bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
De Roover on Business, Banking, and Economic Thought
Authors: Blomquist Thomas W.
Published: May 2010

The untimely death of Raymond de Roover in March 1972 removed one of the major figures from the field of medieval economic history. Now there has appeared a collection of eleven of de Roover's articles, one of them not previously published, to remind us of the magisterial quality of their author's contributions to our knowledge of medieval business and banking techniques and the milieu in which the medieval man of business operated.
Economic Inequality in the United States in the Period from 1790 to 1860
Authors: Soltow Lee
Published: May 2010

There is some speculation that there was more economic egalitarianism in the United States among free men in the period from 1776 to 1790 than there was at any time in the following seventy years until the abolition of slavery. One would like to believe the speculation since it is known that there was extensive inequality of wealth in I860 and one would like to believe that the formation of the nation took place within a context of economic equality. This would be produced from a condition where aggregate wealth is shared fairly equally rather than being owned by a few. Let us give this ideal, this proposition relating to wealthholding for the Revolutionary era from 1776 to 1790, a title of romantic equality.
The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications
Authors: Goldin Claudia D. , Lewis Frank D.
Published: May 2010

We are right to see power, prestige, and confidence as conditioned by the Civil War. But it is a very easy step to regard the War, therefore, as a jolly piece of luck only slightly disguised, part of our divinely instituted success story, and to think, in some shadowy corner of the mind, of the dead at Gettysburg as a small price to pay for the development of a really satisfactory and cheap compact car with decent pick-up and road-holding capability. It is to our credit that we survived the War and tempered our national fiber in the process, but human decency and the future security of our country demand that we look at the costs. What are some of the costs? Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 49–50.
Britain and the Motorship: A Case of the Delayed Adoption of New Technology?
Authors: Henning Graydon R. , Trace Keith
Published: May 2010

The dominance of steam over sail was not finally established on long distance routes until the 1880's. When it came, steam's triumph was due primarily to the adoption of the high pressure compound engine, a marvel of its day and one of the major engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Yet within two decades experiments were being undertaken with two forms of marine propulsion—the steam turbine and the marine diesel—which were to render the compound engine uncompetitive over a wide range of uses. An experimental steam turbine was built by Parsons in 1884 and an improved design powered the Turbinia in 1894. The heavyoil or diesel engine was first adapted for marine propulsion in 1902. In 1910 a Dutch tanker, the Vulcanus, was fitted with a 450 BHP engine and in 1911 Burmeister & Wain began constructing the first ocean going cargo liner, the Selandia. By the early twenties steam turbine and diesel were replacing conventional steam vessels. Above all, the inter-war years witnessed the success of the marine diesel (motorship) which was adopted, particularly by European shipowners, for the propulsion of a wide variety of ship types and sizes.
The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: McCloskey Donald N.
Published: May 2010

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Demographic History of Colonial New England
Authors: Smith Daniel Scott
Published: May 2010

The central fact of the demographic history of early North America is rapid growth. Both Canada and the white population of the English colonies experienced increases of 2½ percent per year during the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century rates, beginning from a low base and more influenced by immigration, were even higher. In contrast, the expansion of population in early modern Europe rarely exceeded 1 percent per annum over an extended period. Since Franklin and Malthus, interpretations of early American demography have centered on the high fertility associated with near universal marriage for women at a low average age. The extremely youthful population, high dependency ratio, and one of the largest mean census family sizes ever recorded all follow from the high level of fertility.
Change in Rural France in the Period of Industrialization, 1830–1914
Authors: Hohenberg Paul
Published: May 2010

France has been well characterized by Raymond Aron, following de Tocqueville, as Immuable et changeante. Nowhere does variability (across space) combine more strongly with stability (in time) than in the economy of rural France in the nineteenth century. Judging again by titles, we must give higher marks to the author of The Eternal Order of the Fields than to the man who argued that Capitalism and Agriculture were growing ever closer, to the advantage of the former.
The Terms of Trade as a Tax on Agriculture: Hungary's Trade with Austria, 1883–1913
Authors: Eddie Scott M.
Published: May 2010

