Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Friday 14 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
D-10 ECO18 Economic Development and Well-being of Workers
B22
Network: Economic History Chair: Mikolaj Malinowski
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Jonatan Andersson : Staying or Leaving the Local Labour Market: the Migration Decisions of Young Adults During the Second Industrial Revolution in Sweden
Structural change and economic growth taking place during the second industrial revolution were made possible by massive internal migration movements, mainly of young adults, to economically expansive areas. In the last decade, a growing body of economic historical literature has focused on migrant selection and social mobility of migrants. Few ... (Show more)
Structural change and economic growth taking place during the second industrial revolution were made possible by massive internal migration movements, mainly of young adults, to economically expansive areas. In the last decade, a growing body of economic historical literature has focused on migrant selection and social mobility of migrants. Few studies, however, have investigated the roles of local labour market participation and attachment to the parental household in migration decisions. Yet these factors must had been important determinants for long-distance migration. On the one hand, participation in the local labour market could have resulted in developing local-specific skills and integration in local networks, which would discourage long-distance migration. On the other hand, participating in the local labour market might had made young people more independent from the parental household and provided skills sought after by employers in economically expansive areas, which would encourage long-migration. A similarly ambiguous relationship can be seen in the living situation of young people. On the one hand, residing in the parental household might signal that their labour was needed at home, which would discourage all migration. On the other hand, living and working at home might also indicate few opportunities in the local labour market, which might encourage long-distance migration. Using a longitudinal micro-level database of 1,500 Swedish men and women between the ages 15-25 born in the late nineteenth century, this article aims to analyse how migration decisions of young people were associated with their participation in the local labour market and living situation. (Show less)

Robin Philips, Bas van Leeuwen : Evidence on Worktime and Working Conditions in the Netherlands at the End of the 19th Century
In this article, we quantify the sectoral and regional differences in working time and working conditions for the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century. Although it is generally acknowledged that work days were long and working conditions were harsh during the Industrial Revolution, aside from national reconstructions of ... (Show more)
In this article, we quantify the sectoral and regional differences in working time and working conditions for the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century. Although it is generally acknowledged that work days were long and working conditions were harsh during the Industrial Revolution, aside from national reconstructions of working time not much is known about the working conditions of the working class in the nineteenth century. Using the recently-digitized inquiry of Struve and Bekaar, who reported working time and working conditions for all ca. 3100 large factories in the Netherlands in 1887-1889, we are able to quantify working conditions for the first time on a micro-level basis for a large sample. Our study learns that intersectoral differences were large: in line with national reconstructions, longest work days were found in the sectors of the first Industrial Revolution (production of textiles and metals) and sectors more prone to small-scale employment at home (production of food and wood products). When controlling for intersectoral differences, more lengthy work days were found in the large-scale factories, factories with a high share of steam engines and factories located in larger cities. Our evidence suggests that those factories also had a higher chance for overwork, night work and poorer hygiene standards. In line with contemporary reports, we argue that precisely those factories faced higher fixed costs, which incentivized factory owners via a sunk cost effect to operate the factory as long as possible, disregarding the well-being of employees. (Show less)

Stephan Sander-Faes : Dead Ideas Walking: Agrarian Dualism and the “Little Divergence” Revisited
Modern scientific explanations of the origins of western nation-states’ power-political superiority hark back to the 1880s when German political economist Georg Friedrich Knapp (1842-1926), today mainly remembered for his treatise on monetary systems, The State Theory of Money (1905). Yet, it is his early and much less known work in ... (Show more)
Modern scientific explanations of the origins of western nation-states’ power-political superiority hark back to the 1880s when German political economist Georg Friedrich Knapp (1842-1926), today mainly remembered for his treatise on monetary systems, The State Theory of Money (1905). Yet, it is his early and much less known work in which he argued that the nature of seigneurial domination determined European—and thus world—history: western Europe’s peasantry, free from the High Middle Ages onwards (as opposed to unfree peasants in Eastern Europe), made all the difference. Variations of this theme informed generations of scholars across the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout the 20th century, in particular during the Cold War as these themes reflected both the wider ideological competition between the US-led western world and the Soviet bloc. To this day, these twin developments inform virtually all recent accounts about the diverging development of western and (vs.) eastern Europe, reinforced—buttressed—by the very limited reception of 20th-century Eastern European scholarship by western academics.
Differences between east and west are fairly traditional, if not conventional, in European thought, however, recent decades witnessed the solidification of its eventual outcome, that is power-political superiority by western nation-states over both Central and Eastern European imperial monarchies such as the German, Habsburg, and Russian empires, as well as over their successor states that emerged in the wake of the upheavals of World War I. This holds particular truth during the Cold War, when the differentiation initially proposed by Knapp underwrote the social-scientific discourse and public debates that reflected on the division of Europe and the world between the US-led West and the Soviet bloc. Curiously enough, while post-1989/90 discussions, themselves revolving around a slightly different terminological and conceptual dichotomy, namely between landlordship (Grundherrschaft) in the west and demesne lordship (Gutsherrschaft) in the east, began to discuss the implications of East European research, the debate soon petered out. Instead, and based on a very selective reading of these histories, the general idea was preserved and continues to reinforce the increasingly widespread and, at times triumphalist, accounts of the rise of western Europe and northern America thanks to commerce and, later, industry, but without an even-handed discussion of agricultural productivity, changing social relations, and the long-term transition of the Humanities and Social Sciences that discuss these matters in terms of the “Great” and “Little Divergence”, but for the most part ignore the intellectual and scholarly foundations of these narratives.
In my paper, I wish to contribute to the overcoming of this regrettable lacuna by outlining the conceptual and intellectual history of this master-narrative as it was, and in some ways continues to be, (selectively) perceived by eastern and western scholars from the late 19th century onwards. (Show less)



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