I use newly-developed data on Africa to estimate the effects of the international slave trades (circa 1500–1850) on the institutional structures of African economies and societies (circa 1900). I find that: (1) societies in slave catchment zones adopted slavery to defend against further enslavement; (2) slave trades spread slavery and polygyny together; (3) politically centralized aristocratic slave regimes emerge in West Africa and family-based accumulations of slave wealth in East Africa. I discuss implications for literatures on long-term legacies in African political and economic development.

The author of the earliest general treatise on economics, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, regarded the entrepreneur as a key factor in production. Later economists have in general had the same feeling, though they have not defined the word entrepreneur in precisely the same manner. By some the entrepreneur has been considered to be primarily a risk or uncertainty bearer, by others an innovator, by still others a superintendent or manager. The list could easily be expanded. The tendency for economists to emphasize now one and now another aspect of entrepreneurship derives, I believe, from several factors: the variations in the volume and nature of economic opportunities, the increasing size of the business unit, and the changes in the legal forms of business organization.

If We are to have a discussion of fabian England, it may be well at the outset to specify what we nean by fabian, even though we take England for granted. Under present circumstances in the world, die German methodology, which dictates beginning with definitions, should perhaps be employed in its Russian variant, which requires that serious discussion of any scholarly subject shall be prefaced widi an indication of what Lenin had to say on the topic. Lenin was interested i n the Fabians, interested enough to translate Industrial Democracy into Russian. It is therefore with special authority that he was able to say, “The most perfect expression of opportunism and of liberal labour politics is undoubtedly the Fabian Society.” His opinion took on added weight because he was echoing “Engels, who treats Messrs. Sidney Webb and Co. as a band of bourgeois humbugs whose aim it is to demoralize die workers, to influence them in a counter-revolutionary direction.” Lenin did recognize that “the Fabians are more sincere and honest than Kautsky and Co. because they have not promised to stand for a revolution; politically, however, diey are the same.” As we all know, in 1915, in the heat of the effort to “convert the imperialist war into civil war,” nothing more damning could be said than diat the Fabians were the same as the “pseudo-Marxist renegade” Kautsky.

Many students of Franklin discuss his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., as a precursor of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population? overlooking the more significant fact that Franklin's essay is part of an extensive movement to analyze population trends, a movement dating at least from John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality (1662). Just as every writer on physics from Newton to Einstein has something to say aboutmotion, Franklin and Malthus as writers on population naturally discuss some common concepts. The similarities are not remarkable. As John Adams observes, “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl, were truths well known to every democrat and aristocrat, long before the great philosopher Malthus arose, to think he enlightened the world by the discovery.” The real significance of Franklin's essay lies in its influence in drawing attention to the potential economic and military strength of the Colonies and hence in contributing indirectly to the restrictive measures of the British colonial policy, the very policies that it was written to forfend.

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.

The sterling crisis of 1337–1339 is interesting for two reasons. First, it seems to be the earliest such crisis for which detailed analysis is possible. Second, the details of this crisis, when compared to those pertaining to the 1340's, offer what might be called a “textbook example” of the differences between non-convertible and convertible foreign exchange systems.

As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily upon small, local investors who preferred safety to innovation. As a result, southern manufacturing firms were hampered in their flexibility, and southern industrial structure was skewed toward mature industries with little developmental potential.

The revolution of 1848, by ending the system of serfdom, had created the basic conditions of Hungary's industrialization; however, since the revolution had remained incomplete and the War of Independence had been lost, the ensuing suppression by Austrian absolutism and the considerable feudal survivals proved a strong barrier to the way of social and economic progress. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a product of the Compromise of 1867, offered somewhat more favorable conditions for economic development. Nevertheless, the structure of the dual monarchy kept Hungary's industrialization within rather narrow limits: the absence of independent statehood and the existence of a common customs area with Austria exposed the Hungarian market to devastating competition from Austria's more advanced manufacturing industry; and since these circumstances helped to consolidate the political and economic power of the large landowners, the capital accumulating within the country served above all the capitalist development of agriculture. So towards the end of the nineteenth century, nearly half a century after the bourgeois revolution, Hungary was still a wholly agrarian country whose major exports were foodstuffs and agricultural produce. The rapid development of manufacturing industry began as late as the last decade of the nineteenth century and continued until the beginning of World War I, over a span of some twenty-five years.

Much of the federally owned public lands in the American South to the west of the Appalachians was sold to private interests between 1820 and 1860. Land sales' policy remained a great political issue during the nineteenth century because of its perceived effects on the distribution of wealth, sectoral economic growth, and the geographic location of political power. In this essay we consider the marginal impact of Southern land sales on national income. Like all models, our model is only as good as its underlying assumptions. Our aim is less to provide the last word on an important historical issue than to place the problem in a context in which analytical tools can be employed.

Perhaps in no other stage in history has a rapidly changing pattern of economic life raised so many acutely disturbing economic problems as it did in England during the last decade of the eighteenth and the first few decades of the nineteenth century, even as there have been few periods in which the body of economic thought has been more enriched. The era that included the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1814) and the postwar period witnessed such historic events as the suspension of specie payments by the Bank of England, modification of the corn laws, industrial depression, widespread introduction of machine technology, and the Luddite riots. Little wonder that the brilliant minds of Malthus, Ricardo, James Mill, Bentham, and many others were stimulated by the troublesome issues of the day.

Although it has not been our practice to publish issues devoted to single themes, the nearly simultaneous submission of three manuscripts treating the economic history of the elderly inspired us to highlight the new research in this area by publishing the articles together and by inviting Professor Stanley Engerman of the University of Rochester to write an introduction.

In his recent article in this Journal, A. H. John has attempted to show how low grain prices in the first half of the eighteenth century stimulated economic growth. His argument runs that after the Restoration,

…there followed almost a century of comparative plenty, bringing an increasing flow of food and raw materials. The most pronounced fall in prices occurred in grains … Because [the bread grains] entered very largely into the diet of most groups in society, a fall in their prices lowered the cost of living and so raised per capita real incomes …. Income tended to move into the hands of people, who, through habit and/or necessity, were more likely to spend than hoard …. Many of the growth points stemmed from a buoyant home market.

Private wealth of the inhabitants of three regions and of the Thirteen American Colonies as a whole, in 1774, estimated from a statistical sample of probate inventories and supplementary data, is the focus. The author's prior interest in consumption and levels of living led to these innovative estimates which supplement national wealth estimates for the United States in later centuries. Levels of wealth compared on a per capita basis with other times and places, as well as wealth inequalities among regions and among individuals, and rates of growth in real wealth per capita are all considered. Some complexities of intertemporal and interspatial wealth comparisons are indicated, in particular the implications of the striking North-South differences in 1774 with their fateful implications for the American dilemma.

Economics, like geology, is an historical science. Geology has made incredible advances by accepting it is an historical, rather than a laboratory science. Economic historians can help economics make similar advances by adopting the research strategies of modern geology. Intensely empirical and global in their range, today's geologists focus on the historical remains of shocking, usually catastrophic, events in the earth's past. Already empirical and global, economic historians have ample shocks to study whether their specialty is population, technology, or institutions. A few examples of the possibilities should stimulate us to reinvigorate our parent disciplines of economics and history.