Questions tagged [economy]
Questions which concern the historical management, distribution, and usage of resources; why a particular resource, or state of production, occurred in a certain way. General economics questions are off-topic but may be welcome on our sister site Economics Stack Exchange.
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Why wouldn't debtors simply destroy their tally sticks?
I understand that the distinctive way the two pieces of a tally stick and the markings on them fit together prevented altering records. But that system only works if you can bring the pieces of a ...
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How much did food cost in Babylon?
I read recently some limited information about Babylon, and it doesn't sound right to me, so I thought I'd ask.
I saw from one source that the wages for one year of unskilled labor may have been about ...
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How much did the production of the Tsar Bomba cost to the Soviets?
The Tsar Bomba, also known as the "King of Bombs," was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed and tested by the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, this ...
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What languages did Karl Marx speak and how well?
Isaiah Berlin in Karl Marx: His Life and Environment comments on Marx efforts to learn Russian:
In order to do this he began to learn Russian; at the end of
six months he had mastered it sufficiently ...
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How did the allies address the economic debts of axis nations following world war 2?
How were the economic debts of axis nations addressed after World War 2? I am particularly interested in:
Plans that were agreed upon to address debt and reconstruction of Germany and Japan.
How ...
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Are there any historical examples of successful price ceilings (aka price gouging laws)?
Thomas Sowell writes the following in his book "Basic Economics":
If the prices of hotel rooms remain what they have been in normal
times, those who happen to arrive at the hotels first ...
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How long did it take arriving passengers to become indentured servants and where did they stay until then? [closed]
In colonial times just prior to the Revolution, when passengers arrived to the New World on a ship, how long would it typically take for them to be indentured to someone? For example, would they ...
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How much iron ore could a medieval miner extract per day?
I am finding really hard to find an answer to this question. There are some numbers available online, but first of all the numbers range quite a lot from different sources, then they are given for a ...
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After World War 2, why did European farmers switch from crop cultivation to grazing?
In George Marshall's speech announcing the Marshall Plan, he claims:
There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange ...
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What was the price of bread in France from 1789 - 1815?
I would really like to know the price of bread in France during the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic era. I am aware it was high in 1789, but couldn't find hard data for further years.
All my ...
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How did people trade for food and drink in Bronze age cities?
The time period I’m specifically interested in is Mesopotamian civilizations in the early to middle bronze age, but I don’t mind examples from other comparable cultures.
I’m curious how people in ...
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How accurate is Belloc's version of European economic history in The Servile State, with regards to the seizing of the monastic lands?
This is my own short summary of Belloc's version of European economic history, which he lays out in The Servile State (1912):
In 1541, the lands of the monasteries were expropriated by Henry VIII. ...
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How did ancient Greek city-states secure mines to mint coins?
I have a basic question about mines and coinage.
I have read that different cities minted their own coins. The Athenians were lucky with the Laurion mines which contained silver. But what did cities ...
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What is the longest lasting hyperinflationary period in history?
I guess hyperinflation periods depend on the definition of hyperinflation, which makes it hard to define and find comparative data. I could find which has been the worse in terms of percentages (...
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How did the accounting and capital organization system work in communist countries like the USSR? Did ideology justify or undermine the system? [closed]
It's difficult to see how the leaders could have kept track of such a complex system, in such a big country as the Soviet Union (USSR), without recognizing the existence of capital relations, the ...
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In Mughal India, which factors determined which countries were allowed forts?
I'm roughly halfway through this excellent extensive book: Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. One of the more memorable sections to me was the account of how the first gestures ...
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What legal code first provided tenants rights and/or covered eviction?
Historically land ownership, and extraction of tax/rents from tenants on that property and therefore the extraction of tenants from the property in event of non payment or other cause would have been ...
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Was the unemployment rate in the Nazi regime lower than the Weimar Republic?
We know that the Nazis didn't count women, Jews, and National Labour Service in the unemployment statistics, which was called 'invisible unemployment',
Putting the 'invisible unemployment' scenario ...
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Did the Europeans benefit economically from the scramble for Africa?
In the following video Rudyard Lynch, owner of the youtube channel "whatifalthist" claims that
Nearly every African colony cost the Europeans far more than they got out of it – the ...
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Are there any estimates of military spending as a percentage of total government expenditure anywhere in 15th century Europe?
A little piece of information stuck in my head about the military expenditure. Namely, the current expenditure on the military is incredibly low when compared to that in the middle ages. I am not sure,...
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Why did peasant serfdom last longer in Eastern Europe than in Western?
My concern is for the early-modern period, roughly 16th to 19th centuries. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia seem to provide the best known examples of long-lasting serfdom.
The article on ...
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What were the cost of comparable aircraft?
When comparing military equipment, little attention is paid to cost, at least in the popular resources (obviously, military establishments pay close attention to how much they are paying!)
E.g., there ...
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Was the Achaemenid Empire richer than the Sasanian Empire?
A while ago I read a passage regarding the economy of different Persian empires. The passage was implying that the Achaemenid Persian empire (a.k.a first Iranian empire) was in total ``far richer"...
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Was the term "depression" (in the economic sense) originally coined to describe and downplay current events in the 1930s?
Several years ago, I heard someone claim that the distinction between "recession" and "depression" is less than 100 years old. Apparently all economic downturns used to be called ...
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How did economic composition change during the world wars?
I'm trying to understand how economic composition changed during the world wars in various countries.
One route would be following the expenditure approach to gdp accounting, but in more detail. For ...
