Germany in the 1830's gave few if any indications of its great industrial potentialities. The population was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian; Berlin was the only city containing more than 100,000 inhabitants, and the great majority of “cities” (in the legal sense) numbered less than 10,000. Nonagricultural production was carried on for the most part in the home or in small shops employing the old handicraft techniques. The pattern of foreign trade was that which has since come to be associated with “underdeveloped” agrarian nations: exports of agricultural products (grain, wool) and the output of artisanal industries, imports of manufactured goods and exotic wares. In those industries that were to lead the way in Germany's industrialization there were as yet no signs of growth. The few spinning factories that were set up in the 1820's and 1830's employed mainly English and Alsatian machinery, and sometimes foreign capital as well. Coal production lagged behind that of tiny Belgium, and was no greater than that of mineral-poor France. The small, dispersed iron industry was still almost universally conducted with the ancient charcoal technique, and the famed chemical industry was still to be born. The Zollverein was just beginning its great work of economic unification; the effective realization of its promise had to await more adequate means of transportation and financial institutions to provide capital; but by 1840 there were only a few short, isolated lines of railway and no modern credit facilities.

This article compares the development of the workers' right to organize and bargain collectively in England, France, and the U.S. Starting with a common repressive policy, each country followed a different path toward establishing the workers' rights. The main ultimate difference lies in the extent to which the state became involved in industrial relations. In England the state remained aloof after securing very broad legal rights of collective action. The workers were left to do their own battling. In France the state came to look upon collective agreements as an aspect of public policy and became the dominant partner in labor negotiations. The American pattern lies in between: state protection extends to procedural but not to substantive issues.

This article considers how and why American industry has supported research and development during the last century. It examines the differences in methods and results of Thomas Edison (inventor-entrepreneur), William Coolidge (General Electric engineer-scientist), and Irving Langmuir (General Electric Nobel Prize winner). The article concludes that Edison's effective use of organized research and development paved the way for scientifically trained people to use varied methodologies to advance science, technology, and commercial interests together.

The California Marine Research Committee was established by the state legislature in 1947 in response to the catastrophic failure of the Pacific Coast sardine fishery. Scientists, state and federal resource-managment officials, and industry leaders put aside long–standing differences of viewpoint to launch a uniquely comprehensive, multidisciplinary research effort. This paper, based on newly opened archival materials, analyzes the founding and early work of the agency. How a stalemate occurred that delayed a consensus on policy recommendations and had the practical effect of continuing virtually unregulated sardine fishing is explained. The article illustrates the institutional development of post–war “Big Science” as a major actor in the policy process and analyzes the mobilization of public agencies to cope with complex environmental issues in resource–extractive industries.

Some recent critics of Russian industrial policy argue that the costs of the Witte System may have been excessive relative to its benefits and that similar rates (or perhaps higher rates) of industrial growth could have been attained if alternate fiscal and monetary policies had been adopted. Once differential rates of growth of prices and real national income are considered, it appears that the Russian money supply was not unduly constrained. The authors also demonstrate that foreign capital inflows made a substantial contribution to Russian economic development, as did the decision to adhere to the international gold standard.

France's canal age was largely the outgrowth of the plan proposed by François Becquey, the state administrator who orchestrated a successful campaign to convince influential Frenchmen that a nationwide canal network was one of the essential tasks of their generation. As Becquey originally conceived his plan, canal building would directly contribute to economic growth and help foster a spirit of business enterprise. In the end he had to settle for a scheme under which the government paid a steep price to a handful of financial consortia for the right to assume all the risks and costs of building and operating the system itself.

In Presenting this paper to an audience of historians I find myself in a painfully ambiguous position. I am not qualified to talk to you as a historian; therefore what I am going to say will lack the richness of empirical detail that usually characterizes historical papers. On the other hand, in order to qualify as “comparative analysis” this paper ought to have a firm theoretical foundation for its analysis, and accepted standards of reference for its comparisons. Unfortunately, the development economists are still at the beginning of their difficult attempts to isolate the factors that make for economic development, and the complex interaction of these factors has so far eluded systematic analysis and presentation.

