The shift in the locus of European trade from the markets of the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic overthrew a centuries old pattern of commerce and established the basis for the predominant role of North Atlantic Europe in the era of industrialization. While the expression “commercial revolution” no longer has quite the currency that it once enjoyed, students of the early modern economy have not been negligent about trying to understand the causes of the commercial shift. The impact of entrepreneurship and Weltanschauung, capital accumulation, technical innovation in shipping and industry, and the economic and political organization of nation-states have all received attention from students of the age.

Why Did “Uncle Remus” exhort the post-bellum South to reduce its cotton-growing in favor of corn? His complaint was prompted in the immediate sense by the low cotton prices of the early 1890's, but such comments reflected a continuing discontent over the region's abandonment of self-sufficiency in foods after the Civil War. The ratio of cotton output to com was probably at an antebellum peak in 1860, but this ratio had been easily exceeded by 1880, as Table 1 indicates. In the leading cotton states, per capita corn production and the per capita stock of hogs were only about half of what they had been twenty years earlier. Coinciding as it did with a major era of stagnation in world cotton demand, this shift into cotton is of great importance for the subsequent economic development of the South. Despite its size and significance, the shift lacks a satisfactory explanation in the historical literature.

To the public of the 1860's, federal loans and land grants to the pioneer Pacific railroads represented aid necessary to secure an economically and politically desirable technological feat; to the public of the 1870's they represented plunder. Scandal, hinted before the driving of the legendary Golden Spike in 1869, sporadically dominated the national political debates of the 1870's and the 1880's. The issue subsided by the 1900's, leaving only a residual popular impression of ample government aid to railroads. Among professional historians, the debate was revived in the mid-1940's by Robert S. Henry's revisionist article justifying the land grants. The ensuing discussion largely restored the original consensus that the land grants represented excessive subsidization.

Did preparations for the Second World War account for the precipitous drop in the growth rate of Soviet industrial production from 10–12 percent per annum in the period 1928–1937 to only 2–3 percent per annum in the period 1937–1940? According to some who study the Soviet economy the answer is “yes.” This view has been succinctly expressed by Stanley Cohn: “After 1937, the rising spectre of Hitler forced the Soviet leadership to shift resources into armaments on a massive scale. As a result, the growth rate fell drastically to 3.6 percent per year between 1937 and 1940.” Such a sequence of events, however, has never been empirically demonstrated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate formally the validity of this explanation, via aggregate production functions, particularly of the CES (constant elasticity of substitution) variety, as well as to explore an alternative hypothesis, espoused, among others, by Naum Jasny, Alec Nove and Warren Nutter. This hypothesis stresses a domestic factor as the major contributor to the disruption in industrial production: namely, the impact of Stalin's terror in the form of chaos-producing political purges.

As a nation becomes economically developed, the pace of development usually tends to vary between sectors and between regions of the nation. Industrialization usually involves more rapid growth and technological change in some industries than others. Often regional specialization accompanies industrialization, and, in fact, can become an important determinant in the industrialization process. With differential growth among industries, and increasing regional specialization, the performance of the factor markets in mobilizing and reallocating capital and labor among industries and regions becomes extremely important.

A Major theme in the historiography of American slavery is the analysis of the slave plantation as a capitalist market oriented enterprise. Much of the controversy surrounding the work of such scholars as Stanley Elkins, Kenneth Stampp and Eugene Genovese stems from differing views of the interaction of commercial capitalism with the ancient institution of slavery. A recurrent topic in this literature is the impact of the profit motive and competitive market conditions on the relationship between master and slave. A major concern is the extent these capitalist incentives may have motivated the master to either brutalize or ameliorate the conditions of the slave's existence.

We wish to thank the following who read earlier drafts of this paper and made useful suggestions and criticisms: Professors Jerry Fastrup, George Jensen, Roger Ransom, Richard Roseman, and an anonymous referee. This study is part of a larger project, “The Optimal Accumulation and Utilization of Slaves” (forthcoming), which extends both static and dynamic neoclassical models of the firm to cases involving slavery.

The problem of how North American medievalists should deal with social and economic history is one which seems to have some importance the present time. Two recent articles in the JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY are concerned with this matter. So are two others which have just appeared in the American Historical Review and which, since they examine quantitative history in general, throw light on this problem. Because of this kind of current interest, it was decided to hold a special session devoted to social and economic history at the recent semicentennial anniversary meeting of the Mediaeval Academy of America. This session was preceded by a questionnaire sent to 105 medieval historians of the United States and Canada who represented every field study, every age group, and every geographic area of this continent. Seventy replies were received and a lively discussion took place later at the meeting itself, which some thirty scholars attended. This article represents an attempt to sum up the results of both the survey and the subsequent discussion because it should be of value not only to medievalists but also to a wider body of scholars who share an interest in economic and social history in general.

This paper reviews the output of journal publications by the twenty five leading economic history programs during the past fifteen years. At present, there are no formal ratings of the quality of economic history programs at the various academic institutions, but journal publications can serve as a partial indicator of quality. The Roose-Andersen ratings graduate programs provide separate rankings of economics and history programs, but this information may not be appropriate in evaluating economic history programs, and the ratings have not been updated since 1969. Journal publications are certainly not the only measure of quality academic institutions, but journals are regarded as the standard outlet for disseminating new research findings and expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Those institutions that have concentrated their publication efforts on books, textbooks, monographs, working papers, and other nonjournal forms of publication will of course be underrepresented by the procedures followed in this paper.