I use the rents and prices of land held by charities in England to estimate statistically nominal and real farmland rental values, including payments for tithe and taxes, from 1500 to 1912. The series measures rental values when land was rented in a competitive market, not the average rents paid by land occupiers which would often be lower because of customary leases. An advantage of the methods used here over older ones is that the sampling error in the series can be calculated. The series show rapid shifts of income toward landowners and away from wages around 1600 and 1800, but back toward wages after 1870. Land rental values are much higher before 1820 than in the recent series of Michael Turner, John Beckett and Bethany Afton. This implies that agricultural productivity was high before 1800: higher than could be consistent with an agricultural revolution either alongside or before the Industrial Revolution.

This article presents a model of the transformation of the Central European economy between the years 1000 and 1800. On the basis of assumptions about the social environment, the actors, and the relations between them, deductions are made that are compared to actual historical developments. The model explains why competitive markets emerged in the high Middle Ages, why anti-competitive corporations and states developed in the period up to the seventeenth century, and why institutions safeguarding market exchange began to be introduced in the course of the eighteenth century.

The Irish Famine killed over a million people who would not have died otherwise. The nosologies published by the 1851 Irish census provide a rich source for the causes of death during these catastrophic years. This source is extremely rich and detailed, but also inaccurate and deficient to the point where many scholars have given up using it. In this article we try to make adjustments to the death-by-cause tabulations and provide more accurate ones. These tables are then used to analyse the reasons why so many people died and why modern famines tend to be less costly in terms of human life.

Self-selection mechanisms are important because they shed light on what has been relevant to those who migrate, especially in the nineteenth century. Using new micro data gathered from emigrant permit lists and census data in the homeland, I compare over 10,000 German emigrants to those who stayed at home. I find that artisans were over-represented and farmers and labourers both under-represented. The emigrant population was positively self-selected in terms of skills, but negatively self-selected in terms of financial wealth.

This article presents revised estimates for the Human Development Index (HDI) for the benchmark years 1870, 1913, 1950, 1975 and 1999, based on the latest available data for real gross domestic product per person and on the recently modified formula for HDI. The results indicate that HDI in most of today's less-developed countries exceeds that of Western Europe in 1870 and that the gaps in HDI between Western Europe and each of Africa, China and India were smaller in 1999 than in 1950. Both these outcomes have been heavily influenced by widespread gains in life expectancy.