Protection of a domestic manufacturing industry to encourage its expansion through import substitution is equivalent (in the absence of equal protection for agriculture) to a “tax” on agriculture to support the development of the industrial sector. To call this policy of biasing the intersectoral terms of trade to favor industry a typical strategy of underdeveloped countries would be, if anything, to understate its universality. The arguments for and against such a strategy are well known, and an approximation of the benefits to the industrial sector can be gleaned from the national accounts of many countries. What remains hidden in the accounts, however, is the cost to the agricultural sector as a result of its being forced to trade at less favorable terms of trade than those provided by the world market. The purpose of this paper is to work out a simple methodology for measuring this cost and then to attempt an estimate of the cost in a particular case.
Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Wright Gavin , Kunreuther Howard
Published: May 2010

Why Did “Uncle Remus” exhort the post-bellum South to reduce its cotton-growing in favor of corn? His complaint was prompted in the immediate sense by the low cotton prices of the early 1890's, but such comments reflected a continuing discontent over the region's abandonment of self-sufficiency in foods after the Civil War. The ratio of cotton output to com was probably at an antebellum peak in 1860, but this ratio had been easily exceeded by 1880, as Table 1 indicates. In the leading cotton states, per capita corn production and the per capita stock of hogs were only about half of what they had been twenty years earlier. Coinciding as it did with a major era of stagnation in world cotton demand, this shift into cotton is of great importance for the subsequent economic development of the South. Despite its size and significance, the shift lacks a satisfactory explanation in the historical literature.
Interest Rate Movement in the United States, 1888–1913
Authors: Smiley Gene
Published: May 2010

As a nation becomes economically developed, the pace of development usually tends to vary between sectors and between regions of the nation. Industrialization usually involves more rapid growth and technological change in some industries than others. Often regional specialization accompanies industrialization, and, in fact, can become an important determinant in the industrialization process. With differential growth among industries, and increasing regional specialization, the performance of the factor markets in mobilizing and reallocating capital and labor among industries and regions becomes extremely important.
The Property Right Paradigm
Authors: Alchian Armen A. , Demsetz Harold
Published: May 2010

Economics textbooks invariably describe the important economic choices that all societies must make by the following three questions: What goods are to be produced? How are these goods to be produced? Who is to get what is produced? This way of stating social choice problems is misleading. Economic organizations necessarily do resolve these issues in one fashion or another, but even the most centralized societies do not and cannot specify the answer to these questions in advance and in detail. It is more useful and nearer to the truth to view a social system as relying on techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources rather than imagining that societies specify the particular uses to which resources will be put.
The Economics of Emancipation
Authors: Goldin Claudia Dale
Published: May 2010

This paper illuminates one particular aspect of the theme of this session, property rights in man. It will deal with various emancipation plans: those actually enacted in various slave societies; those discussed by legislators who debated slave and antislave proposals; and those which, being purely fictional, have become part of counterfactual history.
Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910
Authors: Higgs Robert
Published: May 2010

This paper investigates the organization of southern agricultural enterprise in 1910, with special regard for the interrelations of race, land tenure conditions, and the allocation of resources. After surveying the distribution of farmers and land among the major racial and tenure classes, I seek to answer two main questions. First, what determined the distribution of farm rental contracts between share-rent and fixed-rent forms, and did the tenant's race influence the form of rental contract he obtained? Second, what effect did the race of the farmers and the form of their land tenure have on the determination of farm size? A concluding section raises some further questions and briefly explores the difficult problem of discovering the effects of racism on the southern economy.
Transactions Costs and Differential Growth in Seventeenth Century Western Europe
Authors: Reed Clyde G.
Published: May 2010

From the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, the major countries of Western Europe—England, Holland, France, and Spain—can be viewed as a single entity in terms of overall economic growth. Population and output rose in all until the early fourteenth century when famine and then plague caused population and production to decline for over a century. Again in the sixteenth century there exist clear indications of a general expansion of population and output levels. In the seventeenth century, however, this uniform pattern is broken. Holland and England continue to expand; France falls relatively behind; and Spain absolutely declines. A simple Malthusian model appears to go far in explaining the general contours of the pre-seventeenth-century growth pattern. The differential pattern of the seventeenth century, however, has proven less amenable to unique explanation. This paper will not provide a unique explanation of the seventeenth-century growth pattern. It will, however, attempt to focus the search for such an explanation by arguing that the source of the differential growth lay in a single sector of the economies under discussion. Specifically, it will be argued that given the relatively constant technology of the period, growth, both extensive and intensive, can be explained by population increase in conjunction with economies of scale; that the source of the economies of scale lay in the transactions sectors of the economies under study; that only England and Holland had institutional structures that allowed the population growth beginning in the sixteenth century to give rise to large market areas and thereby allow realization of the economies of scale inherent in the transactions sector; and that the productivity increases brought about through realization of these economies of scale made it possible for Holland and England in the seventeenth century to support continued population increase and to evidence an increasing standard of living. This explanation of growth will necessarily remain incomplete because no attempt will be made to explain why Crown policies, and therefore institutional structures, differed between the countries.
Some Evidence of Subsidization: the U.S. Trucking Industry, 1900–1920
Authors: Herbst Anthony F. , Wu Joseph S. K.
Published: May 2010

