This article combines uniquely detailed household-level tax assessments with reconstituted family histories for an eighteenth-century agricultural village near Paris. The tax records reveal substantial diversity in income among taxpayers despite the exemptions given privileged landowners. High-income households had significantly lower levels of infant and adult mortality, earlier age at marriage of the wife, and slightly lower rates of emigration by their surviving children. Marital fertility was high at all income levels. These classic Malthusian patterns were found at the household level more than a generation after the last great subsistence crises and resulted in a much higher local rate of replacement for the better-off families.

This article analyzes a large quantity of new data documenting the actual characteristics and behavior of early reaper adopters. It shows that a surprisingly large number of small-scale farmers were among the early purchasers and that institutional evolution—the emergence of local markets and cooperative exchanges for reaper services—encouraged rapid diffusion. These findings call into question the standard interpretation of northern farms as self-contained production units and, more specifically, challenge the usefulness of both the farm-specific-threshold model and the family-labor-constraint model.

Economic development depends on the establishment of appropriate institutions, such as a patent system that defends property rights in inventions. Skeptics argue that patents in early America were unenforceable because judges arbitrarily ruled against patentees. I examine 795 patent cases to assess the role of the courts and find that judges protected patent rights because they believed that inventors were motivated by expected returns. Although changes occurred in the 1850s, the courts consistently upheld the view that the patent system fostered economic growth. If inventive activity indeed responded to material incentives, this finding implies that the legal system stimulated technical change by reinforcing the effectiveness of the patent system.

The laws of the United States are extremely favorable to the division of property.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

This article challenges the widely held view that slave prices in Africa fell substantially and permanently after Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807. Examination of slave-price data shows that, when allowance is made for movements in prices of trade goods bartered for slaves, real slave prices fell sharply between 1807 and 1820 but that the fall was confined to West Africa. In West Central Africa prices remained steady before 1820. Thereafter, prices rose strongly in both areas, and between 1830 and 1850 prices were generally close to the levels reached between 1783 and 1807, the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

Debate over the level of economic development for the Eastern Cherokees was heated during the 1830s. Removal opponents argued that the Cherokees had adopted white agricultural methods, whereas advocates of removal maintained that little evidence of progress existed. Removal advocates believed that Cherokee economic progress required that they be removed from contact with whites. This article examines the statistical record to show that a majority of Cherokee households produced surplus food before removal. The large number of Cherokee households producing surpluses before removal suggests the existence of significant rents to be transmitted to white farmers via the removal policy.

This article examines where consensus does and does not exist among American economic historians by analyzing the results of a questionnaire mailed to 178 randomly selected members of the Economic History Association. The questions address many of the important debates in American economic history. The answers show consensus on a number of issues, but substantial disagreement in many areas—including the causes of the Great Depression and the aftermath of emancipation. They also expose some areas of disagreement between historians and economists.