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New Perspectives on the Disposal of Western Lands in Nineteenth Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Peter D. McClelland
Peter D. McClelland
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University
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Abstract

Professor McClelland reviews two book on land speculation, a traditional historical study by Malcom J. Rohrbough and another which falls in the category of “new economic history” by Robert Swierenga.

Type
Book Review
Information
Business History Review , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Spring 1969 , pp. 77 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1969

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References

1 Forster, E.M., Aspects of the Novel (London, 1953), 27.Google Scholar

2 Rohrbough, Malcolm J., The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1968. Pp. 331. $8.75)Google Scholar.

3 Hibbard, Benjamin H., A History of Public Land Policies (New York, 1939), 100, 103.Google Scholar

4 Swierenga, Robert P., Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames, Iowa, Iowa State University Press, 1968. Pp. xxviii + 260.$7.50).Google Scholar

5 “Unimproved acres consisted of land belonging to those farms from which productions were returned but which was not cleared.” (Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits, 28, fn. 6).

6 Swierenga's calculations exclude from expenses any charge for management input and make no allowance for possible income from rents (190), the latter being judged unimportant for the Iowa land dealers in his sample (190, fn. 13, 226). For a reconciliation of Swierenga's rate of return with more conventional measures of profit see Swierenga, 192. Most of the above findings have already appeared in Swierenga, Robert P., “Land Speculator ‘Profits’ Reconsidered: Central Iowa as a Test Case,” Journal of Economic History, XXVI (March, 1966), 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Bogue, Allan G. and Bogue, Margaret B., “Profits' and the Frontier Land Speculator,” Journal of Economic History, XVII (March, 1957), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Time-entry contracts accounted for 85.5 per cent of the acreage handled by James Easley between 1852 and 1858 (162), and possibly 70 per cent of the acreage entered by “the ten major Iowa real estate vendors whose entries exceeded 25,000 acres … in the deed registers of the 9 representative central Iowa counties” (120). No evidence is presented on the contribution of these transactions to the rate of return earned by these or other Iowa land dealers.

9 Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits, 196, fn. 22.

10 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 42.