Category: News

For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2024 series we are pleased to welcome Spike Gibbs (Universität Mannheim). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 3 October at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Abstract

The in-kind wages paid to pre-industrial workers have recently received new attention by economic historians interested in understanding long-term living standards. However, in-kind wages are difficult to quantify leading historians to either ignore them entirely or use proxies such as consumer price index baskets of goods to capture their value. In this paper, we take a different approach by using a new dataset to directly measure the quantity, composition, and value of grain wages paid to late medieval agricultural workers across the period 1270 to 1440. This allows us to precisely measure remuneration, and the value of its cash and in-kind components, at the level of the individual worker. We use this information to evaluate the mechanisms which led to changes in labour remuneration in the period following the Black Death and differences in the effects between workers. Our results clearly demonstrate that the wages of the average adult male worker rose in the wake of the Plague, but only after a thirty-year hiatus, showing that changes in labour relations, rather than worker productivity in and of itself, drove the ‘golden age of labour’. However, preliminary investigations of variation between workers suggest a more complex story: while in the aggregate wages appear to have been similar across different manors held by the same estate, inequality in the wages paid between different types of worker were persistent, suggesting a rigidity in occupational hierarchies that was not overturned by the Plague. 

The paper is a collaboration with Jordan Claridge (LSE) and Vincent Delabastita (Radboud)

About the Speaker

Spike Gibbs is Junior Professor for the Economic History of the Middle Ages at the University of Mannheim. His research addresses topics such as local officeholding, agricultural wages, the economics of lordship, and the social networks of village communities.

For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2024 series we are pleased to welcome Jonathan Kennedy (Queen Mary, University of London). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 19 September at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

Abstract

Disciplines such as history are anthropocentric, viewing the natural world as a stage on which humans, whether “Great Men” or struggling classes, play out their roles. This talk brings together research from a range of disciplines – microbiology, anthropology, and sociology; genomics, classics, and economics – to explore the role that pathogens have played in the past. We will take a brisk ride through the recent history of our species, to see how infectious diseases played critical roles in many of the great social, political and economic transformations, from the emergence of Christianity and Islam as world religions, to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

About the Speaker

Jonathan Kennedy is a Reader in Politics and Global Health at Queen Mary University of London. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. His first book, Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History, was a Sunday Times Science Book of the Year and a national bestseller in the USA. It has been translated into 12 languages, including Norwegian. 

If you missed the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of the Fall 2024 series with Áine Doran (Ulster University) you can catch up with the video here.

Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.

For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Áine Doran (Ulster University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 5 September at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.

The paper has been published in Social Science & Medicine and is available here.

Abstract

What are the insights from historical pandemics for policymaking today? We carry out a systematic review of the literature on the impact of pandemics that occurred since the Industrial Revolution and prior to Covid-19. Our literature searches were conducted between June 2020 and September 2023, with the final review encompassing 169 research papers selected for their relevance to understanding either the demographic or economic impact of pandemics. We include literature from across disciplines to maximise our knowledge base, finding many relevant articles in journals which would not normally be on the radar of social scientists. Our review identifies two gaps in the literature: (1) the need to study pandemics and their effects more collectively rather than looking at them in isolation; and (2) the need for more study of pandemics besides 1918 Spanish Influenza, especially milder pandemic episodes. These gaps are a consequence of academics working in silos, failing to draw on the skills and knowledge offered by other disciplines. Synthesising existing knowledge on pandemics in one place provides a basis upon which to identify the lessons in preparing for future catastrophic disease events.   

About the Speaker

Áine Doran (PhD, QUB) is a Lecturer in Economics at Ulster University. Her research focuses on Economic History, primarily in the areas of demography, living standards and development. Her PhD is entitled ‘Pandemics, Poverty and Population: Essays in Economic History’. One part of the thesis studies 19th century Ireland with the aim of better understanding the context and causes of the Irish Famine. The second area of study is understanding pandemics which have occurred in the last 100 years and both the economic and demographic impact they had. Along with academic conferences, Áine has spoken about her work at both public events and government departments.