The construction and improvement of farm buildings in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century was a task of farmcapital formation exceeded only by the effort to clear the land itself. As uses of the farmer's time and capital, the erection of the first crude shelters and the steady additions to the dwelling and to other farm buildings are of major interest and importance in the analysis of American agricultural development. The statistics available to measure this work are adequate to command attention; like all statistics of this period, they must, of course, be employed with caution.

That the ruling samurai class suffered increasing poverty during the Tokugawa period is accepted, without dissent, by all students of Japanese history. However, this view is based primarily on contemporary descriptions of the financial distress felt by the samurai class and has never been established empirically through the use of quantitative data. Most of the literature supporting this long accepted view is highly impressionistic and fails even to define precisely what is meant by increasing poverty. Thus, the writers on this subject use the phrase “increasing poverty” to mean variously a decline in real income, a lagging increase in real income vis-a-vis that of other classes (merchants, artisans, and peasants), or increasing “psychological poverty” experienced due to increasing expectations while real income was rising less rapidly. Authors not infrequently use these different concepts of “increasing poverty” interchangeably.

Coal company towns were infamous, being described as exploitive, and charged with providing low-quality services, like sanitation. Yet, the quality of sanitation in coal towns in 1922 appears similar to that in cities of similar size, although lagging behind that in major cities. Within the coal region, company and independent towns provided similar levels of sanitation. The quality of sanitation in company towns varied in response to cost-related factors, including town age, population, and natural location. Meanwhile, workers were mobile and demanded compensating increases in wage rates in towns with lower-quality sanitation and higher rents.

The federal budget, a long-sought goal of fiscal reformers, became a reality with the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. This paper is concerned with one of the key expectations of the reformers, that the adoption of a formal budget would produce better estimates of federal revenues and expenditures. The conclusion is that there is little evidence of a dramatic improvement that could be attributed to the reform, although there is some evidence that the quality of the estimates improved over the long run. The paper then discusses the reasons for and implications of this finding.

Two financial missions to Colombia headed by Edwin W. Kemmerer are examined to determine their impact on Colombia's financial system and on the flow of American investment to Colombia. The 1923 and 1930 missions established a central bank and completely reorganized the Colombian financial and fiscal system. These reforms served to provide enough stability to encourage American investment, which helped to develop a financial and economic infrastructure in Colombia.

The conduct of the British government's financial affairs during the Duke of Newcastle's tenure as First Lord of the Treasury has never to my knowledge been specifically investigated. This gap in our understanding of the eighteenth century is doubly puzzling: the period itself, during which Britain won a war and an empire, is pivotal in the kingdom's history; moreover, the sources for such a study are uncommonly rich for precisely those years in which the duke held the office. The lack of such an analysis, however, has not prevented several authorities from passing severe judgments on the duke's handling of financial affairs, and while these authorities speak from extensive knowledge of the Treasury and its complexities, I have come to conclude that their assessments are too harsh—a view I shall elaborate at the end of this essay. But even if the reader should conclude at that point that my flirtation with revisionism is itself ill-founded, there is yet another value in examining the Treasury under Newcastle: as in perhaps no other period we can sometimes see decisions at the Treasury actually being made, ideas being transmitted, and problems being analyzed. And above all we can see in some detail how Britain's remarkably successful governmental financial machine operated.

A notable difference of opinion exists among economic historians as to the effect of harvest fluctuations on general economic conditions. The question has arisen, specifically, in the interpretation of European experience in the eighteenth century. T. S. Ashton has suggested that good harvests, both by cheapening food and thus setting free purchasing power for others forms of expenditure, and by providing ampler supplies of agricultural products used as industrial raw materials, had a stimulating effect on the economy. J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay have taken the opposite view. According to them, bad harvests may have had the more beneficial effect, for the incomes of landowners and farmers were higher in lean years, and their prosperity or distress was of greater consequence than the dearth or cheapness of provisions.

One of the major centrifugal forces in American economic history is the industrial revolution which has been taking place for the past 150 years. Corollary to it are the agricultural revolution and the transportation revolution. Most of the investment capital and working capital for the expanding enterprises involved in these revolutions came from plowing back profits, but a sizable amount had to be borrowed or obtained from outside investors. Mobilizing this capital was a major undertaking, especially in a new nation in which capital was relatively scarce. Its successful accomplishment involved a financial revolution.