When revolutions for independence broke out, religious life in the Spanish American world was ruled by the Indian patronage regime [patronato], which gave the monarch tight control over ecclesiastical institutions. Patronage included, among many other prerogatives, presenting candidates to the pope, appointing parish priests and doctrine teachers, the right to allow or deny the dissemination of...

Medical journals and other sources do not show evidence that cholera occurred in Haiti before 2010, despite the devastating effect of this disease in the Caribbean region in the 19th century. Cholera occurred in Cuba in 1833-1834; in Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Nevis, Trinidad, the Bahamas, St. Vincent, Granada, Anguilla, St. John, Tortola, the Turks and Caicos...

Following the seminal work of late 19th century economist Etienne Laspeyres we analyse the incidence of the Prussian milling and butchery tax shortly before its repeal in 1875. A comparison of flour prices in cities which levied this tax with cities which did not reveals unusually strong tax overshifting. Modern theories which explain overshifting of a specific tax argue with quality improvemen...

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1943. 8 Czerniawski AM. From average to ideal: the evolution of the height and weight table in the united states, 1836-1943. Social Sci History 2007;31:273–96. 9 James M. The Metropolitan Life: A Study in Business Growth. New York: The Viking Press, 1947. 10 Dublin L, Lotka AJ. Twenty-Five Years of Health Progre...

Jules Bernard Luys was a highly industrious and dedicated French investigator who made important contributions to the fields of neuroanatomy and neuropsychiatry in the second half of the 19th century. His name is still eponymically attached to the subthalamic nucleus and the centre médian nucleus, two structures that are at the center of our current thinking about the functional organization of...

Using the debates between Classical political economists and their critics as our lens, this paper examines the question of whether we're the same or different. Starting with Adam Smith, Classical economics presumed that humans are the same in their capacity for language and trade ; observed differences were then explained by incentives, luck and history, and it is the "vanity of the philosophe...

What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux This paper examines the evolving effects of England’s Old Poor Law (1601-1834). It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects dissipated. These conclusions are based on a new datase...