Academic visitors 2023-2024

 

Brian Varian
b.varian@newcastle.ac.uk
Visiting Fellow (Lent Term) of Corpus Christi College
Brian Varian is a Lecturer in Economics at Newcastle University. He is interested in the international trade of Britain and the Dominions during the late-nineteenth century and interwar era. He is currently researching the economic effects of market integration resulting from Australian federation in 1901.

 

Şahin Yeşilyurt
sy464@cam.ac.uk; shnyslyrt@gmail.com

Şahin Yeşilyurt is Associate Professor of Public Finance at the Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Faculty of Political Sciences, Turkey. During his PhD he spent a year (from 2018 to 2019) at Cambridge University Faculty of History, researching his dissertation as a visiting scholar. He is still a visiting scholar (from 2023 to 2024) at Cambridge University, Department of History. His research focuses on economic and public finance history, especially taxation in the 19th-century Ottoman State. He has authored and contributed to books, book chapters, articles, and presentations on the Ottoman State as well as on the early years of the Turkish Republic. His current research project aims to examine the influence of the British government on Ottoman public finance through the British-Ottoman archives during the 19th century.

 

Academic visitors 2022-2023

 

Bina Agarwal
bina.agarwal@manchester.ac.uk

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment in the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research interests are agrarian transformations, group farming and smallholder cooperation, environmental governance, gender gap in property, poverty and inequality, food security, community forestry, the political economy of gender, bargaining and gender relations. She is visiting at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge in 2022-23.

 

Martin Andersson
ma815@cam.ac.uk / martin.a.andersson@slu.se
Visiting Scholar, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 2021–2023
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Robinson College
Researcher in Agrarian history, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Dr. Martin Andersson in interested in problems relating to the social and economic history of late medieval and early modern Sweden. In his doctoral dissertation, Martin studied seventeenth-century migration patterns. One strand of his current work concerns service and other forms of rural labour relations, while another seeks to produce data on the population and social structure of sixteenth-century Sweden.

 

Margarita López-Antón
margarita.lopez@uab.cat

Margarita López-Antón is a Fellow of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and member of the research project “The transformation of the structure of employment as an indicator of economic modernization. Spain, 1700-1930” (PI Dr. Sarasúa). She teaches undergraduate History of Economic Thought, Economic History and Economics and Business Accounting. Her research interests are gendered concepts of work and women’s occupations in Catalonia (Spain) in the period 1700-1930 being her main objectives to rebuild the structure of employment (male and female) with special mention to the recalculation of the female activity rate; to start the analysis of the causes of the changes in the structure of the occupation; under what conditions are non-agricultural occupations an indicator of economic modernization? She is currently researching to show the work of women entrepreneurs.

 

Arvand Mirsafian
arvand.mirsafian@ekhist.uu.se / am3116@cam.ac.uk

Arvand Mirsafian is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University. His main research interests are labour market relations, technological change and economic policy in Sweden during the late 19th and the 20th century. His doctoral thesis studies the Swedish labour movement’s attitude to industrial rationalisation and how it influenced the so-called Swedish labour market model. He is visiting the Faculty of History during the Michaelmas term 2022/23.

 

Susann Anett Pedersen
susann.pedersen@ntnu.no / sap88@cam.ac.uk
Visiting Scholar, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 2022-2023
Postdoctoral researcher, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Susann Anett Pedersen is interested in economic and social history, including gender history, and her research mainly focuses on medieval Norway. In her postdoc-project, Pedersen examines credit in Norway c. 1250-1570. She is interested in how the credit system developed in the period, how land was used as collateral, and in the bonds of trust established between creditors and debtors. In her doctoral research, Pedersen studied propertied women’s economic agency c.1400-1550.

 

 

Hilde L. Sommerseth
hls78@cam.ac.uk
Professor of historical demography at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), and director of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre (NHDC).

Sommerseth has decades of experience working with microdata from the historical population censuses and church books of Norway and has from 2015 been a partner in the construction of the Norwegian Historical Population Register (HPR). This register enables researchers to follow individuals who resided in Norway between 1801 and 1964, their life course history nested within and across generations.  Sommerseth and her team at the NHDC are responsible for formatting the HPR data for use by the international research community. This work also involves developing a public platform for dissemination of the register along with interactive tools for analysis.
Sommerseth’s research centres on historical demography, with a focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intergenerational studies is the nucleus of her interest, stretching from studies on mortality to research on household composition. Key subjects are causes of death, gendering of diseases, human capital, social inequality in health, ethnicity, masculinity, and ageing.

 

 

Professor John Wallis
wallis@umd.edu

Professor John Wallis is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge for the 2022-2023 academic year. He is an American economic historian who has worked on the New Deal; early 19th century banking, political economy, state governments, and constitution; and the interaction of politics and economics in the development process. In 2009 he published Violence and Social Orders with Douglass North and Barry Weingast.  He is currently finishing a new manuscript Leviathan Denied: Rules, Organizations and Economic Development, that focuses on how rules and organizations affect development, with an application to the appearance of capitalist democracies at the late 19th and early 20th century: how the developed world first became developed.

Recent Papers:
“An Alternative Institutional Approach to Rules, Organizations, and Development.” Journal of Economic History, June 2022.

With Naomi Lamoreaux, “Economic Crises, General Laws, and the mid-Nineteenth Century Transformation of American Political Economy.” Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2021.