This paper is concerned with the rapid growth of the trucking industry during the period 1900 to 1920. Our purpose is to examine the frequently asserted proposition that motor trucking was able to grow rapidly in competition with a well-established railroad industry because of the hidden subsidy provided by public expenditures on highways. Though this is a popularly held notion there has been little empirical evidence presented to support or refute it.
The Persistence of Old Technologies: The Case of Flatboats
Authors: Mak James , Walton Gary M.
Published: May 2010

In a recent article in this journal we presented an analysis of productivity change of steamboats on western rivers, 1815–60. Although the steamboat dominated river commerce during this period, other transportation technologies had been and were available. Prior to the steamboat era, keelboats and flatboats were the primary means by which the agricultural surpluses of the trans-Appalachian regions reached outside markets (especially through New Orleans). Although flatboating persisted, keelboating was quickly eclipsed with the introduction of the steamboat. This contrast is explained in part by the differential impact of the steamboat on upstream and downstream rates. Successful keelboat operations depended primarily on upstream revenues, and it was on the upstream rates that the steamboat had its most dramatic effects. One study indicates that by the early 1820's, keelboat revenues on the Mississippi had fallen below or very near to average variable costs, and keelboating was maintained only on shallower waters off the main trunk routes. Alternatively, flatboating not only survived but even expanded in the face of the stiff competition generated by the newer technology. For instance, in 1816, the year before the first successful steamboat navigation of the western rivers, 1287 flatboats arrived in New Orleans. By the commercial year 1846–47, the number of arrivals had increased to a peak of 2792. This persistence of flatboating occurred despite the fact that flatboats underwent no changes in their physical characteristics. Neither were there any apparent technical advances in their handling or navigation.
Steamboats and the Great Productivity Surge In River Transportation
Authors: Mak James , Walton Gary M.
Published: May 2010

Economic historians generally agree that improvements in transportation were a significant aspect of nineteenth-century United States development, and the dramatic fall in transportation costs, 1815–1860, has been given special emphasis by a number of scholars. According to George R. Taylor, nothing less than a transportation revolution was experienced in the United States during this period
The Use and Abuse of Prior Information in Econometric History: A Rejoinder to Professor Williamson on the Antebellum Cotton Textile Industry
Authors: David Paul A.
Published: May 2010

Jeffrey Williamson's provocative discussion opens up a range of questions that surely will be of concern to students of industrial growth in the antebellum United States. Three distinct empirical prongs are advanced by his probing critique of my study of the nature and implications of the production function characterizing the manufacture of powerloom cotton cloth.
Cotton “Overproduction” in Late Nineteenth-Century Southern Agriculture
Authors: DeCanio Stephen
Published: May 2010

No source of agricultural distress in the post-bellum South was more frequently alluded to by nineteenth-century observers than the “overproduction” of cotton. The anonymous author of the opening quotation was merely expressing, in characteristically metaphorical terms, a widely-held view that was to persist for years among southern reformers. Even writers who conceded the peculiar advantages for cotton culture derived from the South's climate and soils often argued nevertheless that crop diversification was the order of the day.
Dutch Investment in France, 1781-1787
Authors: Riley J. C.
Published: May 2010

