Gender (in)equality, maritime economies, and numeracy development in Greece during the 19th and 20th centuries (original) (raw)
Related papers
2023
We study the history of human capital in former Ottoman and later Greek regions during the 19th and 20th century. We investigate numeracy skills of the population from a comparative perspective at regional level. Furthermore, we test the effect of gender equality, geographic, demographic and socioeconomic factors such as agricultural specialisation (crops, livestock), trade and industry development as well as urbanization and migration on numeracy. We find that in Greece the gender gap is highly correlated with numeracy and this effect fades out around 1910. We conclude that maritime orientation of the island economies was highly complementary with early numerical human capital and increasing gender equality.
Numeracy and literacy in Early Modern Europe: Evidence from the maritime sector
This paper reconstructs comparative levels of numeracy and literacy for seamen of different ranks from 14 countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries using age heaping and signature methods. Results show how skill was rewarded in the maritime labour market, where captains and fishing skippers show higher levels of numeracy and literacy than lesser officers and ordinary sailors. The level of numeracy and literacy among ship masters and Scandinavian sailors are among the highest found anywhere, while Dutch, French and Spanish sailors were a par with the common labour force. This is discussed in light of the migratory and competitive character of the maritime sector. and we are grateful for insightful comments at both occasions.
Did the early development of skills and numerical abilities occur primarily in urban centers and among the elite groups of society? In this study, we assess the human capital of different occupational groups in the early modern period and partially confirm this finding: the skilled and professional groups had higher skills than persons in unskilled occupations. However, there was another large group that developed substantial human capital and represented around one-third of the total population: farmers. By analyzing numeracy and literacy evidence from six countries in Europe and Latin America, we argue that farmers significantly contributed to the formation of human capital and, consequently, modern economic growth.
Economic History of Developing Regions, 2022
This paper studies the evolution of numeracy in Chile for cohorts born from the 1780s to the 1970s, providing a new series of this important indicator of human capital, essential to promote economic growth. This is the longest series currently available of any human capital indicator for Chile. It shows that numeracy was very low until the early twentieth century but that, contrary to traditional interpretations, it increased gradually from the 1780s (well before the promulgation of the primary instruction law of 1860), until full basic numeracy skills were achieved by the mid-twentieth century. This transition was completed some 3-4 decades after parallel developments occurred in the leading countries of the region (Argentina and Uruguay), and some 120-150 years behind the most developed areas of Europe. This development was characterised by high gender numeracy inequality until the first decades of the twentieth century, as well as by a pronounced regional inequality. However, there was a quick process of convergence across provinces, completed at the same time as gender inequality was reduced. Our numeracy data is also consistent with alternative human capital indicators such as literacy, enrolment rates and schooling, and we provide a set of explanations about why they all improved and their timing.
Many economic and agrarian historians have argued that more equal patterns of landownership, as well as the overall supremacy of modern industry over traditional agriculture, have both been found to be strictly correlated with the rise of mass public education systems during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The theoretical background behind this argument mainly relies on the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis, which states that land and industrial capital were characterized by different levels of complementarity with human skills. Consequently, large land-owning elites were often reluctant to promote and support mass public education, while, on the other hand, early capitalists were much more favored by a better-educated workforce, thus promoting important educational reforms. In this context, the present paper constitutes a first empirical attempt to explore possible linkages between access to land and literacy development in the late nineteenth-century Greece, using available data from the 1870 and 1879 Greek Population Censuses. In fact, my empirical estimates largely confirm previous findings in the literature, indicating a positive and significant relationship between people’s access to land and literacy rates in the late nineteenth-century Greece. On the contrary, stuck in agriculture has been found to be negatively related to literacy expansion. These results remain robust even after controlling for various other factors, such as marriage, family size, urbanization, ethnic differences, religious affiliation, teacher availability and student attainment.
University of Southern Denmark, 2018
Many economic and agrarian historians have argued that more equal patterns of landownership, as well as the overall supremacy of modern industry over traditional agriculture, have been found to be strictly connected with the rise of mass public education systems in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The theoretical background behind this argument relies on the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis, which states that land and industrial capital were characterized by different levels of complementarity with human skills. Consequently, large landowning elites were often reluctant to promote and support mass public education, while, on the other hand, early capitalists were much more favored by a better-educated workforce, thus promoting major educational reforms. In this context, the present paper constitutes a first empirical attempt to explore possible linkages between people's access to land and literacy development in the late nineteenth-century Greece, using available information from the 1870 and 1879 Greek Population Censuses. My empirical estimates largely confirm previous findings in the literature, indicating a positive and significant relationship between access to land and literacy rates in the late nineteenth-century Greece. On the contrary, stuck in agriculture has been found to be negatively related to literacy expansion. These results remain robust even after controlling for various other factors, such as marital status, family size, urbanization, ethnic differences, religion, teacher availability and student attainment.
Social and Intertemporal Differences of Basic Numeracy in Pannonia (1st Century BCE- 3rd Century CE)
In this study, we assess the human capital of Roman legionaries, officers, and the civilian population born between the first century BCE and the third century CE in Pannonia (today´s West Hungary). Age-heaping techniques allow the measurement of human capital for this early period, although we need to discuss intensively potential selectivity. We find that the Roman military benefitted strongly from occupational choice selectivity: those social groups who decided for a military career had better numeracy values than the remainder of the population. This applied especially to the first centuries BCE and CE. Over time, however, the civilian population converged to the military occupational groups.