Birthing a Nation: The Effect of Fertility Control Access on the Nineteenth-Century Demographic Transition

2014 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 482-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna N. Lahey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Demographic Transition ◽  
Fertility Control ◽  
Demand Side ◽  
Economic Literature ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
The U.S

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. birthrate fell by half. While previous economic literature has emphasized demand-side explanations for this decline, many of these arguments are confounded by changes in the supply of technologies to control fertility. I exploit the introduction of state laws governing American women's access to abortion to measure the effect of changes in the supply of fertility technologies on the number of children born. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4 to 15 percent when abortion is restricted. I also explore the legal characteristics and political economy of these laws.

Unsettling Subjects

2018 ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Land Occupation ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
The U.S

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.

Cameralism as Sonderweg of German Mercantilism?

2021 ◽  
pp. 389-405
Author(s):  
Lars Magnusson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Cameralism, both as a discourse and as an administrative political economy, in both theory and practice. Attention has been drawn to how Cameralism—defined as thought and practice—should be understood. The aim of this article is to take a step back and focus on the historiography of Cameralism from the nineteenth century onwards. Even though many in recent times have challenged old and seemingly dated conceptualizations and interpretations, they are still very much alive. Most profoundly this has implied that Cameralism most often in the past has been acknowledged as an expression of—German. as it were—exceptionalism to the general history of economic doctrine and thinking.

MALTHUS, NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIALISM, AND MARX

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
GARETH STEDMAN JONES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Main Criticism ◽  
Uncultivated Land ◽  
Malthusian Theory

ABSTRACTThis article examines radical and socialist responses to Malthus's Essay on population, beginning with the response of William Godwin, Malthus's main object of attack, but focusing particularly upon the position adopted by his most important admirer, Robert Owen. The anti-Malthus position was promoted and sustained both by Owen and the subsequent Owenite movement. Owenites stressed both the extent of uncultivated land and the capacity of science to raise the productivity of the soil. The Owenite case, preached weekly in Owenite Halls of Science, and argued by its leading lecturer, John Watts, made a strong impact upon the young Frederick Engels working in Manchester in 1843–4. His denunciation of political economy in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, heavily dependent upon the Owenite position, was what first encouraged Marx to engage with political economy. Marx initially reiterated the position of Engels and the Owenites in maintaining that population increase pressured means of employment rather than means of subsistence, and that competition rather than overpopulation caused economic crises. But in his later work, his main criticism of the Malthusian theory was its false conflation of history and nature.

Richard Whately and political economy in school books, 1833-80

1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Goldstrom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Richard Whately ◽  
School Books

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’

SPECIES OF PROPERTY: THE AMERICAN PROPERTY-TAX UNIFORMITY CLAUSES RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 974-1008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin L. Einhorn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Property Tax ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Uniform Property ◽  
The U.S

Economic historians have traced the origin of the uniform property tax in the United States to the insertion of uniformity clauses into state constitutions in the Northwest and to efforts to tax commercial wealth. This article shows that the tax was created by legislation in the Northeast and that the first constitutional clauses were adopted in the South to protect slaveholders. It is time for historians of the U.S. political economy to abandon the dated paradigms of the “progressive history” tradition.

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