A survey of the financial history of France in the years from 1781 through 1787 reveals two interrelated developments: an unprecedented series of loans opened by the state in an effort to meet growing war and postwar expenses and to service a burdensome debt, and a speculative boom which thrived on the confusion of public and private finance which the French revenue system allowed. Both developments are of central importance in any inquiry into public finance in the decade, and thus in any explanation of the financial origins of the French Revolution. Both were fed in part by the unprecedented volume of capital and credit available on the Parisian Bourse as on other European capital markets in this decade. But to an extent too little comprehended, both the increase in public indebtedness and the speculative boom were assisted by investments from abroad, investments which helped to obscure the enormous and onerous public debt in a mask of apparent soundness by responding readily to repeated calls for credit, and which likewise helped sustain the speculative mania through the extension of credit to the speculators themselves. It is known that Genevan, Genoan, and Dutch credit played some role in these events. Indeed, Genevan commitments have, to a degree, been clarified. But the Genoan and Dutch roles have remained vague, always cited but never detailed. What will be attempted here is an analysis of the Dutch role, of the structure and method of Dutch investments in France during this period in which such investments made some contribution to maintaining the appearance of public solvency while assisting Bourse expansion.
Beyond the New Economic History
Authors: North Douglass C.
Published: May 2010

The new economic history has been with us now for almost a score of years. Its practitioners have advanced from young revolutionaries to become a part of the middle-aged establishment; and by all the criteria of publication and training of graduate students, it has indeed transformed the discipline in the United States. From my quite subjective perspective, the new economic history has made a significant contribution to revitalizing the field and advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Yet I think it stops short—far short —of what we should be accomplishing in the field. Our objective surely remains that of shedding light on man's economic past, conceived in the broadest sense of those words; and I submit to you that the new economic history as it has developed has imposed strictures on enquiry that narrowly limit its horizons—and that some of my former revolutionary compatriots show distressing signs of complacency with the new orthodoxy.
International Diffusion of Agrarian Technology
Authors: Evenson Robert
Published: May 2010

Improved techniques of production have been an important part of the history of agricultural change in all modern economies. The search for policies to bring about the rapid introduction of improved techniques of production in traditional or less developed agricultural sectors has been a central focus of development agencies for the past two decades. It has proven to be a very difficult task, however, to develop policies which actually achieve the transfer of new techniques. The record of success in development efforts towards this end in agriculture has been, on the whole, rather poor.
The International Diffusion of Electrical Power Technology, 1870–1920
Authors: Brittain James E.
Published: May 2010

Some of the factors which influenced the international diffusion of the Gramme dynamo, the Edison dynamo, the revolvingfield alternator and the Alexanderson alternator will be examined in this paper. The selection of a few specific power generators as diffusant tracers represents a methodological compromise within a technological continuum bounded by a single invention such as a new armature winding and a complete power system such as Edison's. Each of the selected machines possessed a distinctive morphology so that the adaptations or mutations which may occur when the machine is introduced into a new national environment can be easily recognized.
The Economic Development of Manchuria: The Rise of a Frontier Economy
Authors: Eckstein Alexander , Chao Kang , Chang John
Published: May 2010

The paper we are presenting here is in essence an interim research report, a summary and preliminary analysis of findings based on a larger study still under way. Thus both the findings and the interpretations are subject to revision as we continue and complete our investigation.
Railroad Development and Market Integration: The Case of Tsarist Russia
Authors: Metzer Jacob
Published: May 2010

Up until the mid-nineteenth century Russia had an enserfed peasantry, a mere 1,000 or so miles of railways, and a small, almost insignificant market sector. When serfdom was abolished (1861) and the expansion of railroads started to occupy a prominent place in development policy toward the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was launched on a transformation from a state of preindustrial and pre-capitalistic backwardness into a path of modernization and industrialization.
Watersheds and Turning Points: Conjectures on the Long-Term Impact of Civil War Financing
Authors: Williamson Jeffrey G.
Published: May 2010

What accounts for the “epochal” changes in capital formation shares and capital goods' prices during the 1860's? The pages following document an epochal rise in American gross saving rates centered on the Civil War decade. They also establish a symmetrical episodic shift in the relative price of manufactured durable investment goods. Not only did the American investment share in GNP rise dramatically (and permanently) between the 1850's and 1870's, but the relative price of capital goods declined sharply over the same period. This relative price change was pronounced and it was never again repeated in a subsequent century of development.
The Plantation States as a Sub-Region of the Post-Bellum South
Authors: Mandle Jay R.
Published: May 2010

