{"title":"The War of the Pacific and Chilean public revenues: Reallocation of the tax burden and institutional change","authors":"Oriol Sabaté, José Peres-Cajías","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70023","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A substantial body of literature has considered warfare a fundamental driver of fiscal capacity. We argue that the nature of the tax base available to governments can either foster or constrain the ability and incentives of central elites to impose their legitimacy once the war is over. We illustrate this dynamic by analysing the evolution of public revenues in Chile before, during, and after the War of the Pacific (1879–83). The seizure of natural resource-rich areas enabled the Chilean state to raise public revenues and expand its size. This process was driven by a significant increase in natural resource revenues, accompanied by the reduction or decentralization of other revenue sources - outcomes shaped by deliberate policy choices. Over time, the limitations of this arrangement became increasingly evident, paving the way for the introduction of new domestic taxes and investments in fiscal capacity from the early twentieth century onward. While these shifts are crucial for understanding the long-term development of Chilean state capacity, they proved insufficient to address the short-term macroeconomic vulnerabilities stemming from the state's dependence on natural resource taxation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"575-599"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ehr.70023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. , Victoria Bateman, (Headline Publishing Group, 2025. Pp. 432. ISBN 9781035415779. HbK £25)","authors":"Judy Z. Stephenson","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70107","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"857-858"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francesco Maria Salvatore Fiore Melacrinis, Mauro Rota
{"title":"Public health reforms and the mortality decline in nineteenth-century Italy","authors":"Francesco Maria Salvatore Fiore Melacrinis, Mauro Rota","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study examines the impact of Italy's 1887–8 health reforms on mortality, contributing to the historical debate on the state's role in Europe's health transition. Leveraging event-study-style difference-in-differences approach, we assess the effectiveness of the Crispi–Pagliani reforms, which strengthened public health governance and introduced targeted non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate deaths from infectious diseases. Mortality from targeted diseases decreased by 8.5 per cent relative to non-targeted diseases within 5 years of the reforms. The results highlight the role of sanitary surveillance and coordinated governance, particularly effective in less-educated regions, where public authorities compensated for limited health knowledge and prompted information flow in a broader process of top-down modernization.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"527-554"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ehr.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Agustina Paglayan, (Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 384. ISBN 9780691261270 Pbk £28.)","authors":"Gabriele Cappelli","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70113","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"862-864"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The cost of the consumer revolution: Prices, material living standards, and real inequality in Amsterdam (1630‒1805)","authors":"Bas Spliet, Anne E. C. McCants","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article measures the cost of the early modern consumer revolution through a quantitative analysis of product and process innovations in Amsterdam and examines their variegated social impact in two distinct datasets of probate inventories. It demonstrates that middle-class decencies became substantially cheaper during the seventeenth century, nuancing the industrious revolution hypothesis in urban settings, but we also find no sustained positive impact of rising consumption on the material living standards of the labouring masses. In the eighteenth century, in fact, first- and second-hand prices diverged due to the combined effects of a supply glut, the accelerating turnover of fashion, and the inherent fragility of many novel consumer goods. While elite and middling households compensated for their indulgence in consumerism with prudent ‘investment’ in more durable possessions, thereby ensuring a transferable inheritance for the next generation, our analysis documents the material impoverishment of Amsterdam's working classes during the final decades of the <i>ancien régime</i>. The consumer revolution, we conclude, contributed to the eighteenth-century rise of material – or ‘real’ – inequality between the shrinking middle classes of this preindustrial metropolis on the one hand and its growing numbers of impoverished inhabitants on the other.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"684-716"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ehr.70036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Triumph of Textiles: Industrial Dundee c. 1700–1918. Christopher A. Whatley and Jim Tomlinson, (Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Pp.291. ISBN: 9781399537827. PbK £19).","authors":"Carlo Morelli","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70103","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"859-861"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Macroeconomic policymaking in interwar Britain: A reappraisal","authors":"David Ronicle","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper brings together modern empirical techniques with contemporary high frequency data to fill two prominent gaps in the literature on Britain's interwar years: what were the quantitative effects of monetary policy on unemployment and prices in the years 1919–38, and how did that compare with the effects of fiscal policy? Its specific innovation is to draw on a previously little-used weekly publication of public finance statistics, allowing the roles of monetary policy, taxation, and public spending to be assessed side-by-side in a coherent framework – a structural vector autoregression identified with sign restrictions. In a period of particularly unsettled policy, I find that policy shocks, both monetary and fiscal, made a material contribution to variation in prices and unemployment and played a central role in the two great recessions of the period, modern Britain's most severe. Other macroeconomic policy choices could have delivered better outcomes for prices and unemployment, but this would have required making different choices in the face of conflicting objectives and some sharp trade-offs.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"661-683"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alejandra Irigoin, Atsushi Kobayashi, David Chilosi
{"title":"China inside out: Explaining silver flows in the triangular trade, c. 1820s‒70s","authors":"Alejandra Irigoin, Atsushi Kobayashi, David Chilosi","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper analyses a new large dataset of silver prices, as well as silver and merchandise trade flows in and out of China in the crucial decades of the mid-nineteenth century when the Empire was opened to world trade. Silver flows were associated with the interaction between heterogeneous monetary preferences and availability of specific coins. Before the 1850s, money markets became increasingly efficient, as reliance on bills of exchange allowed exports to grow in times when sound money was in short supply. When a new standard for silver eventually emerged, there was a new peak in China's silver imports.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"496-526"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ehr.70020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Strategic materials and state capacity in Renaissance Italy: The economic policies of ‘Roman saltpetre’ procurement","authors":"Fabrizio Antonio Ansani","doi":"10.1111/ehr.70039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70039","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Demonstrating the existence of a soaring demand for strategic materials in fifteenth-century Rome, the article pioneers research in the late medieval trade in saltpetre, the irreplaceable, rare component of gunpowder, indispensable for waging war following the diffusion of artillery technology. More importantly, the essay highlights the political measures undertaken to support the supply of materiel, revealing a pragmatic stance that combined state control with private initiative. The result is a compelling example of the role arms procurement played in the early development of state capacity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47868,"journal":{"name":"Economic History Review","volume":"79 2","pages":"757-780"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ehr.70039","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148012210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}