In the neoclassical-cliometric view of historical events, earlier concerns with economic change over time are now “out of bounds.” This narrowing has been justified by the supposed demands of scientific rigor, but a new model of science suggests that this need not be so. Science does not have any single goal or method. Science demands that economic historians develop whatever tools are needed to solve the problems they face. Examples of this already exist.

The significant place of credit in everyday business is not a new phenomenon. If the last few centuries have witnessed a rapid development in the character and extent of credit facilities, it is still far from certain that the relative importance of credit is today greater than it was in the medieval period, or during the intervening centuries. In any case it is undeniable that the business affairs of men, from paupers to princes, have frequently required credit in one form or another. The king with his wars and splendid court, the noble with his extravagant ways, and the merchant with his speculative ventures have been the colorful debtors of history and fiction alike. The Jew, the Lombard, the Medici or Fugger, the goldsmith, and finally the modern professional banker have appeared as the masters of credit. But credit transactions have not been limited to these groups alone. As R. H. Tawney has pointed out, such a society as that of Elizabethan England was composed largely of small property holders, chiefly farmers and artisans. These yeomen, artisans, and small businessmen were often in need of loans to expand or retrieve their estates. Where did they find the credit they required?

Anumber of economic historians, including Charles Beard, C. Vann Woodward, and others have argued that southern economic development during the nineteenth century may have been significantly hindered by the South's political and economic relations with the North. Certainly the best known of such arguments is that of Charles Beard. Beard thought that the “normal” workings of the pre-Civil War political economy would have resulted in the relative eclipse of the southern economy even in the absence of the Civil War. Wartime devastation plus such northern policies as the tariff, the Homestead Law, the National Banking Act, and emancipation of the slaves, merely hastened and worsened the South's economic decline.

The influence that short-time economic fluctuations in western Europe presumably had on the development of the Swedish timber trade during the latter half of the nineteenth century must, to an American audience, seem to be a rather specialized subject, and I think a few introductory words giving a background might be useful.

I present estimates here of the geographic persistence of estate owners and managers in Barbados during 1673–1723. The estimates are based on evidence generated by the functioning of an economic market; the evidence was produced by tracing the names of purchasers over time through the invoice accounts of slave sales held by the Royal African Company on the island.Estimated rates of out-migration from Barbados were low during the 1670s, comparable in magnitude to those found in colonial New England towns, but the rates rose considerably during the following decades. The initially low rates of out-migration might have been the result of the great profitability of sugar planting in early Barbados, while the subsequent increase might have been due to the development of methods of plantation management that allowed estate owners to earn profits as absentees.

The application of the notion of learning by doing to account for the measured input efficiency growth of an aggregation of production units admittedly creates worrisome ambiguities about exactly what was being “learned,” how, and by whom. (David, p. 562)

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.

Recent problems in the performance of the American steel industry have prompted a number of calls for an “industrial policy” for this sector. Before any such programs of public intervention can be considered, however, it would behoove public policymakers to examine why the industry fell into its present state of decline. This paper, an abstract of a longer study, analyzes the relations of business and government in American steel from 1945 to 1960, and concludes that public policies had as much to do with subsequent industry decline as did other factors previously delineated by scholars.

The year 1886 was destined to be a crucial one in the history of the American labor movement. The eight-hour crusade, the numerous strikes, the Haymarket bomb, the entrance of workingmen into the political arena at the state and national levels, and the mushroom growth of labor organizations all contributed to the agitation and excitement of the year. Yet the importance of these events was overshadowed by a development that was to have such far-reaching implications that it would determine the future of the labor movement for the succeeding half century. That development was the declaration of war by the trade unions against the reform unionism of the Knights of Labour.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries British overseas territories under control of the Colonial Office were required to place all business affairs which could not be handled within their own boundaries or those of an adjacent British area in the hands of an office in London known as the Crown Agents for the Colonies.

The textbook explanation for Britain's high unemployment in the 1920s is that the return to gold at $4.86 left the currency overvalued. Recent estimates suggest that an 11 percent devaluation would have eliminated roughly half the unemployment in 1925. This article questions the validity of that conclusion. It measures the power of exchange rate devaluations to decrease unemployment in the context of sectorally distinct labor markets. The results suggest that though a devaluation would have been helpful, eliminating half of 1925's unemployment would have required one much greater than 11 percent and would have caused significant price pressures.

Austria was among the countries that began to develop modern industry at the turn of the eighteenth century and in particular during the Continental Blockade. Cotton spinning was mechanized and construction of textile machinery began. Similarly, when in the late 1820's horse-drawn railroads were constructed on the European Continent, Austria was among the pioneers. This onset of modern economic growth followed a long tradition of handicraft and manu-factories in several regions of the Habsburg domain. Notwithstanding these early beginnings, in 1900 about 58 percent of the economically active population was still engaged in agriculture, as against 22 percent in industry. According to estimates based on Colin Clark's figures Austrian national product per head of the “working population” was in 1913 about 47 percent of the corresponding British product, almost 60 percent of the German, and above 70 percent of the French. Population growth throughout most of the nineteenth century was rather steady, at an average annual rate of below 1 percent. When at the turn of the century the rate increased, Austria became one of the major sources of European emigration.

Throughout the first hundred years of Canadian Confederation, an underlying problem in the struggle to “unite and integrate the separate regions” in a viable national economy has been the continuing interaction between disparate rates of regional economic growth and unequal levels of regional public services. This paper is an attempt to set out in a general way the extent and significance of differences in regional expenditures by government in Canada and to inquire into their possible relationships with variations in rates of growth and levels of regional per capita incomes. It also indicates a spatial distribution of public expenditures at all three levels of government and notes some implications for national and regional development policy currently in the forefront of public debate in Canada.