Recent work by Reid, Higgs, Sutch and Ransom and others is an indication that increasing scholarly attention is being addressed to the post-bellum southern economy. The object of this note is to raise a word of caution with respect to work done on the South in which the latter is taken to mean a more or less homogeneous section of the nation. In particular I would suggest that (a) substantial and important variations exist within this region, differences which may even be obscured when the South is divided along the usual Bureau of the Census sub-regional borders, and (b) a disaggregation of the South into more functional units than that of the Census Bureau may provide insights into the relative poverty experienced in the region, particularly of the black population in this area in the years before 1910.
The End of the Chisholm Trail
Authors: Galenson David
Published: May 2010

The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.
Patterns of Farm Rental in the Georgia Cotton Belt, 1880–1900
Authors: Higgs Robert
Published: May 2010

The story of the post-bellum reorganization of southern agriculture has been told many times, and the main features of the transition from slave to free labor are well known. Throughout the cotton economy the initial experiments with wage labor gave way to share-rent tenancy; later fixed-rent tenancy became common as well. That these changes resulted from an adjustment process in which both landlords and laborers increasingly recognized different contractual arrangements as mutually beneficial seems clearly established. The existing literature is deficient, however, by failing to account for the continuing diversity of contractual arrangements in southern agriculture. By 1880 the organizational variety that would persist for more than a half century could be clearly discerned: some farms were cultivated by their owners, often with the assistance of wives and children; others by hired workers receiving a fixed wage; some by tenants paying a stipulated amount of products (standing rent) or money (cash rent) for the use of the land; still others by tenants paying a definite share of the crops as rent. The “mix” of these arrangements varied widely from place to place, even within a given state, and changes occurred over time. How can one explain the proportions in which these various arrangements were employed and account for differences over time and space? In particular, what determined the proportion of the farms rented? Of the rented farms, what determined the proportion rented under share contracts? Did the farmer's race influence the form of the rental contract he obtained? This article attempts to answer these questions with reference to the Georgia cotton belt in the late nineteenth century.
Population and Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe: Prussian Upper Silesia, 1840–1913
Authors: Haines Michael R.
Published: May 2010

This article deals with a largely Polish speaking region of eastern Prussia which was transformed from a rural, agrarian area in the mid-nineteenth century to a modern mixed agricultural and heavy industrial economy by 1913. This region moved from a condition of high ana fluctuating mortality and fertility prior to the 1860's to a situation with declining mortality and eventually declining fertility after the 1860's. Consideration of detailed patterns of mortality (by age, sex, atid cause of death) and of fertility (byKreise) helps relate economic factors to these demographic trends and differentials.
Banking Under the Gold Standard: An Analysis of Liquidity Management in the Leading Financial Centers
Authors: Hinderliter Roger H. , Rockoff Hugh
Published: May 2010

This paper compares the proportion of liquid assets in the portfolios of the major banks in London, Paris, and New York during the heyday of the gold standard. Various hypotheses concerning the determinants of this proportioh are advanced and then tested using data on individual banks over a number of years. The major conclusions concern the effectiveness of the Bank of England in comparison with the systems prevailing in the other centers and the existence of national differences in the aggressiveness displayed by bank managers.
American Law and the Marketing Structure of the Large Corporation, 1875–1890
Authors: McCurdy Charles W.
Published: May 2010

This paper employs the techniques of legal history to explore the relationship between the rise of big business and the size of the American market. It emphasizes law as a determinant of market size, and it analyzes judicial construction of the Constitution's commerce clause over time to delineate the role of integrated corporations in generating legal change. Specifically, the paper suggests that if the American market is defined as a free-trade unit, enlargement of the market was a result of, rather than a prerequisite for, the post-Civil War revolution in business organization.
Banking and Economic Growth in Sweden before World War I
Authors: Sandberg Lars G.
Published: May 2010

The article sketches the history of Swedish commercial banking from 1656 until World War I, with special attention to the post-1850 period. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between economic growth and banking. International comparisons based on the quantitative measures developed by Rondo Cameron and Raymond Goldsmith are made. It is concluded that at all stages of its early industrialization Sweden had a remarkably large and efficient banking system. This, in turn, was largely the result of the general population's long experience with banking and paper money and their generally high levels of literacy and education.
Indentured Servitude: The Philadelphia Market, 1771–1773
Authors: Heavner Robert O.
Published: May 2010

