Estimates of employment structure, agricultural output, and agricultural labour productivity are developed for the leading European countries from 1300 to 1800. The employment estimates are developed from estimates of the total, urban, and rural populations. The output estimates are derived by positing a demand curve for agricultural goods.

A survey of industrial households conducted in 1889–90 is used to investigate participation in self-help organisations, such as sickness and death benefit clubs and friendly societies, and to examine whether payouts were important in seeing families through earnings crises. Formal self-help has been hypothesised to underpin the male breadwinner family form, reducing the risk incumbent in reliance on one source of earnings. The results here show that those households with multiple earners took out most insurance and also had recourse to informal strategies, such as eliciting greater labour force participation from other family members and economising on rent, when adversity carried male earnings down. Those reliant on a male breadwinner were left vulnerable. They insured less, benefits were insufficient to make up earnings shortfalls and they were unable to compensate for deficits through labour market strategies. Formal self-help was a complement to, not a substitute for, family employment.

France presents an unusual case because, unlike several other European countries, there are no estimates of the income distribution for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a serious deficiency because it limits the ability to understand how an important dimension of the socio-economic fabric changed during the years preceding and coinciding with the beginning of France's industrial development. In this article we provide estimates that use tax data and the social tables of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While this data does not provide a basis for a perfectly accurate assessment of the income distribution, it does permit an evaluation of the general magnitude of inequality and how it varied in that period. The results suggest that inequality during the eighteenth century was large but decreased during the revolutionary period (1790–1815). Afterwards, and in accordance with Kuznets' hypothesis, when industrialisation began about 1830, inequality increased until sometime in the 1860s when it began its slow decline towards greater equality that characterises the twentieth century.

This article assesses the hypothesis that the implementation of sanctions on the export of coal and oil products to Italy by the League of Nations in 1935–36 would have forced Italy to abandon her imperialistic war against Ethiopia. An analysis of the data on coal consumption in the industrial census of 1937–38 shows that Italian industry would have survived a League embargo on coal, provided that Germany continued her supply to Italy. However, the counterfactual on oil and oil derivatives proves that Italy was vulnerable to an oil embargo which included oil residuals (the main input for the petrochemical industries using oil cracking as a refining method), and fuel oil. Therefore, a solitary attempt at such an embargo by the League could have been successful even with only a limited collaboration by the United States in the form of maintaining exports to Italy at ‘peacetime levels’ for each commodity embargoed by the League.