We study the effects of domestic conflict and external shocks on Spanish trade policy in the interwar period. Our account mobilizes a new granular dataset on exports and imports, and good-country level information on tariffs, trade agreements, and quotas. Into the Depression, the mainstay of policy was the tariff. The establishment of the Second Republic in 1931 was a turning point in policymaking. The new regime initiated bilateral trade negotiations. The Republic’s dilemma was to find countries willing to exchange market access. In a daunting international environment, the Spanish case offers a poignant reminder of the perils of going against the grain.

Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency.

The effect of the commercialization of traditional agriculture on the levels of living of peasant households is examined through a case study of El Palmar, Colombia. While there appear to have been widespread, positive, short-mn effects, the long-run consequences appear to be more problematic. It is suggested that commercialization and its consequences are more complex than can be grasped from available aggregate data, and a historical, case-study approach to this topic is recommended to complement macroeconomic studies.

This study examines Great Britain's adaptation in the 1920s and 1930s to the decline in the market for its nineteenth-century exports: cotton textiles, ships, iron and steel products, and coal. Continued growth in a mature economy depends at certain points upon structural change, in this case a movement from declining to expanding industries. At such times, I contend, the developing sector tends to grow independently, rather than through transformation of existing productive structures. Growth does not occur primarily through a reallocation of capital and labor from declining to expanding industries and regions.

In 1928 Hans Proesler, whom we shall meet in the course of this study, assumed the presidency, that is, became the Rector, of what can 1928 Hans Proesler, whom we shall meet in the course of thisbe described as the Niirnberg school of economics (Hochschule für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften). The address he delivered on that occasion can properly serve as the starting point for my own presentation, for it dealt with German economic history, its development and problems. In his talk Proesler pointed out that it was the eighteenth-century enlightenment that opened the road to economic history by assigning to studies pointing in this direction a niche in the lecture hall of general cultural history. In Germany such men as Justus Möser, Gottfried Herder, and some members of the then-famous Göttingen school of historians, Schlözer, Gatterer, Heeren, von Anton, and Fischer, are considered by the historian of economic and social history as having stood at the cradle. Although German Romanticism had done much for historiography in general, its role for economic history was very limited. Romanticist historians were not primarily interested in things economic, although in the frame of legal and constitutional history on the one hand, and in connection with classical studies on the other, scholars of that period and the decades following made contributions to this field of knowledge. I might mention Savigny, Eich-horn, Waitz, Böckh, Otfried Müller, Mommsen; and a few minor figures, such as Hüllmann and Hannssen, even devoted themselves to special problems in the area, that is, financial and agrarian history, respectively. Georg von Below, the renowned German historian, treating Proesler's topic a few years before the latter, emphasized the contribution of the Prussian archivist, Georg Wilhelm von Raumer (1806-1856). Not only did the latter take an interest in matters economic but his ideas even tended toward what we would today call a materialistic interpretation of history.

Contemporary reaction to the Homestead Act was complex in the United States, and the judgment of posterity has included much negative criticism. Whatever the real merits and defects of the Act, its impact on public opinion in Europe was not necessarily in keeping with the facts as they unfolded in America. European reactions to the famous Act are much less known than is the case with American public and expert opinion on the same subject. Standard literature on emigration and on the American image in Europe invariably stresses political freedom and economic opportunity as main motives for emigration. The Homestead Act is in most cases mentioned only in passing, as one among several factors in the motivation of prospective emigrants. In some cases it is claimed to have been a major motive but without evidence to bear out how important it was.

Economic development and deliberate policy to accelerate its pace are relatively recent concepts, but the facts of development and economic policies to bring it about are, of course, ancient. Mercantilist, Colbertian, cameralism Smithian policies, all had in mind what now is called development; and much of the discussion of the stages of growth with which German economists during the nineteenth century were so preoccupied is obviously a preoccupation with growth at a time at which pure theory concentrated on the allocation of resources and on slowly developing an intellectual apparatus of which one could cease to be ashamed.

Some time ago I picked up a magazine that contained an article by Red Smith, a man whose work I try not to miss. The article was about the job of sports writer for a metropolitan newspaper and it opened with an account of an overnight journey from New York to a World's Series game in St. Louis. This was an eon or so ago, when Smith was a young man and I was a boy, and people travelled in sensible conveyances, such as railroad trains. The trip was a merry one, the activities including, among other things, much pleasurable and instructive chat. Smith didn't report the latter in any detail. But the point was that it was pleasurable and instructive and it lasted the whole night. Smith went on to say that sports writers are not paid much, in money, but that if you threw in the psychic income of pleasant afternoons in the sun and nights spent in the company of affable and intelligent eccentrics, they did pretty well.

Historical demography is indeed what Father Mols calls it, a “science des confines” (Vol. I, Introduction, p. xvi), a discipline which is doomed to cultivate the boulder-strewn and not easily accessible borderlands between half a dozen fields of learning. In a territory such as this the first clearings are of necessity a matter of small-scale enterprise; that is to say, local research predominates. But this has been proceeding on a broad front; the difficulties encountered have not been great enough to discourage the pioneers. Indeed, the amount of labor expended on local or regional investigations into problems of historical demography beggars description: antiquaries and genealogists, statisticians and students of medical history, sociologists and economic historians have combed thousands of records and accumulated mountains of quantitative as well as symptomatic evidence regarding past populations.

The origins of this exchange stem from an important paper by N. F. R. Crafts, Steven Leybourne, and Terence Mills, which argues that underlying trends in British industrial output for the period 1700 to 1913 are stochastic rather than linearly deterministic. Using parsimonious methods, we propose an alternative view that the output series have alternating stochastic properties. Specifically we distinguish the period 1780 to 1851 as an Industrial Revolution epoch during which shocks had long-term effects. Out model simplifies to help understand the complexities of the Industrial Revolution, and we agree with Clive Granger and Zhuanxin Ding, that “While it is correct to search over a specific set of parsimonious models … the model so achieved is, at best, an approximation to the truth”.

This study of mortgage borrowing in the American West covers mortgage activity in Champaign County, Illinois, from 1836 through 1895, but emphasizes the years 1854 through 1895. This time span covers the county from the time it was a part of the American frontier until it became a developed geographic unit within the national economy. Primary concern is with the level and trend of interest rates and with sources and uses of mortgage funds.