In the 1770s Philadelphia had a well developed indentured servant market which served the city and the surrounding region. This market had many attributes of rational labor and physical capital markets and provided a means for financing migration and education. This study is of indenture records which include prices, term lengths, employer-provided amenities, and servant attributes to test hypotheses based on a rational buyer model. Results indicate that in response to the riskiness of a servant, the buyer used indexes of servant productivity and reliability; that the servant paid for amenities offered by the master, such as general education; and that there was a seasonal pattern of prices corresponding to seasonal activities of agriculture.
Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman Industrial Decline, 1550–1650
Authors: Cizakca Murat
Published: May 2010

The Ottoman Empire did not escape the “price revolution” of the “long” sixteenth century. As far as the Bursa silk industry was concerned, however, the rate of increase of relative prices was such as to result in a price “scissors.” This situation led to declining profits in the production of cloth, while profits in the production of the raw material were substantial. A transformation of Bursa's economy from cloth production to raw material production followed. It appears that this transformation conformed to a cyclical pattern in the following centuries, a pattern that was chiefly dictated by European economic might.
The Profitability of the Suez Canal as a Private Enterprise, 1859–1956
Authors: Hansen Bent , Tourk Khairy
Published: May 2010

On the basis of published accounts, internal rates of return and present values are computed for capital in general and for particular investors (French shareholders and the British and Egyptian governments) from construction to nationalization of the canal. Terminal values at the nationalization had to be imputed. Rates of return are compared with opportunity costs represented by the return on alternative investments. For capital generally, French shareholders, and the British government, rates of return were 8–9 percent against opportunity costs of 3–4 percent. For the Egyptian government, corresponding figures were 2–5 and 11 percent. American investment would not have been profitable.
The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People: A Research Note
Authors: Millar James R. , Linz Susan J.
Published: May 2010

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.
Introduction
Authors: Hughes Jonathan R. T. , Mokyr Joel
Published: May 2010

The Program Committee for the thirty-seventh annual meeting of the Economic History Association was formed in late November 1976, ten months before the convention. The Committee selected the participants whose papers are published in this issue after a comprehensive consultation procedure with a large and wide-ranging sample of members of the Association. The basic guidelines followed by the Program Committee may be briefly stated. First, it was felt that the session topics should pertain to past achievements in the field, as well as reflect issues relevant to the 1970s. Hence, it was decided to include a “summing up session,” in which the importance and achievements of three influential schools in economic history could be evaluated. The three other sessions, as well as the majority of workshops, dealt with issues which were felt to be of considerable interest to scholars at present and in the foreseeable future.
The Achievements of Economic History: The Marxist School
Authors: Cohen Jon S.
Published: May 2010

It is impossible within the confines of a short paper to provide an adequate survey of the main works in Marxist economic history. The most that can be done is to introduce a limited number of issues that best illustrate the contributions of Marxist scholars. The topics covered in this paper include feudalism and the decline of serfdom, the transition to capitalism, the crisis of the seventeenth century, the English Civil War, and the rise of factories. An attempt is made to integrate these subjects into a more or less chronological account of European history.
Structural Change in Fascist Italy
Authors: Vaudagna Maurizio
Published: May 2010

Since the early seventies studies on the Italian economy of the thirties have become one of the liveliest aspects of the debate on Fascism as a whole. This trend reverses the long neglect of the early postwar period and the lack of information that went with it. Fresh ideas and facts are now contributed at a fast pace; all attempts to summarize views and trends are bound to be soon outdated by new research. The central notion of these recent studies is that some of the structural features of the present-day Italian economy came to life in the early thirties as a response to die depression.
The Fishers of Men: The Profits of the Slave Trade
Authors: Thomas Robert Paul , Bean Richard Nelson
Published: May 2010

Historians of slavery and the slave trade have often left us with the impression that the slave trade was fantastically profitable. The view that it was the profits from the slave trade which financed the British Industrial Revolution and the first industrialization of the United States appears to be gaining adherents. These interpretations seem plausible enough on the surface; indeed, the latter provides part of the historical foundation for the claim by black militants for reparations. Black slaves, whether shipped directly from Africa, or born in the New World into slavery, served their masters against their wills in return for the subsistence allowed them. Surely there was a substantial difference between the value of what they produced and the value of the consumption goods allotted to them to allow survival.
The Determinants of U.K. Investment Abroad, 1870–1913: The U.S. Case
Authors: Edelstein Michael
Published: May 2010

