LSE at the Economic History Society Conference 2026

Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. Cutting-edge research from the Department of Economic History, LSE. This year the Economic History Society held its centennial conference at LSE, bringing the discipline’s scholars to Houghton Street. The large LSE delegation included nine PhD students, presenting research ranging across medieval China and early modern England to Cold War Eastern Europe and nineteenth-century Japan. Below is a snapshot of what they brought to the table. Andrés Irarrázaval – How Much Can Elites Extract? Subsistence Constraints and the Long-Run Evolution of Top Incomes, 1700–2025 How do we compare inequality across countries at very different levels of income? Andrés argues that standard top-income-share measures are misleading because they ignore a hard constraint: in poor countries, much of national income is tied to bare subsistence and cannot feasibly flow to elites. His ‘Extractable Income Framework’ rescales inequality relative to the income actually available above subsistence, revealing that elite extraction was far greater in relative terms in the past than modern figures suggest, and that economic growth has progressively widened the scope for concentration. Zoey Ziyue Shen – Currencies in Contest: Monetary Decentralisation and Financial Innovation in Song China Most accounts of Chinese monetary history emphasise the power of the central state, but Zoey’s research tells a more complicated story. Focusing on the Song dynasty (960–1279), she shows that monetary governance was far more decentralised than official records suggest, with regional paper-note systems operating alongside the imperial copper currency. Paradoxically, it was precisely this fragmentation that created the institutional conditions for the world’s first sustained paper-money system. The paper uses GIS mapping and novel datasets drawn from archives in China, Japan and the United States to challenge the binary of ‘centralised China’ versus ‘decentralised Europe’ at the heart of the Great Divergence debate. When did English landlords stop farming their own land, and why? Greg’s paper examines the transition to leasing on the Winchester episcopal estate, one of medieval England’s largest, between roughly 1350 and 1475. Applying modern risk-management concepts to the medieval world, he argues that leasing was a form of risk transfer: lords traded volatile agricultural income for predictable fixed payments. Drawing on c.500 surviving manorial accounts, the paper traces how the financial demands of Bishop Wykeham’s educational foundations shaped the estate’s strategy, offering a close-grained view of the shift from seigneurial management to the tenant farming world of the early modern period. John Zhang – Welfare Retrenchment and Social Unrest Does cutting welfare benefits cause social unrest? This question, as relevant today as in the nineteenth century, is at the heart of John’s research. Using variation in English poor-relief spending, his paper identifies the causal effect of welfare retrenchment on episodes of popular unrest. The findings speak directly to contemporary debates about the social costs of austerity, demonstrating that the historical record offers sharp lessons for modern policymakers. Jingwen Shi – Altruism, Authority, and Allocation: Private Charity and Parish Relief in Early Modern England England’s early modern welfare system was built on a distinction that has never quite gone away – the deserving and the undeserving poor. Using granular parish-level data on poor relief and charitable endowments from over 300 parishes between 1600 and 1786, Jingwen shows that the expansion and institutionalisation of statutory relief helped push private charity into a more targeted role, with donors redirecting giving towards specific vulnerable groups. The paper offers a new account of how England’s ‘parish welfare state’ became progressively more selective over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sheila Pugh – Town Councils and Their Local Water Company: Co-Operation, Conflict and Motives for Municipalisation Why did Victorian town councils take over their local water supplies? The conventional answer, that public-health failures by private providers drove municipalisation, is not borne out by the evidence from a case study of Midland towns. Sheila’s research shows that financial interest and political economy were central to the timing and terms of municipal takeovers, complicating the standard narrative of Victorian ‘gas and water socialism’. The findings carry obvious resonance for contemporary debates about essential service provision. Marco Cokić – Picking Winners? Trade and Investment Policy in Cold War Eastern Europe Industrial policy is back in fashion, but its track record is contested. Marco’s paper provides a historical test case by examining state-directed investment across eight Eastern European socialist economies in the Cold War decades. Linking investment flows to sectoral trade outcomes in a novel dataset, he finds that investment concentrated in industries regardless of comparative advantage, producing convergent export structures and weak competitive performance. At a moment of renewed enthusiasm for industrial strategy, this is a sobering historical lesson. Tom Learmouth – Becoming Asia’s First Industrial Nation: The Absorption of Foreign Manufacturing Knowledge in Japan, 1900–37 How did Japan become the first country in Asia to industrialise across a broad range of manufacturing sectors? Tom’s paper examines this through the rubber industry, tracing how foreign knowledge was absorbed in the tyre and footwear clusters of Kobe and Kurume in the interwar decades. A central puzzle is why Bridgestone originated in provincial Kurume rather than the port city of Kobe, where Dunlop had its Japanese factory, and this opens onto broader questions about entrepreneurship and industrial organisation in catch-up development. Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat – Art and Finance in the Age of Capital: Prices and Returns in Britain and France, 1800–1914 Can buying art protect you from financial turmoil? Luisa constructs new annual hedonic price indices for the British and French art markets across the entire nineteenth century and compares art’s performance against equities and government bonds in terms of risk-adjusted returns, correlation, and cross-country integration. She finds that art, which operated through institutions separate from banks and stock exchanges, behaved differently from mainstream financial assets during periods of crisis, with important implications for our understanding of historical wealth management and information asymmetries in non-standard asset markets. All authors are PhD students in the Department of Economic History at LSE. Fourth year: Gregory Salter, Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat, Tom Learmouth. Third year: Marco Cokić, Zoey Ziyue Shen, Andrés Irarrázaval, and John W. Z. Zhang. Second year: Jingwen Shi