by Neil Cummins (LSE), Morgan Kelly (University College Dublin), Cormac Ó Gráda (University College Dublin)
A repost from VoxEU.org
Between 1563 and 1665, London experienced four plagues that each killed one fifth of the city’s inhabitants. This column uses 790,000 burial records to track the plagues that recurred across London (epidemics typically endured for six months). Possibly carried and spread by body lice, plague always originated in the poorest parishes; self-segregation by the affluent gradually halved their death rate compared with poorer Londoners. The population rebounded within two years, as new migrants arrived in the city “to fill dead men’s shoes”.
This piece is the result of a collaboration between the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History and the European Review of Economic History. More details and special thanks below. Part A is available at this link
Man and women with the bubonic plague with its characteristic buboes on their bodies — a medieval painting from 1411. Everett Historical/Shutterstock
As the world grapples with a pandemic, informed views based on facts and evidence have become all the more important. Economic history is a uniquely well-suited discipline to provide insights into the costs and consequences of rare events, such as pandemics, as it combines the tools of an economist with the long perspective and attention to context of historians. The editors of the main journals in economic history have thus gathered a selection of the recently-published articles on epidemics, disease and public health, generously made available by publishers to the public, free of access, so that we may continue to learn from the decisions of humans and policy makers confronting earlier episodes of widespread disease and pandemics.
Generations of economic historians have studied disease and its impact on societies across history. However, as the discipline has continued to evolve with improvements in both data and methods, researchers have uncovered new evidence about episodes from the distant past, such as the Black Death, as well as more recent global pandemics, such as the Spanish Influenza of 1918. In this second instalment of The Long View on Epidemics, Disease and Public Health: Research from Economic History, the editors present a review of two major themes that have featured in the analysis of disease. The first includes articles that discuss the economic impacts of historical epidemics and the official responses they prompted. The second turns to the more optimistic story of the impact of public health regulation and interventions, and the benefits thereby generated.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death (1562 ca.)
Human society has achieved enormous gains in life expectancy over the last two centuries. Part of the explanation for this improvement was improvements in key infrastructure. However, as Daniel Gallardo‐Albarrán demonstrates, this was not simply a question of ‘dig and save lives’, because it was the combination of types of structure — water and sewers – that mattered: ‘Sanitary infrastructures and the decline of mortality in Germany, 1877–1913’, The Economic History Review (2020). One of the big goals of economic historians has been to measure the multiple benefits of public health interventions. Brian Beach, Joseph Ferrie, Martin Saavedra, and Werner Troesken, provide a brilliant example of how novel statistical techniques allow us to determine the gains from one such intervention – water purification. They demonstrate that the long-term impacts of reducing levels of disease by improving water quality were large when measured in education and income, and not just lives saved: ‘Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation’. The Journal of Economic History 76, no. 1 (2016): 41–75. What was it that allowed European societies to largely defeat tuberculosis (TB) in the second half of the twentieth century? In an ambitious paper, Sue Bowden, João Tovar Jalles, Álvaro Santos Pereira, and Alex Sadler, show that a mix of factors explains the decline in TB: nutrition, living conditions, and the supply of healthcare: ‘Respiratory Tuberculosis and Standards of Living in Postwar Europe’. European Review of Economic History 18, no. 1 (2014): 57-81.
Thomas Rowlandson, The English Dance of Death (1815 ca)