 

 

Academic Visitors 2013-2014

 

Ke-chin Hsia
kechinhsia@gmail.com
Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Academic year 2013-2014

Ke-chin Hsia is broadly interested in the interactions between the state and its citizens in post-1867 East Central Europe.  His research interests include social history of the First World War, nationalism and empire, democratization, civil society and voluntarism, bureaucracy and the administrative state, and the origins of the welfare state from a comparative perspective.

 

 

Johan Mathew
johanmathew@history.umass.edu
Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Academic year 2013-2014
Assistant Professor of History and Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Johan Mathew studies the history of the Indian Ocean with a focus on illicit trade and commercial regulation in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism in the Arabian Sea." His research interests include: illicit and informal economies, histories of capitalism, finance, and globalization.

 

 

Academic Visitors 2012-2013

 

Iza Hussin
hussin@uchicago.edu
Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Academic year 2012-2013
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

 

 

 

Douglas Moggach
dmoggach@uOttawa.ca
Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Academic year 2012-2013
Distinguished University Professor, University Research Chair in Political Thought, and Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa

 

 

Gabriel Paquette
gabriel.paquette@jhu.edu
Balzan-Skinner Fellow at Centre for History and Economics, Academic year 2012-2013
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University

 

 

Academic Visitors 2011-2012

 

Professor Yoko Gotoh
yg283@cam.ac.uk
yokogotoh@kanagawa-u.ac.jp
Visiting Scholar, Faculty of History, Academic year 2011-2012 Professor, Faculty of Economics, Kanagawa University

Prof. Gotoh has worked on the issues in housing policy, health and income maintenance policy, and economic policy from the viewpoint of historical and comparative approach of the tax system as well as the fiscal system in the U.S. and Japan. Her Doctor’s degree is from Keio University in Japan. My research explores interactions between the income tax system and the transforming roles of government, society, and economy, including internal interactions among a variety of treatments embedded in the tax system in line with historical implications and the concept of distribution/redistribution. Progress in this area should shed light on the reasons for the stability and instability of the tax system, and should enable us to distinguish endogenous from exogenous factors. Currently I am investigating on (1) the economic, social, and ideological changes to evolve the income concept and the principle of taxation (2) the impact of tax policy on the tax system (3) mass taxation and social policy (4) tax revenue under federalism.

 

 

Academic Visitors 2010-2011

 

Professor Gary D. Libecap

Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Cambridge University (2010-2011) and Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Corporate Environmental Management, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara. He also is a Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Sherm and Marge Telleen Research Fellow, Hoover Institution. His Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania.

My research focuses on how property rights to natural and environmental resources are defined and enforced and how or when markets might be developed as options for more effective resource management and allocation. Much of my work draws upon American history—the development of mineral rights, water rights and markets, the origins of the 1930s Dust Bowls, farm failure in the Great Plains, fisheries, oil and gas rights and regulation, federal lands and grazing, and the demarcation of property rights to agricultural and urban lands. My work encompasses economics and law, economic history, natural resource economics, and economic geography. My latest books are Owens Valley Revisited: A Reassessment of the West’s First Great Water Transfer, Stanford University Press, 2007, and The Economics of Climate Change: Adaptations Past and Present, co edited with Richard Steckel, University of Chicago Press and NBER, forthcoming. I am working on a book manuscript with Terry Anderson on Environmental Markets, drawing on many historical examples, for Cambridge University Press.

 

 

Academic Visitors 2009-2010

 

Professor SaitoProfessor Osamu Saito
os10003@cam.ac.uk
Visiting Leverhulme Professor, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Academic year 2009-2010
Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University


Prof. Osamu Saito has written on wide-ranging issues in economic and population history, mostly in comparative perspective. At the Cambridge Group, he is working on the following projects: (1) Comparative History of Occupational Structure, a book project with Leigh Shaw-Taylor; (2) Panel data analysis of Japan’s Farm Household Surveys, currently focusing on hours worked by farm women between 1931 and 1941; (3) Infant mortality in rural Japan, focusing on farm women’s workload as a factor accounting for its slow decline during the interwar period; and (4) The Great Divergence: a Japanese perspective, some thoughts on which were delivered as the Leverhulme Lectures in February 2010.

 

Dr Tokihiko Settsu
mmo@ier.hit-u.ac.jp

Tokihiko SettsuVisiting Scholar, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, from the 3rd May to the 28th August 2010. COE Researcher, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Japan His research interest is in the role of the service sector in economic growth and its regional difference in modern Japan (1868-1940). Based on new estimates of service-sector employment and output, which he compiled in his dissertation, he is currently working on (1) Occupational Structure in Modern Japan (with Osamu Saito) for the Comparative History of Occupational Structure project, and (2) Regional Inequality and Industrial Structures in Pre-War Japan (with Kyoji Fukao, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Tangjun Yuan and Ralph Paprzycki), which examines the relationship between economic growth and regional inequality based on new estimates of prefecture-level GDP.

 

Dr Chiaki Yamamoto
cy254@cam.ac.uk
cy@econ.osaka-u.ac.jp
Visiting Scholar, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Academic year 2009-2010
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University


My PhD examined rural labour markets in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. In particular, regional unemployment and two-layered labour markets of agricultural workers were explored. I am currently carrying out further research on regional wage differences based on the 1834 Poor Law Report, which considers not only income in cash but also income in kind in the form of food and drink provision. I am also working on the occupational structure of women in the first half of the nineteenth century. Based on the 1834 Poor Law Report and Census Enumerators’ Books, I investigate the general trend of female job opportunities.