In the middle of the nineteenth century, a handful of societies began creating and enforcing impersonal rules, rules that treat everyone the same, on a broad scale. The existing institutional literatures, while appreciating the importance of impersonal rules for the rule of law, have not understood how they contribute to economic and political development through rules that are enforced but not followed: default rules. The conceptual importance of impersonal default rules is drawn out and then applied to better understand both economic and political development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I use new evidence from servant contracts, 1610–1890, to estimate male farm wages and the length of the work year in Japan. I show Japanese laborers were surprisingly poor and could only sustain 2–3 adults relative to 7 adults for the English. Japanese wages were the lowest among pre-industrial societies and this was driven by Malthusian population pressures. I also estimate the work year and find peasants worked 325 days a year by 1700, predating the “industrious” revolution in Europe. The findings imply Japan had a distinct labor-intensive path to industrialization, utilizing cheap labor over a long work year.

I use newly-developed data on Africa to estimate the effects of the international slave trades (circa 1500–1850) on the institutional structures of African economies and societies (circa 1900). I find that: (1) societies in slave catchment zones adopted slavery to defend against further enslavement; (2) slave trades spread slavery and polygyny together; (3) politically centralized aristocratic slave regimes emerge in West Africa and family-based accumulations of slave wealth in East Africa. I discuss implications for literatures on long-term legacies in African political and economic development.

This study reveals the operation of the triangular settlement system for Asia’s silver absorption over the 1850s–60s, which contributed to the stabilization of the pre-1870 global monetary system. First, we demonstrate that the triangular settlement system among Britain, India, and China was established based on exchange operations. Second, we validate the bullion point method for Asia’s settlement analysis and devise the triangular silver point mechanism. Third, through reconstructing silver points and comparing the arbitrage profits with the silver trade, we found that silver was imported into Asia from Britain through both the bilateral and triangular settlement systems.

A novel series of interest rates paid by the Corporation of London shows that interest rates in London declined by 350 basis points during the seventeenth century. The decline followed a similar pattern in Europe. Records from the Corporation’s archive provide evidence for financial development: an increase in the number and volume of debt instruments, an increase in the number of lenders, and the development of a secondary market. Econometric analysis establishes that increasing the debt instruments’ liquidity contributed to the convergence of interest rates between London and Amsterdam.

Abundant land and strong property rights are conventionally viewed as key factors underpinning U.S. economic development success. This view relies on the “Pristine Myth” of an empty undeveloped land, but the abundant land of North America was already made productive and was the recognized territory of sovereign Indigenous Nations. We demonstrate that the development of strong property rights for European/American settlers was mirrored by the attenuation and increasing disregard of Indigenous property rights. We argue that the dearth of discussion of the dispossession of Indigenous nations results in a misunderstanding of some of the core themes of U.S. economic history.