Brown Bag Seminar 2024-25

Winter Term 2024 - 2025

Tuesdays 12-1pm
Winter Term Venue: CKK.117 (Cheng Kin Ku)

21 January 2025

• Speaker: Professor Neil Cummins 
  
  Abstract: 

  We document religiosity in England from 1300 to 1850 using the full-text of ~26,000 last will and testaments and 8,000 will extracts.. By extracting from these documents measures of religious expression and sentiment, together with specified wealth bequests for burial, remembrance, parish church and charity, we measure two distinct types of religiosity. “Nominal” religiosity is measured using a composite index for a set of religious declarations in the preamble of the will, such as gratitude towards higher entities. “Real” religiosity is measured from declarations to religious entities in the latter part of the will, together with the value of cash bequests to church, charity and other religious signals. We also code each will to a set of characteristics such as wealth, gender, place, human capital, and occupation. Thus we can chart the correlates of the rise and decline of real and nominal religiosity in high micro-level resolution. Applying regression discontinuity designs across a diverse variety of macro-shocks such as, for example, the Black Death, Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534, and across the periods of the enlightenment, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions we can assess the determinants of religiosity at the individual level.

18 February 2025

• Speaker: Professor Leigh Gardner
  
  Abstract: 

  Economic histories of Sub-Saharan Africa during the interwar period have focused almost exclusively on the interventions of colonisers like Britain and France. But this was a period in which the global order was shifting, and new powers like the United States were displacing the old on the global stage. Thus far, the impact of this shift on African economies has been neglected by economic historians of Africa and by historians of the United States in the world - though contemporary accounts suggest that both Africans and Europeans were keenly aware of the opportunities and risks these changes presented. They also show that the material and cultural extension of an interwar "American dream" increasingly influenced African economies as the period progressed. This programme examines the economic legacies of American trade, investment, philanthropic and missionary engagement in Africa in the period between the wars.

1 April 2025

• Speaker: Tom Raster