Perhaps because the world had never before or since seen such a large proportion of national income devoted to accumulating overseas assets, the processes of British accumulation in the period from 1870 to 1913 have long been given disproportionate attention in the study of modern British economic history. Calculations based on C. H. Feinstein's latest studies of U.K. income, expenditures and product suggest that roughly half of the nation's annual savings took the form of net foreign lending during these years, savings averaging slightly less than ten percent of net national income. Undoubtedly, interest in these matters has been further augmented by the intriguing problem of the United Kingdom's loss of world leadership in both industrial output and per capita income during these same years.
The Equity Effects of Public Land Speculation in Iowa: Large versus Small Speculators
Authors: Swierenga Robert P.
Published: May 2010

The economic impact of American public land policies in the nineteenth century can be assessed either in terms of their efficiency or equity effects, that is, their impact on national growth rates or on income distribution. Robert W. Fogel and Jack Rutner recently explored the growth question and discovered that federal land policy had a positive but minimal effect on economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the equity question is perhaps more important than the efficiency issue, a point made several years earlier by Douglass C. North.
The Labor Force Participation of Turn-of-the-Century Married Women
Authors: Fraundorf Martha Norby
Published: May 2010

The standard modern model of married women's labor force participation is modified because turn-of-the-century families had the alternatives of substituting children for the mother in the labor force and of taking in paying boarders. The modified model explained 1901 participation rates quite well. Participation rates were significantly related (negatively) to the number of older children (potential workers) but not to the number of young children. In addition, the availability of jobs was more important than high wages in inducing women to seek work. Other family income, the male unemployment rate, and literacy also were significant.
Bulk Exports, Trade Tiers, Regulation, and Development: An Economic Approach to the Study of West Africa's “Legitimate Trade”
Authors: Chamberlin Christopher
Published: May 2010

During the nineteenth century the export of bulk commodities from West Africa expanded at the expense of slave exports. Research has focused on the political implications of the expansion of so-called “legitimate trade” rather than on its economic character. In the interests of an economic approach, new terminology and a conceptual framework are proposed, and then applied to a historical problem—the levels of competition prevailing in the African trader networks serving the coastal ports. The conclusions of this study are related to the issue of the historical origins of African underdevelopment.
Economic and Demographic Determinants of Educational Commitment: Massachusetts, 1855
Authors: Field Alexander James
Published: May 2010

More than half the variance in length of school session in a cross section of 329 localities in Massachusetts in 1855 can be explained by the share of Irish in.the town's population, the family per dwelling ratio, and a proxy for the share of male merchants over 15 in the population, all of which enter regression equations with strong positive coefficients. This paper considers what these results may tell us about a number of hypotheses that link industrialization and educational revitalization in antebellum Massachusetts, discusses independent confirmation of these basic relationships, and concludes with a more general discussion of the implications of this Massachusetts evidence.
From Traditional to British Currency in Southern Nigeria: Analysis of a Currency Revolution, 1880–1948
Authors: Ofonagoro Walter I.
Published: May 2010

Soon after establishing political control, the British colonial administration in southern Nigeria attempted to replace the existing currencies of the country with British currency. The traditional currencies competently discharged the functions of money, however, and it required fifty years before the pre-colonial currencies, attacked by the colonial authorities and unrecognized as legal tender, gradually lost standing and proved worthless to their last holders. Theoretical implications of these developments are discussed.
An Anniversary Message
Authors: Chandler Alfred D. , Galambos Louis
Published: May 2010

The 1970 meeting of the Economic History Association in Dallas, Texas, marked die organization's thirtieth anniversary. Occasions such as this call for certain ritualistic responses—as every husband knows—and the Program Committee was more than willing to satisfy the demands of tradition. Thus our anniversary program included a review of past accomplishments in the various branches of economic history. To balance this review, however, we introduced an element which seldom plays a visible role in the anniversary: a set of resolutions or guidelines for future work in the field. By design, each of the sessions had both a past and future dimension.
From Old to New to Old in Economic History
Authors: Parker William N.
Published: May 2010

The President of this Association is like a species of short-lived insect, whose only function in life is to lay an egg, and then to die. Yet, like the walking candle, a President has this brief moment on stage, and his obscurity before and after it makes him determined to burn all the more brightly.
Explanations and Issues: A Prospectus for Quantitative Economic History
Authors: Swanson Joseph A. , Williamson Jeffrey G.
Published: May 2010