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Why were some German and Japanese cities bombed more than others during WW2? Is there a scientific consensus?
I'm trying to study the long-run effects the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities had on urban and economic development.
Reading some articles about it I get contradictory information about ...
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What was the wealth distribution in US antebellum North / South
My question relates to the following quote from chapter XI of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and ...
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What caused the stagnation in real wage growth in the later half of the 20th century?
During that time, U.S. per capita GDP grew briskly, "average" (mean wages) grew slowly, and "median" wages grew hardly at all. What reasons do economists cite for the differences ...
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What was the expected retirement age for men in Spain in 1936?
I am trying to find out what the expected age of retirement was for men in Spain in 1936.
I tried searching the Internet but the results I found were for recent years and not time past.
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Does city-specific economic data for the pre-WW2 decades exist for Japan and Germany? How do I find out?
I'd like to the an analysis using historical economic data of Japan and Germany.
For that I'm trying to figure out, if data exists from before 1945 of economic production in different japanese and ...
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What are the 'mushroom trusts' referenced in Churchill's "Second World War"?
It is in a section where he is referring to the collapse of the German economy during and after hyperinflation…
p.10 The Gathering Storm – The Follies of the Victors 1919–1929
Here is the passage that ...
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Was the financial crash of 2008 caused by top graduates of the American Ivy Leagues working at wall street banks?
From this article by Lisandro 'Leloy' Claudio, a Philippine/a Filipino professor of history, politics, South & Southeast Asian Studies (and not necessarily of finance, economics, mathematics or ...
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Did the world suffer a general economic decline in 1870?
Last year the World Bank reported that :
According to World Bank forecasts, the global economy will shrink by 5.2% this year. That would represent the deepest recession since the Second World War, ...
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How many labor hours were required to build wooden sailing ships? [closed]
I'm trying to find out how many hours of labor it took to build wooden sailing ships. (Obviously it would depend on e.g. size, and the ideal result would be a formula or table relating such parameters ...
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What's going on with this graph of wheat prices in "Civilization and Capitalism"?
I've been reading through Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Vol I: The Structures of Everyday Life. On page 135, there's a graph of the price of a quintal of wheat in ...
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Were there any watermills within sailing distance of the sea?
Watermills were widely used in times when river transport was even considerably more economically important than it is now. This sometimes led to conflict between these two uses of a river, e.g.
The ...
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Did countries use insurance to compensate for their economic losses after the Black Death/Spanish flu/Asian flu? [closed]
The first insurance contracts as we know them today appeared between the 12th and 13th centuries in Italy. The Florentine chronicler Giovani Villani asserts that insurance originated in Lombardy in ...
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What was the nature of a widow's personal estate in Colonial America?
In books that discuss figures in Colonial America and early American history (and I believe more broadly throughout contemporaneous European history), it is relatively common to see discussions of ...
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How long did it take to make a woolen sweater?
In premodern times, in temperate or colder climates, clothing was orders of magnitude more expensive than today and textile production made up a large percentage of total economic activity. I'm ...
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Was the post-WW2 form of globalisation a historical abberation? [closed]
I was discussing this with a friend and while I argued that globalisation (in the form of transportation of goods, people, knowledge and technology) existed since the early 17th century,he rebutted by ...
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Which is the oldest, still current, government debt?
(Not sure if this belongs to politics or history).
Which is the oldest, still current, government debt?
The answer of course depends on definitions since debts usually are "rolled over" at ...
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Was the tariff that Alexander Hamilton wanted to create (in his Financial Plan) ever put into action by Hamilton?
Hamilton's Financial plan had 3 parts:
The U.S. government would pay all debts
The U.S. government would create a national bank
The U.S. government would impose a high tax on imported goods (tariff)
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Is there validity to the claim of a scavenger hunting barter economy in the history of money?
I've read in economics textbooks, and seen in videos like this, saying that before money, there was a barter economy was based on a coincidence of wants, and people would have to go on basically a ...
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What did people used to exchange for goods during the 1920s German hyperinflation while the official currency was not trusted
When the 1920s hyperinflation happened, it seemed that the rapid currency devolution is not too hard to see. This must result in the people who own and sell goods distrust the future of the currency; ...
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Why didn't Louis XVI print money prior to the French revolution?
I'm currently reading "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution" by Simon Schama. It is an ok book. There is a lot of divergence into the culture leading up to the revolution, which ...
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In a medieval city how large a market was needed relative to population? [closed]
In a large medieval city fed by the agricultural product of the area, plus imports such as grains, spices, fish, etc. and also serving as a regional hub for the exchange of trade goods, what ...
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Was the US dollar, the Soviet reserve currency too?
Was the Soviet rouble also backed by the US dollar, which was the global reserve currency at the time?
I remember reading something about Soviets taking aid from the US, in the 1970s, after Soviet ...
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Are the coal mining revenue provided in the "Gentleman Jack" realistic for 1830s?
The "Gentleman Jack" series is based on the diaries of Anne Lister - a XIX century woman, often declared as "first modern lesbian" (the "gentleman" is apparently a slur, ...
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Why did Mao use political mobilization to prevent inefficiency and slack? [closed]
China just followed the Soviet Union model and inevitably encountered the same problems that socialist countries all suffered in the 1950s and 1960s. That is the lack of incentives of people and the ...
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Was there a Norse custom of "one keeps what one defends"?
Watching a Viking TV series this cropped up where a farmer was challenged to fight for his farm. It appears that the Norse did not have title deeds but rather relied on the sword to settle ownership ...
