I provide a simple guide to using printed numerical tables to support historical research. Often, useful tables of information are bound in physical form and can be cumbersome, consisting of an intimidating number of rows and columns. A researcher wanting to provide historical context may like to provide visualisations of this data or generate simple statistics from it. As the rising tide of Artificial Intelligence (AI) products lowers barriers to transcribing historical data tables, a renewed need emerges to simply state the non-AI approach to such a task, in order to give historians a baseline from which to understand and critique automated 'black-box' approaches now all too easily relied upon. Using only Excel and the R coding language, this chapter guides historians through a worked example from transcription to produced visuals.

The U.S. Civil War (1861-65) drove economic distress across Britain's cotton region, culminating in a recession now known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine. This raw cotton shortage led many to the New Poor Law as a means of securing their welfare. Difference-in-differences reveal that outdoor relief rates were 51% higher than their pre-recession mean after the shock, with this figure reaching 347% when the cotton shortage was at its worst. I also find that whilst the worst of the recession was over during the U.S. Civil War, roughly 3 and a half years after its outbreak, Poor Law relief converged to its baseline well after the war had ended. This fits with existing findings of 'tick-shaped' recessions. I supplement this with descriptive evidence to consider how the economic structure of England and Wales in 1861 might have altered the distress effect, evaluating potential channels along which individuals plausibly out-migrated to handle the recession.

This paper studies two distinct mechanisms for pooling risk across England and Wales in the mid nineteenth century. The New Poor Law was a tax funded local last resort for the destitute. Friendly societies were mutual membership organisations which used their funds to protect against idiosyncratic risk. Using an exogenous shock to the cotton industry alongside novel society and parish level data, I study how these two systems handled recessionary stress.

We investigate the impact of cooperative creamery establishments in Ireland between 1901-1911 on a variety of socio-economic outcomes, testing the hypothesis that the development of local industry can lead to improved health and human capital outcomes.

What were the differential impacts of being endowed with local microfinance institutions on local populations around 1841? We compare census outcomes across local parishes in Ireland, where a stark West-East split in the reform and withdrawl of savings banks enables a natural experiment on the impacts of local financial institutions on outcomes such as health, literacy, and occupational composition.

How does the market for securitization function? Who are the major players and what are their action spaces? Who has which incentives? In an effort to answer such questions, we write a model of the UK securitization market. This project occupies its own website, where interested parties are able to play with assumptions and see how different players are impacted by efficiency and profitability implications.

I leverage recently digitised data on friendly societies in Britain between 1851 and 1861 in order to test the hypothesis that local mutual insurance schemes can lead to improved developmental outcomes at the local level. I do this by exploiting the variation timing of friendly society establishments as a continuous and staggered treatment in a difference-in-differences framework.

I leverage long-run estimates of emissions and industrial policy implpementations in order to study the regional trade-offs between income and air quality. This is motivated by a desire to test the political economy of climate change related policy: in a post-industrial economy such as the UK, how far is industrial decline good for national air quality accounting, but bad for those regions which have made inter-generational sacrifices?

In a world where one's attention seems increasingly hard to manage, its scaracity might imply an inherent economic value. This short paper provides a primer to a wider body of research I wish to conduct on how we can measure attention as a fundamental factor in production. I argue that whilst land, labour, and capital capture traditional embodied value in an intuitive and useful way, entreprise falls short of fully reflecting the non-tangiable pre-requisites of productive action: all of the entreprenaurial capacity in the world cannot substitute for a shortened attention span. I suggest that the UK, and perhaps most nations, face a crisis of attention which underlies further declines in a well documented and longer term stagnation in productivity.