Recent accounts of medieval agricultural organization begin not with a description of “the” manor but with a warning that no single archetype may be considered appropriate. From place to place, from generation to generation, a property might be exploited as a single unit, divided between tenancies and demesne, or wholly partitioned into tenancies; and the land would be worked by a correspondingly varied mixture of “employees” and independent labor. This complex historical record is still far from being explained by a suitable model. In the secondary sources, the varying size of the demesne is most frequently attributed to changes in relative prices: the demesne is buoyant, it is argued, when output prices are high and wages low; when prices fall and wages rise, rents become more attractive and the demesne is parcelled out. The difficulty with this explanation, however, is that rents are not independent of output prices and wages: in simple economic theory, rent so adjusts to prices and wages as to always equal the surplus that could be earned by direct exploitation, and the proportion of tenant land on an estate is a matter of indifference. This does not of course mean that it was so in fact; it does mean, however, that one must carefully specify which of the many considerations neglected by that simple theory are in fact critical to the problem at hand.

The analysis of fluctuations longer than the nine-year business cycle has been somewhat confused by a failure to distinguish sharply and to relate three distinct phenomena: the forces set in motion by a leading sector in growth, stemming from the introduction and progressive diffusion of a new technology, and its deceleration; the forces set in motion by changes in the profitability of producing foodstuffs and raw materials, whether from the side of prices or technology, including their effects on investment in new territories and mines, on capital movements, interest rates, terms of trade, and domestic and international income distribution; and the forces set in motion (notably, in housing and urban infrastructure) by large waves of international or domestic migration or other forces changing the rate of family formation, housing demand, and the size of the working force. As the world economy unfolded after 1783, these three phenomena operated concurrently and related to each other in complex ways not easy to disentangle. Nevertheless, the substantial literature on long waves can be usefully clarified by distinguishing these phenomena more sharply than is sometimes done and then relating them to each other at particular times and places. The exercise of doing so has, I believe, some general implications for economic theory, for they are all aspects of the process of adjustment towards a moving equilibrium, never attained—a process for which we lack an adequate dynamic theory.

A struggle for industrialization is one of the major themes of the recent history of not only Brazil, but virtually the whole of Latin America. The historical evolution of that struggle finds a common denominator in the structural similarities of the national economies of the region. Assessment of Brazil's experience in the post-1929 period should therefore yield insights into the problems that Latin America as a whole faced during the international upheaval spawned by the financial collapse of 1929. Such an appraisal may also provide empirical assistance for the elaboration of future comparative studies. The specific analytical focus of this article is the attitude of Getúlio Vargas' government toward industrialization and planning, a theme whose re-evaluation serves, furthermore, to do justice to the enigmatic and reluctant revolutionary who governed Brazil during critical years and depression and war.

“The town has that sign of prosperity of new buildings, which never deceives,” wrote Arthur Young of Nantes in 1788. In fact, on the eve of the Revolution, Nantes—the infamous ville des négriers (city of the slavers)—was one of the richest cities in France and one of the most important ports in the kingdom. For almost a century Nantes had been the capital of the French slave trade, and by 1789 local merchants were investing almost 10 million L (livres) annually in the trade. Yet, in spite of the general activity, Nantes traders were experiencing difficulties with their business. Although a few slavers managed to create vast fortunes almost overnight, problems in France, the colonies, and Africa meant that most traders had to struggle to obtain even modest profits, from slaving. During the last decade of the old regime investments in the slave trade were usually no more profitable than investments in offices or land, although the trade alone offered the possibility, however, remote, of quick, vast profits.

The contract construction industry today represents one of the most important sectors of the American economy. Total new construction in recent decades has accounted for nearly one-half of the Gross Private Domestic Investment, while non-farm residential building alone accounts for nearly one-quarter of GPDI.

On the whole we don't treat old people well in this country, but old scholars probably fare better than most. We let them use our libraries and come to our annual meetings. Occasionally we have them chair a session on some not-too-current topic. We refer to them in footnotes and we thank them in prefaces. We donét, in other words, completely depersonalize them, cut them off from our lives and banish them from our ceremonies, as happens too often with other people of advanced age.

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.