Early modern European powers were beset by episodic unrest as they sought to consolidate authority and build empires. We examine how growing state communication networks and the penetration of society impacted unrest by combining original and …
This article introduces the Jean Nicolas database, a comprehensive resource documenting 8,516 rebellions in France between 1661 and 1789. Based on a survey conducted by Jean Nicolas from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the database records each …
We test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by imposing equal partition of inheritance among all children, including women. We combine new data on local inheritance rules before the …
Empirical research in historical demography is typically time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recent advances in machine learning open new opportunities for constructing large-scale databases much faster and at lower cost, but they also raise …
This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between candidates' occupation and their electoral success. To identify the causal effect of local variation in urbanization, we exploit exogenous changes in the boundaries of electoral …
Customary law governed most European societies during the Middle Ages and early modern period. To better understand the roots of legal customs and their implications for long-run development, we introduce an atlas of customary regions of Ancien …