areas exposed to increasing factory competition reduced their share of dependent household members relative to factory workers in response to the shifting importance of the two occupations’ income- or employment-risk. We compare the ratios calculated for these treated areas with similar ratios observed in areas where artisans were not affected by factory competition (our control areas). This allows us to assess the degree to which industrialisation altered the income/employment risks of the two occupational groups. Next, we examine whether any resulting changes in income-/employment-risk proxied by the share of dependent household members prompted an evolutionary adaptation as measured by the child quantity-quantity trade-off. Life History Theory predicts that organisms under pressure shift to a “fast” reproductive strategy of many offspring of low quality. In our context, this translates into finding out whether artisans living in areas of factory production shifted towards a high-fertility/low-education strategy whereas the industrial winners (the factory workers) shifted towards a low-fertility/high-education strategy instead. (Show less)