This paper attempts to illustrate some future areas of quantitative historical research which have not yet received the attention we think they deserve. Our interest is primarily in aggregate economic systems. This emphasis is not motivated by a distaste for the analytical tools of microeconomics. On the contrary, a central premise of this paper is that macroeconomic models are ideally deduced from propositions about the behavior of individual decision-making units, and that they also critically depend on rules for the aggregation of such behavioral relationships. In fact, quantitative economic historians have long recognized the critical role played by aggregation rules in historical analysis. And, in the end, it will be the quantitative economic historian who will best be able to evaluate the efficacy of the employment of such rules in specified historical circumstances.
American Institutional Studies: Present Knowledge and Past Trends
Authors: Soltow James H.
Published: May 2010

The production of economic history, like that in many fields of scholarly endeavor, increased sharply in the past quarter-century, compared to the rate of output in earlier eras. While the “new” economic history, with its emphasis on economic theory and measurement, has attracted considerable attention during the last decade, “traditional” economic history, written along institutional lines, has continued to be significant, both quantitatively (in terms of numbers of books and articles) and qualitatively (as assessed by contributions to our understanding of economic processes.)
The Role of Governments in Economic Growth in Early Modern Times
Authors: Lane Frederic C.
Published: May 2010

A discussion fifty years ago of comparative economic history would have taken a broader view and would probably have been concerned very largely with exploring along the trails blazed by Max Weber and Marc Bloch. They were interested in many other aspects of economic history besides economic growth and I hope that similar broader interests will shortly show signs of reanimation. In spite of the present popularity of quantitative studies of changes in production, I hope some discussions at this meeting will examine comparative studies of forms of economic organization and the human qualities those structures reflected or generated. But my remarks here accord with the present preoccupation with that kind of economic history in which the all-important questions relate to the causes of economic growth. And I limit myself to one aspect only, the influence of governments.
The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–1875
Authors: Kindleberger C. P.
Published: May 2010

The textbook theory of tariffs, and their converse, the movement to freer trade, has more elements than we need for the nineteenth century, but also lacks some. In the usual comparative statics, a tariff may be said to have ten effects: on price, trade, production (the protective effect), consumption, revenue, terms of trade, internal income distribution, monopoly, employment and the balance of payments.
Varieties of Unsuccessful Industrialization: The Balkan States Before 1914
Authors: Lampe John R.
Published: May 2010

This paper should begin with a brief defense of its title. “Variety” and “unsuccessful” are doubtful if not dirty words to most economists and many economic historians. The “success stories” of rapid development in Western Europe, Russia and Japan have been the most frequent subject of this Journal's articles on non-American topics. And the discovery of uniformity in the past, rather than variety, is admittedly essential to the development economist's search for predictability in the future that has informed so much of the economic history written since the Second World War.
Economic Imperialism: The Case of the Gold Coast
Authors: Reynolds Edward
Published: May 2010

In recent years economic imperialism in reference to Africa is being re-evaluated, and it is now sufficiently clear from the emerging literature on the subject that very few serious scholars would rigidly apply the classical interpretation or interpret the partition of Africa only in economic terms. One of the most significant recent contributions on the subject which has stimulated much useful discussion and is provoking further research is A. G. Hopkins' article “Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–1892.” He cites the case of Lagos in order to explore some neglected economic aspects of the partition of West Africa and deals with the economic aspects of the scramble for Africa. To Hopkins the critics of economic imperialism have tended to underrate all other economic motives.
The British in the Atacama Desert: The Cultural Bases of Economic Imperialism
Authors: Monteón Michael
Published: May 2010

In the nineteenth century, the British were popular throughout the west coast of South America as the cultural and economic allies of the ruling elites. Thecriollosof Peru and Chile, who had inherited the colonial social order, looked to France in matters of art and fashion but viewed the British as the providers of commerce and economic progress. They welcomed Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants as merchants, artisans, and prospective grooms. In Peru, the British played a key role in developing the market for guano (the fertilizer composed of bird excrement and the precursor of the nitrate, salitre, trade), and British ships took Chile's copper and wheat to England from the 1840's through the early 1870's. By 1870, the development of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the London Bank of Mexico and South America assured the British dominance of the commerce along the west coast.