Essays on Topics in American and Egyptian Economic History

Daubenspeck, Jamie Mark

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2v8p-0566

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Essays on Topics in American and Egyptian Economic History

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This dissertation studies three topics in 19th and early 20th century economic history. Chapter 1 studies the causes behind low inter-regional migration from the American North to the South prior to the Civil War. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on topics in the economic history of Egyptian agriculture. Chapter 2 studies the role of transportation infrastructure in agricultural and industrial mechanization in Egypt. Chapter 3 studies the effects of cash crops on living standards in developing countries, using the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Nile Valley following the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1902 as a natural experiment. Finally, Chapter 4 concludes this dissertation and places the chapters on Egyptian economic history in a unified historical context. The Southern labor market was isolated from the rest of the U.S. during the antebellum period, and few migrants from the North moved there. One popular explanation is that would-be migrants were deterred by characteristics of the South such as slavery, lower wages, and weaker infrastructure. A second is that average temperatures, rainfall, and daylight hours changed more rapidly as migrants moved north or south rather than east or west, imposing additional costs on migrants seeking to preserve environment-specific human capital. In Chapter 1, I evaluate these explanations by developing a discrete-choice model of migration in which agents have preferences over destinations and face moving costs for each destination based on where they are moving from. I estimate this model on a sample of men linked between the 1850 and 1860 U.S. censuses, using the set of U.S. counties as potential destinations. I find that moving costs are insufficient for explaining low migration from the North to nearby parts of the South, such as Border-South states, Virginia, and the Carolinas. If migrants hadn't viewed these areas as unattractive destinations, we should have observed more migration from nearby areas of the North than did, in fact, occur. I find the opposite pattern for states along the Southwest frontier like Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. These states were desirable destinations, even compared to states on the Northern frontier, but migrants faced high costs in moving to them. In the rest of this dissertation, I turn to topics in Egyptian economic history. Colonial-era investments in transportation infrastructure lowered shipping costs within developing countries, especially to and from major ports. This reduced the price of steam engines and other modern technologies at the point of use, but lower shipping costs also increased competition between imports and domestic products. In Chapter 2, I estimate the effect of lower internal shipping costs on steam-power adoption in Egyptian agriculture and manufacturing using the straight-line distance to Egypt's main port, Alexandria, as an instrument. I find that cheaper transportation within Egypt caused export-oriented cotton farmers to adopt steam power, but I find no change in steam power use for local manufacturers, who produced for local markets and competed with foreign products. Transportation infrastructure built during the Age of Empire disproportionately encouraged technology adoption in primary goods sectors, reinforcing international patterns of specialization. The construction of the Aswan Dam in 1902 lowered the cost of irrigating long-staple cotton during its summer growing season, causing cotton production in Upper Egypt to triple in just a few years. This cost decrease was localized in perennially irrigated land; most of Upper Egypt still relied on flood basin irrigation and did not grow cotton. In Chapter 3, I use difference-in-differences to estimate the effect of this sudden decrease in the cost of growing cotton on township-level population characteristics collected from the 1897 - 1947 Egyptian censuses, using within-district variation in irrigation technologies to identify the causal effect. I show that the lower cost of cotton cultivation in perennially irrigated townships caused literacy to increase more quickly in subsequent decades relative to townships that did not benefit, yielding 6 and 2.6 percentage point increases for men and women, respectively, in 1947. Using evidence from sex ratios, age distributions, and rates of male and female widowhood, I also find that the reduction in the cost of growing cotton disproportionately decreased female mortality and may have increased male mortality. I argue that this was due to a combination of women gaining a higher proportion of household resources, as a result of their relatively higher productivity in cotton agriculture, and increased male exposure to water-borne illnesses in perennially irrigated land. Finally, in Chapter 4, I consider the legacy of British colonialism in Egypt and place Chapters 2 and 3 in a unified historical context. I argue that the main difference between the British colonial regime and its predecessor regimes in Egypt was its ability to successfully implement large-scale infrastructure projects, like the repair of the Delta Barrage and the construction of the Aswan Dam. Because cotton was produced by most Egyptian farmers and not restricted to a single geographic area, these infrastructure projects tended to benefit the country as a whole.

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