About 55 million Europeans migrated to the New World between 1850 and 1914, landing in North and South America and in Australia. This mass migration marked a profound shift in the distribution of global population and economic activity. In this book, Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson describe the migration and analyze its causes and effects. Their study offers a comprehensive treatment of a vital period in the modern economic development of the Western world. Moreover, it explores questions that we still debate today: Why does a nation's emigration rate typically rise with early...

As awareness of the process of globalization grows and the study of its effects becomes increasingly important to governments and businesses (as well as to a sizable opposition), the need for historical understanding also increases. Despite the importance of the topic, few attempts have been made to present a long-term economic analysis of the phenomenon, one that frames the issue by examining its place in the long history of international integration.
This volume collects eleven papers doing exactly that and more. The first group of essays explores how the process of globalization can...

Migration and the International Labor Market 1850-1939 focuses on the economic aspects of international migration during the era of mass migrations.

The studies in this volume explore the challenges and opportunities presented by globalization events prior to 1950, and identify how countries around the Mediterranean responded to them. In addition to comparative assessments of regional performance, the volume offers case studies of Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, Israel and Egypt.

Two of the world's leading economists, Philippe Aghion (a theorist) and Jeffrey Williamson (an economic historian), jointly question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. Aghion assesses the effects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality matters: is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with microeconomic theories of incentives? Jeffrey Williamson then discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of wage and income inequality in developed...

Two of the world's leading economists, Philippe Aghion (a theorist) and Jeffrey Williamson (an economic historian), jointly question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. Aghion assesses the effects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality matters: is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with microeconomic theories of incentives? Jeffrey Williamson then discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of wage and income inequality in developed...

Coping With City Growth assesses British performance with city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian. What emerges is an exciting and provocative new account of a very old problem. The debate over Third World city growth is hardly new, and can be found in the British Parliamentary Papers as early as the 1830s, in treatises by political economists, and in the British Press. This book should change the way urban history is written in the future and influence the...

Coping With City Growth assesses British performance with city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian. What emerges is an exciting and provocative new account of a very old problem. The debate over Third World city growth is hardly new, and can be found in the British Parliamentary Papers as early as the 1830s, in treatises by political economists, and in the British Press. This book should change the way urban history is written in the future and influence the...

Jeffrey G. Williamson examines the political economy of immigration backlash and immigration policy in two global centuries. The first, between 1820 and World War I, was a proglobal environment, characterized by booming trade, labor, and capital markets. It was followed by an antiglobal and autarchic retreat between 1914 and 1950.

Late Nineteenth-Century American Development is an economist's attempt to interpret a critical period of US history, from Civil War to World War I. The questions raised have always been at the heart of American historiography. What accounts for the retardation up to the turn of the century? How did capital markets operate and what was their influence on the pace and pattern of our growth? What determined farm performance and what impact did that performance have on the economy as a whole? Yet while the questions raised in this book are familiar, the methods are not. This book blends...