• Canada
• 060106 history of social sciences close

AbstractWe assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1915–19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

This article will highlight the importance of the common law, enclosure, and the abolition of common rights in changing the ownership of land, all of which helped to transform England into the first capitalist country. This unique social metamorphosis, which included the complete abolition of the peasantry, also accounts for why England, and no other country in Europe, experienced a thorough Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Turning historical meteorological observations into usable data is a challenging process that is immeasurably enriched when it encompasses interdisciplinarity. Here, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) project shows how climatologists, geographers, archivists, data scientists, and coders together built a citizen-science-based transcription platform to transform the McGill Observatory paper records into a traceable and sustainable database.

Debates in business and economic history have focused on the role played by business ownership and organisational forms on the performance of firms, industries and economies. Alfred Chandler asserted that it was the adoption of hierarchical managerial structures and joint-stock ownership which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the scale of business in the late 19th century. This argument is widely debated and a growing literature has looked at the role played by different forms of business organisation, such as the partnership and cooperative, in enabling economic growth. This thesis contributes to these debates through an investigation of Anglo-Indian trading firms between 1813 and 1870. A new data-set of firms operating in Calcutta identified the use of various business forms to conduct trade. In this period the number of trading partnerships increased from 24 to 88, whilst the number of joint-stock firms expanded from a handful in the years before 1850 to over 170 by 1868. In the decade after 1858 the number of hybrid managing agency firms tripled, whilst the number of firms using agents grew from 57 to 183. Drawing on the ‘analytic narratives’ method a novel analysis using transaction cost and agency theories is made of four firm case studies. This analysis reveals that changes in the economic environment altered the transactions undertaken by the firms and incentivised the adoption of different forms of ownership. In turn, the internal organisation of the firms adapted to mitigate costs of agency caused by changes in ownership. These findings show that entrepreneurs sought adaptive organisational solutions to balance an evolving set of trade-offs between transaction and agency costs. Key to this process was the capacity of the partnership form to reduce the costs of agency incurred by firms operating with geographically distant actors. This resulted in the proliferation of the managing agent form. These findings reinterpret existing explanations of the evolution of firms in the Anglo-Indian trade, showing that problems of managing agents at distance remained a key challenge throughout this period.

Generally, Canada has been ignored in the literature on the colonial origins of divergence with most of the attention going to the United States. Late nineteenth century estimates of income per capita show that Canada was relatively poorer than the United States and that within Canada, the French and Catholic population of Quebec was considerably poorer. Was this gap long standing? Some evidence has been advanced for earlier periods, but it is quite limited and not well-suited for comparison with other societies. This thesis aims to contribute both to Canadian economic history and to comparative work on inequality across nations during the early modern period. With the use of novel prices and wages from Quebec—which was then the largest settlement in Canada and under French rule—a price index, a series of real wages and a measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are constructed. They are used to shed light both on the course of economic development until the French were defeated by the British in 1760 and on standards of living in that colony relative to the mother country, France, as well as the American colonies. The work is divided into three components. The first component relates to the construction of a price index. The absence of such an index has been a thorn in the side of Canadian historians as it has limited the ability of historians to obtain real values of wages, output and living standards. This index shows that prices did not follow any trend and remained at a stable level. However, there were episodes of wide swings—mostly due to wars and the monetary experiment of playing card money. The creation of this index lays the foundation of the next component. The second component constructs a standardized real wage series in the form of welfare ratios (a consumption basket divided by nominal wage rate multiplied by length of work year) to compare Canada with France, England and Colonial America. Two measures are derived. The first relies on a “bare bones” definition of consumption with a large share of land-intensive goods. This measure indicates that Canada was poorer than England and Colonial America and not appreciably richer than France. However, this measure overestimates the relative position of Canada to the Old World because of the strong presence of land-intensive goods. A second measure is created using a “respectable” definition of consumption in which the basket includes a larger share of manufactured goods and capital-intensive goods. This second basket better reflects differences in living standards since the abundance of land in Canada (and Colonial America) made it easy to achieve bare subsistence, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor made the consumption of luxuries and manufactured goods (clothing, lighting, imported goods) highly expensive. With this measure, the advantage of New France over France evaporates and turns slightly negative. In comparison with Britain and Colonial America, the gap widens appreciably. This element is the most important for future research. By showing a reversal because of a shift to a different type of basket, it shows that Old World and New World comparisons are very sensitive to how we measure the cost of living. Furthermore, there are no sustained improvements in living standards over the period regardless of the measure used. Gaps in living standards observed later in the nineteenth century existed as far back as the seventeenth century. In a wider American perspective that includes the Spanish colonies, Canada fares better. The third component computes a new series for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is to avoid problems associated with using real wages in the form of welfare ratios which assume a constant labor supply. This assumption is hard to defend in the case of Colonial Canada as there were many signs of increasing industriousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The GDP series suggest no long-run trend in living standards (from 1688 to circa 1765). The long peace era of 1713 to 1740 was marked by modest economic growth which offset a steady decline that had started in 1688, but by 1760 (as a result of constant warfare) living standards had sunk below their 1688 levels. These developments are accompanied by observations that suggest that other indicators of living standard declined. The flat-lining of incomes is accompanied by substantial increases in the amount of time worked, rising mortality and rising infant mortality. In addition, comparisons of incomes with the American colonies confirm the results obtained with wages— Canada was considerably poorer. At the end, a long conclusion is provides an exploratory discussion of why Canada would have diverged early on. In structural terms, it is argued that the French colony was plagued by the problem of a small population which prohibited the existence of scale effects. In combination with the fact that it was dispersed throughout the territory, the small population of New France limited the scope for specialization and economies of scale. However, this problem was in part created, and in part aggravated, by institutional factors like seigneurial tenure. The colonial origins of French America’s divergence from the rest of North America are thus partly institutional.

