There were three epochs of growth experience after the mid-nineteenth century for what is now called the OECD “club”: the late nineteenth century, the middle years between 1914 and 1950, and the late twentieth century. The first and last epochs were ones of overall fast growth, globalization, and convergence. The middle years were ones of overall slow growth, deglobalization, and divergence. Thus history offers an unambiguous positive correlation between globalization and convergence. When the pre-World War I years are examined in detail, the correlation turns out to be causal: globalization played the critical role in contributing to convergence.

In the eighteenth-century British Empire and the antebellum South, slaves were concentrated in domestic service and rural enterprises like agriculture and ironworks. I argue that employers in these sectors chose to employ slaves rather than free labor because they faced especially high turnover costs—that is, costs of searching for a worker and going without labor when a free worker quit or was fired. In the absence of slavery, these sectors were marked by other institutions designed to deal with turnover costs: indentured servitude, employment agencies, and deferred compensation.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the raw-silk trade served as the most important trade linkage between the then still largely closed economies of East Asia and the industrialized West. This article traces the evolution of the global raw-silk market during the period 1850 through 1930. Using comprehensive data on raw-silk prices and quantities and applying co-integration techniques, I find a well-integrated global raw-silk market evolved during this period. This article also examines the evolution of technologies and institutions of the global silk industry, which exhibited characteristics of path dependency and technical interrelatedness.

Nineteenth-century laws granted wives previously withheld rights to their own property and earnings as well as liability for debts and contracts. I use 4,198 women's patents to assess whether these laws encouraged greater female commercial activity. Patentees were motivated by potential profits and were responsive to market incentives. Women's patenting jumped significantly in states with legal reforms and was lowest in states without such laws. Much of the subsequent increase occurred in metropolitan centers where property rights were of greater concern. Thus, by reducing transactions costs and increasing expected benefits, legal reforms arguably stimulated women's investments in patenting and commercial activities.

In this article we argue that during the period from 1870 to 1914 adherence to the gold standard was a signal of financial rectitude, a “good housekeeping seal of approval”, that facilitated access by peripheral countries to capital from the core countries of western Europe. Examination of data from nine widely different capital-importing countries, using a model inspired by the Capital Asset Pricing Model, reveals that countries with poor records of adherence were charged considerably more than those with good records, enough to explain the determined effort to stay on gold made by a number of capital-importing countries.

The impact of China's demand for silver on global trade in specie and monetary metals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains poorly understood. Conventional wisdom postulates that seventeenth-century China became so dependent on foreign silver to sustain domestic economic growth that a sharp fall in silver imports in the 1640s led to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. This hypothesis rests on dubious theoretical and empirical grounds. The demand for silver in China was determined by long-term changes in indigenous demand for money rather than short-term fluctuations in the flow of silver imports.