The Committee on Research in Economic History was established in 1940, more than a generation ago. Most of those who were active in its creation and administration have died or retired from active academic life; and surely a fresh direction of internal evolution has altered, at least in important ways, the objectives of the discipline. Accordingly, it appears appropriate to set down here an account of what were the hopes and intentions of those especially active in its initiation and early planning, and to record its more obvious achievements. Members of ensuing generations will have time in their later lives to pass judgment on the intellectual value of this particular effort at academic improvement and intellectual growth. Indeed, I propose to close my survey with the transmogrification of the Committee into the Council—an event of the mid-1950's, at a point in time already far enough removed to offer a considerable perspective.

Liberal Italy, 1860–1922, has never stimulated the same interest as the Risorgimento era, which spawned the unitary state, or the Fascist experiment, which destroyed it. Admittedly a number of works have dealt with the liberal period, but these have been all too few and very general in scope. Little, for example, has been written in English about Italian economic growth during these years and even less is known about the commercial policy of the unitary Kingdom. Contemporary critics of the tariff clamored that duties were exorbitant, were politically motivated, favored the North at the expense of the South, and increased industrial profits while they burdened agriculture. But there has not been a full scholarly analysis of commercial policy which would permit an appraisal of these criticisms.

Every generation has interpreted the monetary experience of the colonies in the light of its own problems. The Jacksonian period produced the interpretations of Gouge just as the silver controversy of the 1890's produced the work of Bullock and Davis. The reaction to the financial fundamentalism of the 1890's came largely from the work of R. A. Lester and the unpublished but celebrated work of L. Brock in the late thirties and early forties, heavily influenced by the experience of the depression. From the latter two, a new orthodoxy has emerged among American historians, under the authority of E. James Ferguson, whose important recent study, The Power of the Purse, defends the paper money currencies of the colonies by a well-reasoned appeal to the modern fiscal practice of financing war by inflation.

Considered analytically population growth may either have positive or negative influences on economic growth. Population expansion may, by facilitating a widening of markets, allow for economies of scale to be realized and permit the introduction of new industries, or by relieving labor scarcities, facilitate economic expansion. Possible negative implications for economic growth may result however, as Malthus argued, through the mechanism of diminishing returns or by changing the age structure of the population so as to increase the proportion of dependents relative to economically active producers and thus reduce the volume of goods and services available to each individual. The point is that economic analysis prima facia is agnostic with respect to the net effect of population change on economic change. One or all of the above relationships may be operative in any individual country experience and without careful empirical observations, it is impossible to identify accurately whether the negative or positive effects are dominant. Clearly what is needed before general statements about the relationship between population and economic change can be supported is a series of country studies whose purpose will be not only to determine the frequency with which the optimistic or pessimistic influences predominate, but in addition to identify the intervening economic and social institutions which account for the predominance of one or the other effect.

One of the most controversial economic issues confronting the American public during the nineteenth century was that of protection. The plea for a protective tariff had been raised as soon as the First Congress met in 1789. The issue was sharply debated off and on throughout the nineteenth century but never finally resolved. There is now a large literature relating the outcome of this issue to the economic and political interests of various involved groups.

The pioneers' trek across the land has long been taken as a central element in American social history. But that redistribution of resources has been no less vital in fueling the advance of productivity, in supporting the varying pattern of final outputs. Because migration both caused, and was a consequence of, these massive changes there has long been an interest in measuring the scope and detail of population redistribution.

On January 2, 1837, in Kirtland, Ohio, a bank which was founded upon divine revelation, which had no charter, whose officers were not bankers, and whose capital base was narrow, opened its doors for business. These, characteristics probably did not differentiate the bank too much from the hundreds of other such institutions begun in this period. But the circumstances attending the founding of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, or more accurately, the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, and the record of its operations are sufficiently different from the run-of-the-mill wildcat bank to justify a closer look at the colorful history of this institution.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”

Though Social critics have often spoken of the “wage slavery” associated with modern capitalism, it is more common to believe that coerced labor was banished with the coming of modern standards of civilization. Thus the corvee of ancient China, the feudalism of Western Europe and Japan, and the New World enslavement of blacks in the 17th-19th centuries are seen as products of those earlier and less enlightened ages, mere way stations in the historical evolution of modern day economies.