Kris Inwood

Economic History in 2025 - Economic History The past year saw LSE's economic historians address some of the discipline's most enduring puzzles. How do states consolidate control? Can societies escape their geographic destiny? When crisis strike...

What has our department been up to in 2025 🗺️📈? Check it out here:
blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichist...
#lse #echist

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Birkbeck, University of London, is looking for a talented researcher to join a project focused on expanding our understanding of non elite writers and writing in seventeenth century England. As Postdoctoral Research Associate you will join 'Written Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England', an exciting Leverhulme Trust–funded project. The role is offered on a 13 month, part time (17.5 hours a week) contract with a salary of £22,124 rising to £25,189 per annum (pro-rated £44,247 to £50,379 per annum). In this role, you will carry out dedicated research on non elite textual production, working closely with the Principal Investigator, Professor Sue Wiseman, and the Co Investigator, Dr Brodie Waddell. You will have the opportunity to work extensively with manuscripts and printed sources, visit archives, investigate datasets, develop the project database, and contribute to shaping the project’s scholarly outputs - and you may also be involved in textual editing. As Research Associate, you will focus on one of two thematic strands: 1. Non elite writing produced in the provinces, or 2. Writing produced by non elite women. Further details via link

We are hiring postdoc researchers to join our #WrittenWorlds project at Birkbeck, with Sue Wiseman, @mdpowelldavies.bsky.social, @richardjansell.bsky.social and I.

0.5FTE, 13 months, focus on women's or provincial non-elite writing #EarlyModern 🗃️
cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/post...

‘By the king’s suspension, the constitution is violated’: provincial opposition to the revolution of 10 August 1792 Abstract. Following the insurrection of 10 August 1792, the Legislative Assembly named commissioners to bring news of the events in Paris to the department

New article in French History! ‘By the king’s suspension, the constitution is violated’: provincial opposition to the revolution of 10 August 1792' by William S. Cormack

🇫🇷🧐💾👨‍🎤🤴

Open Access here: doi.org/10.1093/fh/c...

@frenchhistory.bsky.social

<em>Population and Development Review</em> | Population Council Journal | Wiley Online Library The ongoing Colombian armed conflict has produced widespread homicides and enforced disappearances, as armed actors used violence to terrorize communities and consolidate power. Family bereavement—on...

Paper by E Acosta, @demography.bsky.social, @thegargiulian.bsky.social & C Torres first from PDR special issue I guest edited w/ L Andriano & M Ebbinghaus, Social and Demographic Consequences of Political Conflict and Violence, to be available on early view onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Growing Up in the Early Modern World, a workshop Nov 27 in Sydney exploring childhood in institutional settings, & care, discipline & education across the life course. Please submit a 200 word abstract & 3-sentence bio note by 15 July to paula.plastic@mq.edu.au. Online/hybrid participation possible.

I was interviewed by the French History Network blog about my new @manchesterup.bsky.social book, 'Make cheese not war'. It was an ace opportunity to reflect on the lifecycle of a book project, personal encounters, research-led teaching (& vice versa) & more

frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/6838/

🗃️

When unpaid cooking, cleaning and child care get a dollar value, US income inequality shrinks – but the gap has grown since 1965. Leila Gautham & Nancy Folbre in the JPubE report that declining household production implies inequality in living standards has expanded more than standard data suggest!

The Criminal Justice team at Arnold Ventures is looking for a pending/recent PhD with strong causal inference skills, for a remote, part-time consulting position.

This is a great opportunity for someone considering a transition from academia to the policy space.

Deadline: March 15

Please share!

Excited to announce new OA article with Jane Humphries, 'The economic history of caring labour'.

Using historical data on infant feeding, we show how breastfeeding acted as a buffer against weak public health systems and how scientific and technological change reshaped this care work over time.

2 & 5

A great #bookhistory job.

Trying to work out what precisely is meant by 'schrifterij' when someone in the London Dutch Church describes documents as ‘rustende onder de schrifterij aen der consistorie’. It's not in the Historische Woordenboeken. Grateful for thoughts from early modern Dutch experts (no guesses please!).

Letter with children's picture book style illustration of a tree with birds, a little girl in a yellow dress standing on a boy's back to pick apples. Text: Port Erin 1941. My dear Kappy, Em sends you very many many happy returns to your third Birthday. I do hope you will enjoy your Mummy and I wish you that your dear Daddy may return to you and Mummy very soon, that you can be happy ever more. Your old Em.

Letter framed with illustrations of animals: cats, rabbits, birds. Text: Dear Kappy, Soon you will be two years old and I am so sorry not to be able to congratulate personally but instead I made you this pikture [sic] sheet and collar and cuffs to wear on a red velved Dress. I am sure Mummy will give you a party and you will have a nice time with the other Children. Thank you veyr much for the photo, but I would like to have a awhole picture of you Darling so I can see how big you are. Wishing you a nice time a happy Birthday to you and many Kisses from Em. Port Erin, Sept 10 1940

Children's illustration-style watercolours of a house, a teddy bear, a ship, a car, a giraffe, a dog and train, a golliwog [sorry, it's 1941[ and a dutch doll. Text: My Kappy Darling. You should know, you your old Em learns words hard for you [?] just to please you, do you remember the big ship you traveld [sic] in? Does it look like Mummy's Car? look at the Dolly. Daddy is going to get you one alike. Teddy bear is pouring [?] the ball, look at the scotty. Keep well Darling, God bless you and remember always your old Em. Por Erin, IoM 4.-2.-41

Children's illustration style watercolour of a group of children, backs turned to us, waving their hands in the air; two children on either side holding a banner that says 'Happy Birthday to You!' Text: Dear Marcia May, from Em, 16.10.42

Any WWII historians of UK internment camps out there? I have 4 letters written to my mother by a Mrs Emmerich, a German (probably) cook who worked for her family before the war. They are so gorgeous, & so heartbreaking, & might be of interest to historians? @waitmanwbeorn.com ?

