The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.

The paper focuses on the development in Australia of minimum wage-setting and its relationship to unemployment. A variety of industrial tribunals embarked on a course of wage-setting early in the twentieth century as part of their task of reducing industrial conflict. In varying degree, the tribunals kept in mind what was thought of as wage justice for workers with low bargaining power. By 1921 a standard minimum wage for unskilled men had emerged and formed the basis of the wage system. It was a wage which had a strong welfare basis. Other wages more closely reflected the market. During the 1920s unemployment was not high but was concentrated on less-capable unskilled men. The limited evidence available points to the wage structure as the main cause.

During the nineteenth century the export of bulk commodities from West Africa expanded at the expense of slave exports. Research has focused on the political implications of the expansion of so-called “legitimate trade” rather than on its economic character. In the interests of an economic approach, new terminology and a conceptual framework are proposed, and then applied to a historical problem—the levels of competition prevailing in the African trader networks serving the coastal ports. The conclusions of this study are related to the issue of the historical origins of African underdevelopment.

The dissertation is a study of the service industries in the United States during the period 1839 through 1899. The primary purpose of the study is to provide three series relating to the quantitative development of the sector. These series—value-added, gainful workers, and capital stock—provide benchmark estimates at decade intervals centered on census years. Series are presented for the aggregate sector; the major components, final and intermediate services; and eight industries. These eight industries, defined as the service sector, are trade, transportation and public utilities, finance and insurance, professional services, personal services, government, education, and the independent hand trades.

Nineteenth-century romanticism and the hardships of capitalist individualism have caused scholars to emphasize collectivistic social and economic institutions i n the Middle Ages. Carried to extremes by the English socialists, this attitude tended to ignore or even to deny the competitive aspects of medieval production. Church authorities and guild ordinances were often cited in support of the thesis that the era was noncompetitive. Even Sombart was able to see in the medieval craftsman and tradesman a petit bourgeois who typically held to the morals prescribed by church authorities.

Girls far outnumbered boys in American high schools at the turn of the century. Despite the fact that women on average spent far fewer years than men in the paid labor force, we argue that a high school education was a better investment for girls than for boys. This was because formal education offered the only opportunity for girls to obtain job-related skills, whereas it was but one of many such opportunities for boys.

The purpose of this note is to examine the method by which N. S. B. Gras establishes his thesis concerning the evolution of the English grain markets. According to his book, grain, markets evolved through several distinct stages, culminating in the “metropolitan market.” Although the influence of the London market by the sixteenth century can be demonstrated without reference to the existence of the early stages, it is nevertheless they that constitute the essential novelty of Mr. Gras's approach and, presumably, the main contribution of the book to the study of economic history. It will be contended below that the existence of certain of these early stages is at least doubtful and that, in any case, their economic significance is either negligible or not provable.

After peaking around the mid-eighteenth century, grain market integration in China declined by a colossal 80 percent amid a twofold increase in population and remained at low levels for well over a century. Markets only resumed their growth momentum after the largest peasant revolt—the Taiping Rebellion—wiped out roughly one-sixth of the Chinese population starting 1851. This U-shaped pattern of grain market integration distinguished China from Europe in their trajectories of market development. Using grain prices to divide China into grain-deficit and grainsurplus regions, we find that the negative relationship between population growth and market integration originated from the grain-surplus-cum-exporting regions.

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.

Focusing on a religious commune known as the Shakers and utilizing the information recorded in the enumeration schedules of the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture censuses, this article estimates the productivities of Shaker enterprises and compares them with those of other producers randomly selected from the same data source. The results provide support to the contention that communes need not always suffer from reduced productivity. Shaker farms and shops generally performed just as productively as their neighbors; when differences did exist between their productivities, there are good reasons to attribute them to factors other than the organizational form.

When arrayed in time series, the rates of signature literacy of free persons in colonial Perquimans County, North Carolina, exhibit the ∪-shaped pattern found in the records of many other new communities of early America. In Perquimans, the pattern was due to coincident movements in the literacy rates of immigrants and natives of the county. The initial drop was associated with pronounced political and social disorder; the rise, with improved political stability and with demographic and economic growth.

Spain ascended to dazzling heights in world affairs during the sixteenth century, thrust there by her political, military, and economic might. Until the seventeenth century began, her position seemed unassailable. Then, with agonizing helplessness, she slipped into a humiliating cycle of decline which persisted until only a shell of her greatness remained one hundred years later. Viewing Spain in such depths of misery, few observers could have guessed that her melancholy drift had ended when Charles II (1665–1700) died and Philip V (1700–1746) succeeded him in 1700. Yet as the Austrian lineage thus came to an end and the Bourbon dynasty began, Spain entered a new epoch marked by the unusually enlightened participation of government in Spanish economic affairs.

The analysis of labor and capital productivity in the New England cotton textile industry has been extensive in recent years. The well-preserved records of the early textile firms have provided the basis for major studies by Layer, McGouldrick, Davis and Stettler, Zevin, David, and Williamson. Although these studies vary in approach and focus, they are alike in using measures of labor input that are primarily based on data for mill operatives. The labor productivity indices thus constructed have indicated increasing labor productivity prior to the Civil War. These estimates not only have substantially revised traditional historians' often implied beliefs of falling labor productivity due to declining labor quality in this period, but also have led to a variety of explanations of the relationship between labor productivity, capital productivity, and technological innovation.

Newly estimated national accounting data for the Arab community are utilized to provide a comparative economic profile of the Arab and Jewish sectors in mandatory Palestine's dual economy. It is shown that the Arab economy grew substantially, but at a much slower rate than the Jewish economy. Productivity advance, however, seems to have made a significantly larger relative contribution to Arab growth. General and specific dualistic features of Arab-Jewish trade and their growth promoting effects are also explored, suggesting that the political conflict between the two communities played only a minor role in shaping their economic interrelationship and performance.

IN recent years much has been said and written about milk as the most nearly perfect of all modern foods, but it is important to realize that it is also the most venerable of human nutriments. Its use began long before recorded history, and it has continued throughout the ages to be a staple part of the human diet. Man's making friends with the lactating animals, such as the cow and the goat, was a significant step in the advancement of human nutrition and therefore of civilization as well. Butter and cheese proved to be important ways of preserving the food values of milk, and their invention, though probably accidental in both instances, was an important contribution to human nutrition. In the long history of dairying, custom and accidental discovery have probably been more important than conscious experimentation and innovation.