Few stones have remained unturned in an effort to reconstruct Anglo-American history in the critical years from the Treaty of Paris in 1763 to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Much has been learned by investigating such problems as public finance, colonial administration, and mercantile policy within the context of an expanded British empire. It is not always realized, however, that by the Treaty of 1763 Great Britain acquired new fields for capital investment as well as vast new lands to govern. In addition to taxation and public expenditure, such problems were raised as capital recruitment and allocation, the modification of financial institutions, and the adjustment of debtor-creditor relationships. Though distinct in certain respects, public and private finance impinged upon each other in the period from 1763 to 1775. This was especially the case after the British credit crisis of 1772, when, in addition to the controversy over tea, debtor-creditor relations between the thirteen colonies and the mother country underwent marked deterioration.

Since agricultural history first acquired independent status it has been carried forward without much theoretical direction. So much research has been done in the field, however, that possibly a tentative general theory for further work may now be advanced. To be useful, an historical hypothesis should probably center on some common denominator of human experience. One possible common denominator is that all men are located within, or are a certain definite distance from metropolitan unit. All those who live within a certain given zone around the metropolis have at least one common experience: they are all some specific distance from the metropolis. Furthermore, for any given group of people this one common experience may have shaped many of their ideas and actions. Since human events take place in time and space, a theory based primarily on these dimensions might be at least roughly applicable to most history.

It is extraordinary how little is known about the engineers who produced the water wheels, steam engines, textile and other machinery of the early Industrial Revolution. In most economic histories of this period there are merely a few brief and vague references to smiths, carpenters, and millwrights, based on Smiles or Fairbairn, with no contemporary evidence whatever. Most accounts of the development of mechanical engineering normally begin with Bramah and Maudslay, from about 1800, and carry on with such renowned nineteenth-century names as Fairbairn, Roberts, Whitworth, and Nasmyth. Before the nineteenth century, we are usually led to believe, mechanical engineering hardly existed. This belief is largely based on nineteenth-century evidence. William Fairbairn, for example, stated that when he first came to Manchester, in 1814, “the whole of the machinery was executed by hand. There were neither planing, slotting, nor shaping machines; and, with the exception of very imperfect lathes, and a few drills, the preparatory operations of construction were effected entirely by the hands of the workmen.” Similarly, the Select Committee on Exportation of Machinery reported in 1841 that “[machine] tools have introduced a revolution in machinery, and tool-making has become a distinct branch of mechanics, and a very important trade, although twenty years ago it was scarcely known.”

The origins of a Balkan Orthodox merchant class or classes may be traced back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did it become sufficiently strong in wealth and number to capture the trade of Hungary, South Russia, and the eastern Mediterranean. The eighteenth century was a time of expansion of French, German, English, and Russian trade in the Balkans. It was also a time of growth of the trade of Moslem Albanian and Bosnian merchants. But, in terms of its significance to the cultural, political, and general historical evolution of the Balkan peoples, most important of all was the expansion of the Balkan Orthodox merchant: the Greek trader of Constantinople, Salonika, and Smyrna, the Greek and Orthodox Albanian merchant, sailor, and shipper of the smaller Aegean islands, the Greek, Vlach, and Macedo-Slav muleteer and forwarding agent of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, the Serbian pig-merchant of Šumadija, the “Illyrian” muleteer and forwarding agent of Herzegovina and Dalmatia, who set up business in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) or Trieste, the “Rascian” of Pannonia, and the Greek or Bulgarian of the eastern Rhodope. The Balkan Orthodox merchants were Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian subjects, but their principal business was to bring goods into or out of the Ottoman Empire. The area of their primary business concentration stretched north and west of the political limits of the Ottoman Empire to Nezhin in South Russia, Leipzig in Germany, Vienna in Austria, and Livorno and Naples in Italy. In western Europe, they succeeded in creating an area of secondary commercial penetration.

George Murphy and Arnold Zellner, who admittedly “have little taste for ghosts or spirit rapping,” seem quite ready to exhume a doctrine and place it in an “up-to-date” package. We welcome historical re-evaluations; but our joys should not preclude us from challenging unwarranted conclusions. While I cannot deliver any spirits, I can at least do some spade work to turn over a few skeletons as partial refutation of the Murphy-Zellner conclusions. In particular; I wish to contest the following statements: (r) that “it [sequential growth] shortened and modulated business cycle contractions [and] contributed to shortening and alleviating critical situations for labor as a whole” (page 420); and (2) that it was largely responsible for “keeping the percentage of the labor force unionized small” (page 408).