In 1914 I was a student in college and according to our textbooks the nature and operation of the gold standard was a subject that presented few difficulties. Countries, we learned, were on the gold standard if they selected as a unit of account a certain weight of gold of a certain fineness and made their currencies convertible into gold at the rate fixed by this definition. If, in addition, such countries placed no restrictions on the export or import of gold they were on an international gold standard. When the major trading countries of the world simultaneously adopted arrangements of this kind, we had what was, in effect, a sort of international convention concerning the treatment of gold which we described as the international gold-standard system.

The daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France, are examined here. Based on the comments of pioneer manufacturers, historians have been led to believe that early industrial work was irregular and unpredictable. The Montgolfiers as well complained of undependable workers. Yet their own output registers reveal a pattern of regular productivity unaided by advanced machinery or steam power.

The pioneering work of Lance Davis on regional bank loan rates in the United States from 1870 to 1914 generated several attempts to explain the observed regional interest rate differentials and their subsequent narrowing by 1914. This article reports on a more direct test of the hypothesis that barriers to capital mobility were due to monopoly power on the part of local bankers. Tests using data on individual banks and local markets for one state, Wisconsin, suggest that local competitive conditions did not exert a significant influence on bank lending performance. This may be the result of relatively free entry into Wisconsin banking during the period.

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures “played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita” in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

Skilled engineers who had sufficient technical know-how to construct the antebellum canals and railroads were viewed by their contemporaries as a key input in the transportation revolution, and a number of modern scholars have concurred in this judgment. Yet very little is known about the economics of the antebellum engineering profession. This article is a modest attempt to help remedy that deficiency. We shall present and describe three original salary series that chart the course of earnings for three distinct grades of antebellum civil engineers from 1820 through 1859. In addition, we shall argue that our data clearly indicate that a highly competitive market of broad geographical scope for high-ranking engineers was coming into being during the decade of the 1820's. This trend toward competition which these data reveal persisted until about 1835, but was then swamped by the rapid economic changes which occurred in the fifteen years from 1835 to 1850, only to reappear again in the last antebellum decade. As we shall argue below, the economic changes that temporarily overrode the earlier pattern of competition reflect a significant structural change in the antebellum engineer market.

In a recent article in this Journal David Galenson presents an interesting hypothesis about the impact of changing relative prices on the cattle driving industry in the late nineteenth-century West. Briefly, he argues that movements of.cattle prices in the urban marketing centers relative to the local prices in the range areas affected the profitability of the industry and thus the quantity of cattle driven north from Texas. Unfortunately, in testing his hypothesis, Mr. Galenson has incorrectly interpreted the history of the southern Great Plains.

“Imperialism is no word for scholars.” I quote my own printed words of ten years ago. The bewildering changes of content and color of that chameleon word throughout the brief century of its existence are. now being explored by R. F. Koebner of the University of Jerusalem. Here indeed is a fit task for scholars—to take a key word such as imperialism or despotism, to trace the history of its usage and abusage, to fit it into its true context of ideology, propaganda, and political warfare throughout successive historical phases. What a scholar can NOT do with these emotionally reverberant words is to make them reliable instruments of scientific exploration and explanation.

In this article I develop a taxonomy of financial practices based on whether financial activity is intended to fund new capital investment or to create new financial structures to accommodate planned changes in the structure of an industry's existing capital stock. The taxonomy is then applied to the financial development of the U.S. sugar-refining industry between 1875 and 1905. The taxonomy provides an explanation of the rise of the large, widely held industrial corporation in the United States that is more consistent with the historical record than are the conventional “financial strain” or “asset liquidation” hypotheses.

This paper shows that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 broadened access to Parliament for families needing rights to sell land in so-called estate bills. Bills were on average 14–27 percentage points more likely to be for gentry families and not aristocratic families in legislative sessions after the Revolution compared to sessions before. Regression and archival evidence suggest that parliamentary certainty was primarily responsible for improved access by altering families’ entry calculus and brokers’ recruitment of new business. More broadly, the paper provides insight into the ways in which political institutions affect access to and the provision of property rights.