Since the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay, historians have implicitly recognized the significance of community characteristics on levels of economic opportunity. Nevertheless, even though the last two decades have witnessed the publication of a number of occupational mobility studies of a wide variety of communities, the nature of the community under examination has been largely overlooked. Thus, while the authors of these studies have frequently found different levels of mobility, the practical necessity of focusing on one community in these undertakings has precluded any systematic attempt either to explain variances among communities or to measure precisely the impact of community characteristics on levels of opportunity.

What are the new interests, the new methods, and the new conceptions of European economic development which over the past thirty years have formed or reformed our discipline? In partial answer to this difficult question, we shall first consider the economic history of what we may call traditional Europe, and which we shall extend, very roughly, from the early Middle Ages until the seventeenth century.

The weakness of the Ch'ing land tax system is manifested in the gradual reduction of the tax burden. This weakness can be traced to two practices: that of commutation and a fixed tax quota. A model is provided to analyze these practices and their impact on the tax burden. The empirical data of Su-chou and Sung-chiang prefectures are used to implement the theoretical analysis. It is found that the tax burden was reduced enormously, about 50 percent by 1830. The article includes one table, five figures, and one appendix.

My article on Prussian public finance in the December 1966 issue of this Journal contained some errors of calculation which partially affect the arguments I advanced there and which provide an excellent object lesson in the hasty use of quantitative evidence. After unaccountably converting current prices into constant ones by multiplication instead of division, I rushed the results off to the editors without checking them.

In the half-century before 1914 international capital movements Played a significant role in the development of the world economy. This paper—which is a prelude to a more comprehensive study—focuses upon the British experience. We will first present new annual series on British foreign capital issues for the period 1865–1894. Our analysis of their behavior is centered about the following questions. First, how did the volume of British foreign investment fluctuate during the latter part of the nineteenth century? Were there long swings in these capital movements? Second, how did the geographic distribution of British foreign investment change over time? Was there an increasing tendency to invest within the British Empire? How was the total volume of investment apportioned between the tropics and the temperate regions of recent settlement? Third, how was British foreign investment allocated among economic sectors? Did the industrial composition vary significantly among countries, continents, and climatic-ethnic regions? Finally, what types of enterprises were nourished by British capital? How did the shares vary among government, private and mixed—government and private—undertakings? We believe that our time series provide more reliable answers to these questions than do previously available data.

Historians have taken it for granted that the Revolutionary, debt was fairly well concentrated before it was funded in 1790, but they have not been able to support this view with concrete evidence. Most of the people living at the time thought the same thing but were likewise unable to prove it. The truth could not be known until Hamilton's funding operation assembled the securities that made up the debt. Under the act of 1790 a new federal loan was instituted. Various kinds of securities representing unpaid claims against the government were taken as subscriptions and the possessors given new federal stock. As nearly all the old securities came in, the government had full information about the transfer and ownership of the Revolutionary debt. The details, however, were not made public. Later, a succession of fires in the treasury destroyed nearly all the central records. Documents now existing, though voluminous, are scattered, incomplete, and hard to interpret. Historians have not made much use of them. For this reason, the ownership of the debt, which was a question in 1790, is a question still.

The factors responsible for the South Carolina Low Country's rapid economic rise in the eigthteenth century and for the area's subsequent lapse into stagnation and decline are described and analyzed. The conclusion is that the rise and fall of the Low Country grew out of the white settlers' early economic commitment to the production of plantation staples with bound labor. The Low Country was locked into a pattern of economic development that required a high demand for low country staples. When demand for low country staples abated, the area faced economic ruin.

Industry and commerce developed rapidly in China during the last three centuries before Christ, as they did also in the Mediterranean world. Contemporary Hellenistic and Roman businessmen made extensive use of slave labor, and slavery gradually developed an industrial character. Nothing comparable occurred in China. Private and government slavery had a marked growth under the Han empire, but the use of slaves for industrial purposes—even commercial farming— did not become an important characteristic of the Chinese institution. This fact raises questions concerning the “style” of ancient Chinese slavery, and concerning the economic organization of which it was a part.

To study the role of the entrepreneur is to study the personal factor in economic history, to introduce the problem of what today is called the businessman. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, the expression “businessmap” was apparently not used in late colonial times, although “going into business” or “going into merchandising” was. The distinction is important; the colonial economy was far too general, and its participants too many-sided, to permit the assumption that there was a colonial man of business in the modern business sense.