In this article, I take on the problem of the face in images and visual research on children. This is a problem that is engendered through the visual representations of children and the act of deploying the visualizing techniques associated with visual methods (pictures, video, etc.). It nevertheless is a problem, I argue, that has been couched singularly within a question of ethics in child studies, criminology, and sociology, among other disciplines. Here, I utilize the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to challenge the unquestioned ethical commitment to the pixilation of children’s faces in publications. To trouble and reconceptualize the problem of visual representations of children, I assert that this problem is intimately connected to the cultural politics of childhood. For illustrative purposes, I analyze how children are represented in Today’s Child advertisements and Roman Vishniac’s Children of a Vanished World. This article concludes with a broader discussion of the (child’s) face, digital images, and (micro)politics.

Much of the blame for the 2007–2008 economic and financial crisis was placed on the faith of bank managers, executives, and federal regulators in quantitative analysis, models, and equations. Howev...

The needs of particularly vulnerable children and youth have long tested Canadian parents and communities. Youngsters with mental and physical impairments have historically experienced a wide range of conditions that are always negotiated in the context of cultural assumptions, existing social supports and barriers, and available technologies. Both institutionalization and inadequate domestic substitutes have a long history, like birth families everywhere, of devastating youngsters beyond their original impairments. The construction of that predicament and its relationship to the use of institutions, fostering, and adoption in Canadian child welfare practices is the concern here. This article begins with a review of the commonplace evaluation of disabled youngsters in English-speaking Canada, next considers the vulnerability of families, and turns finally to institutional and domestic alternatives to birth family care. Although the story in each case is mixed, youngsters with disabilities remained vulnerable into the twenty-first century.

This chapter traces the career of John Maynard Keynes, paying particular attention to two aspects: the development of his monetary theory between 1924 and 1938 (the years of A Treatise on Money and The General Theory) and his various proposals for international monetary reform between 1929 and 1946 (from A Treatise on Money to the Clearing Union and the International Monetary Fund). Emphasis is placed on the varied sources of inspiration and, over time, how he became more collaborative and more open to stimulation from others. In both cases, the culmination comes with the Second World War in domestic and international economic policy where the previous development of new theories and tools in domestic economic policy (national income accounting) and broader attempts at wartime and post-war international collaboration saw Keynes involved on many fronts, most notably Lend–Lease and its progeny (the Clearing Union and the International Trade Organization).