Jeffrey G. Williamson’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

About 55 million Europeans migrated to the New World between 1850 and 1914, landing in North and South America and in Australia. This movement, which marked a profound and permanent shift in global population and economic activity, is described in vivid detail by Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, and the causes and effects relative to this great relocation are soundly analysed. The Age of Mass Migration offers a thorough treatment of a period of vital development in the economic history of the modern world and, moreover, devotes much objective consideration to certain economic questions that still baffle us today: Why does a nation’s emigration rate typically rise with early industrialization? How do immigrants choose their destinations? Are international labour markets segmented? Do immigrants truly “rob” jobs from locals? What impact do immigrants have on wage rates and living standards in the host country? In addressing these issues, and many of others, this book takes a new and comprehensive view of mass migration. Although somewhat controversial in terms of method—it assigns to a social phenomenon an economic explanation and interpretation— The Age of Mass Migration will be useful to all students of migration, historical or contemporary, and to anyone interested in international economic activities.

We document the origins of Australia's egalitarianism by quantifying both the level and trends of earnings inequality during 1870–1910 by constructing social tables for earnings, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the lack of income, tax and wealth data. We find that earnings inequality was much lower in Australia than in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1870 and that there was no rise in Australian earnings inequality over the half century 1870–1910, but rather a fall. We argue that such findings are driven by a faster skill supply growth relative to demand.

This paper contributes to the New World living standard leadership debate by comparing the Australian experience during 1820s–1870s with the USA, Latin America, and the UK. Using novel living costs data, we compute two estimates of income leadership: welfare ratios and purchasing–power–parity-adjusted GDP per capita. Australia started considerably below the UK and the USA but by the 1870s, it had overtaken the former and had almost done so for the latter, due to relatively rapid labour productivity growth and a steep decline in living costs. Still, in the 1870s Australia was not the world income leader, but a close second.

Compared with its competitors, Australian GDP per worker grew exceptionally quickly from the 1820s to the 1870s, at a rate about twice that of the US and three times that of Britain. Did this rapid growth produce rising inequality, following a Kuznets curve? Using a novel dataset, this article offers new evidence that provides unambiguous support for the view that, in sharp contrast with the US experience and with globalization‐inequality views concerning late nineteenth‐century frontiers, Australia underwent a revolutionary levelling in incomes up to the 1870s. This assessment is based on trends in many proxies for inequality, as well as annual estimates of functional income shares in the form of land rents, convict payments, free unskilled labour incomes, free skilled labour and white collar incomes, British imperial transfers, and a capitalist residual.

We use a new trade dataset showing that nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom comparable to other parts of the “global periphery.” A sharp rise in export prices in the five decades before the scramble (1835–1885) was followed by an equally impressive decline during the colonial era. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior. -- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050718000128

India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market, primarily to Britain. The ensuing deindustrialization was greatest c1750-c1860. We ask how much of India’s deindustrialization was due to local supply-side forces -- such as political fragmentation and a rising incidence of drought, and how much to world price shocks. An open, three-sector neo-Ricardian model organizes our thinking and new relative price database implements the empirical analysis. We find local supply side forces were important from as early as 1700. The size of Indian deindustrialization is then assessed by comparison with other parts of the periphery.

What happened to the inequality of real income and wealth before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution? Just as the usual Industrial Revolution era (1750-1850) has been revised by historians of economic growth, so too the articles in this issue follow the lead of Van Zanden (1995) in opening up a new inequality history for earlier eras and other continents. Three of them offer new evidence on European wealth and income inequality movements in pre-industrial and industrial epochs. The fourth offers a new perspective on Latin American experience since the late nineteenth century, reporting a twentieth-century experience quite unlike the Great Leveling that Kuznets and others saw in Europe and the USA from World War 1 to the 1970s.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book brings together a range of ideas and theories to arrive at a deeper understanding of inequality in Latin America and its complex realities. To so, it addresses questions such as: What are the origins of inequality in Latin America? How can we create societies that are more equal in terms of income distribution, gender equality and opportunities? How can we remedy the social divide that is making Latin America one of the most unequal regions on earth? What are the roles played by market forces, institutions and ideology in terms of inequality? In this book, a group of global experts gathered by the Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL), part of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), show readers how various types of inequality, such as economical, educational, racial and gender inequality have been practiced in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and many others through the centuries. Presenting new ideas, new evidence, and new methods, the book subsequently analyzes how to move forward with second-generation reforms that lay the foundations for more egalitarian societies. As such, it offers a valuable and insightful guide for development economists, historians and Latin American specialists alike, as well as students, educators, policymakers and all citizens with an interest in development, inequality and the Latin American region.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to northwestern Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (or ‘West’) and a non-industrial, or even de-industrializing, South (or ‘Rest’). This nineteenth-century divergence, which had profound economic, military, and geopolitical implications, has been studied in great detail by many economists and historians. Today, this divergence between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ is visibly unravelling, as economies in Asia, Latin America, and even Sub-Saharan Africa converge on the rich economies of Europe and North America. This phenomenon, which is set to define the twenty-first century, both economically and politically, has also been the subject of a considerable amount of research. Less appreciated, however, are the deep historical roots of this convergence process, and in particular of the spread of modern industry to the global periphery. This book fills this gap by providing a systematic, comparative, historical account of the spread of modern manufacturing beyond its traditional heartland, to Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America, or what we call the poor periphery. It identifies the timing of this convergence (fastest in the inter-war and import-substituting post-Second World War years, not the more recent ‘miracle growth’ years), and identifies which driving forces were common to all periphery countries, and which were not.