Between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, English agriculture underwent a transformation in its techniques out of all proportion to the rather limited widening of its market. Innovations in cropping took place on a wide, though not a universal, front and independently of any great expansion of demand, which was to stimulate the extension of improved methods during the classic agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth century. Except in the sphere of stock breeding, the remainder of the century really had little to offer in the way of techniques which were new in principle. Yet the initial introduction of the most important advanced techniques had come during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the slow and ultimately uncertain growth of population and the modest rise in per capita national income combined to produce only a gradual growth of demand.

The rise in productivity described by Dr. Jones, coupled with a static population, brought to an end the upward movement in the relative prices of farm products which had characterized the one hundred forty years preceding the Restoration. With the passing of the lean years, there followed almost a century of comparative plenty, bringing an increasing flow of food and raw materials.

Not long ago an authority on dyeing observed that “in the history of the dyeing industry indigo holds a unique place by reason of its irresistible rise to supremacy among dyestuffs and its equally rapid dethronement by the modern chemical colors. …” Among the sources of this once flourishing industry, one that has never been studied adequately is that of colonial Brazil. Commercial indigo production began there in the early 1760's, but after an impressive start the industry disappeared within less than two generations. Its beginnings occurred at a time when Portugal, like other imperial powers of that era, was seeking to diversify the agriculture of her colonies so as to make them more lucrative to the mother country. A study of the industry's brief tenure in Portugal's most important colony reveals some of the problems that confronted its planters, merchants, and royal officials as they attempted, with limited experience and inadequate supporting capital, to develop new sources of income during a period of keen international economic rivalry. The factors involved in the rise and decline of the Brazilian indigo industry can best be appreciated when it is examined as part of the global history of indigo production and trade between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

To discuss economic activity in Russia of the eighteenth century is to deal with an economic and social order that antedates the age of industrialization. Industrial activity in Russia during the eighteenth century was carried on within the political framework of an autocratic state, with ill-defined norms of legal behavior, and against the background of a serf agriculture which reached its apogee during this very period. The state of the industrial arts was low in comparison with western European standards, and the use of waterpower as a motive force in manufactories was introduced in Russia by foreign entrepreneurs only in the seventeenth century. Against this background, the efforts by Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) to modernize Russia appear genuinely heroic. The demands of his policy forced the government to engage directly in a vast program of establishing new industries, of converting small handicraft workshops into large-scale manufactories, and of encouraging private entrepreneurs to follow the government's example.

One of the principal sectional issues in nineteenth-century American politics related to Federal subsidies for major transportation facilities in the territories and newer western states. Not unreasonably, western political and business leaders contended that tax revenues in newly settled areas were insufficient to support the cost of large-scale public transport projects. Road and canal facilities were essential to regional economic development, declared a Cincinnati editor in 1824; yet “the Western states … are too poor, too exhausted, to engage in those public works.” The states recently admitted to the Union, he asserted, required “the fostering aid of the nation.” But appeals for such aid ran into a bedeviling series of political and financial obstacles. First, military expenditures during the War of 1812 and the legacy of war debt drained the Federal Treasury of surplus funds. Then, Jeffersonian “strict constructionists,” notably Presidents Madison and Monroe, questioned on constitutional grounds the propriety of an active Federal role in transport development. Underlying the tortured constitutional debates was a basic sectional conflict, which posed the eastern and southern states (some of which had been supplicants themselves for Federal aid a few years earlier) against the claims of the West. Of all the major western demands for Federal patronage, the National Road was virtually the only project approved before 1824.

The construction and improvement of farm buildings in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century was a task of farmcapital formation exceeded only by the effort to clear the land itself. As uses of the farmer's time and capital, the erection of the first crude shelters and the steady additions to the dwelling and to other farm buildings are of major interest and importance in the analysis of American agricultural development. The statistics available to measure this work are adequate to command attention; like all statistics of this period, they must, of course, be employed with caution.