I'm now recruiting for a crucial post in my team - Curator: Parliamentary Art Collection. A rare chance to work with a wonderful collection in a unique setting.

Please do share, and feel free to get in touch with any questions

Abstract This paper provides the fi rst systematic evidence on intergenerational wealth mobility in Germany using newly harmonized wealth data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) spanning nearly three decades (1988–2017). Linking parents and their adult children, we estimate intergenerational rank–rank correlations (IRRC) in net wealth to assess the persistence of relative wealth positions across generations. We fi nd substantial wealth persistence in Germany, with an IRRC of around 0.25. Strikingly, this association remains highly stable across two observation windows (1988–2002 and 2002–2017), despite pronounced changes in the macroeconomic and institutional environment. Mobility curves indicate that the rank–rank relationship is approximately linear and exhibits little evidence of strong non-linearities at the top or bottom of the parental wealth distribution. We further document limited heterogeneity by off spring gender and birth cohort, and show that controlling for parental income and education attenuates the IRRC only modestly, suggesting that wealth captures an additional dimension of socioeconomic advantage beyond standard indicators of parental background. In an international perspective, Germany exhibits lower intergenerational wealth persistence than the United States. Exploratory evidence suggests that cross-country diff erences in homeownership may account for a sizable part of this gap, highlighting the potential role of housing-related institutions in shaping intergenerational wealth mobility.

scatter plot titled “The Great Gatsby Curve in Wealth.” X-axis: Wealth inequality in 2005 (more inequality to the right). Y-axis: Intergenerational wealth correlation (higher values mean less mobility). Countries country United States, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan, Norway, Germany, South Korea, Denmark, France, Australia, Japan inear trend line (slope ≈ 0.46) shows a positive relationship: countries with greater wealth inequality tend to have higher intergenerational wealth correlation, meaning lower wealth mobility. The United States and Sweden toward the upper-right; Denmark and France are lower-left; Germany in the right-middle.

Interesting working paper on wealth mobility in Germany by Markus Grabka, @pmlersch.bsky.social, @smaexie.bsky.social, and @drschnitzlein.bsky.social population-economics.committee.socialpolitik.de/sites/defaul...

Finally in print in the JEH: Nikolaus Wolf and I study the Congress of Vienna as a natural experiment that changed European borders and may have left Prussia with the geography that would unify the German Empire. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Infant mortality increased following the Nazi expulsion of Jewish doctors, according to Helge Liebert and Beatrice Mäder in a new REStat paper!

Excellent and surely unarguable letter in @thetimes.com on the case for making student loan debt tax deductible. One only has to think about this for one minute to wonder why on earth this doesn’t happen already…

Openverse Search over 800 million free and openly licensed images, photos, audio, and other media types for reuse and remixing.

Looking for public domain & open license images? “Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone... [searching] 800 million images and audio tracks from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset.“ Also, attribute authorship with one click 📸

the future of population health surveillance

In our new paper (BMJ Global Health), we systematically collected 923 historical growth studies covering 122 countries from 1814–2016.

By harmonising height-by-age data, we reconstruct stunting patterns over two centuries.

Link: doi.org/10.1136/bmjg...

5)

What is child stunting — and how has it changed over the last 200 years?

Stunting means being too short for one’s age due to chronic undernutrition and disease in early life.

It’s one of the clearest markers of cumulative deprivation in childhood.

1)

graphs

Steven Ruggles has a new analysis on cohort sizes and labor market competition, showing that when you account for immigration, labor market entrants, and retirements, the next few decades should be good for young workers. Paper not out yet, but here's a talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jw1...

Come join @nathannunn.bsky.social James Fenske, Stephan Heblich and myself in the far north of 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, boasts up to 240 nights of active aurora borealis per year ❤️

the iconic Australian painting Shearing the Rams - by British-born impressionist and figure painter Tom Roberts - held in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

In a new ANU working paper Alison Booth contextualizes the iconic Australian painting Shearing the Rams by Tom Roberts in the growth of the Australian wool industry, the development of trade union organization and the Australian colonies' path to federation.
ideas.repec.org/p/auu/hpaper...

Only one week left to propose a paper for the joint economic history-Indigenous economics meeting August 21-23 in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.
Send 1-2 page extended abstract to David Rosé (darose@wlu.ca) & Rob Gillezeau (rob.gillezeau@rotman.utoronto.ca) by February 27!
economichistory.ca

The decline of child stunting in 122 countries: a systematic review of child growth studies since the 19th century Introduction Child stunting, a measure of malnutrition, is a major global health challenge affecting 148.1 million children in 2022. Global stunting rates have declined from 47.2% in 1985 to 22.3% in ...

Eradicating child stunting was a central feature of the modern health transition. A new paper reviews 923 child growth studies in 122 countries 1814-2016 to show massive decline in child stunting in the 20th century even in hi income countries & surprising heterogeneity in the regional trajectories.

Call for Papers | Social Science History Association Call for Papers 51st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association The Atlanta Hilton, Atlanta, Georgia – November 19th-22nd, 2026 Submission Dea ...

CFP SSHA
March 1 is the deadline to submit an abstract for papers & paper sessions at the 51st annual Social Science History Assoc meeting in Atlanta Nov 19-22. The meeting brings together scholars in history & the social sciences in 20 thematic networks, each of which organizes its own sessions.

The University of Prince Edward Island is hiring a historian in Atlantic Canadian history! Details below…

www.upei.ca/hr/competiti...

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety.

Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment.

1