In preparing a review article of writings on colonial economic history since 1945, one would have little to say if he had to confine himself to studies mentioning economic history in their titles. Textbooks, whether old stand-bys recently revised1 or newly written, devote comparatively few of their pages to the period before 1790, and the colonial volume in the Rinehart Economic History series has not yet appeared.

In a recent article in this JOURNAL, Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White (hereafter R-W) conclude that, “while there is still room for skepticism [of the presence of a bubble in the boom and bust stock market of 1928/29], the traditional accounts of a bubble in the market cannot be so easily dismissed”.1 Their conclusion is not based on econometric evidence for a stock market bubble per Se. Instead, it is based solely on their interpretation of the widening spread between the interest rates on brokers’ loans (call and time loans collateralized by stocks and bonds) and other money market interest rates in 1928 and 1929.

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinson's narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,” to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

The Federal Tariff of 1901 marked the first of numerous interventions by the Australian government designed to stimulate the production of finished motor vehicles. It was unsuccessful, as was the “Tudor” Tariff of 1911, which imposed a specific duty on body imports; war conditions in 1917 led to an embargo on imports of motor vehicles. Thereafter, the government's need for revenue, which favored protectionist measures generally, in combination with a defense policy that deemed engine production to be of strategic importance, underpinned a series of government measures intended to promote local vehicle production. One effect of the “Green” Tariff in 1920, which afforded protection to manufacturing in general, was to attract American assemblers. By that time, the fierce and often clandestine clash of pressure groups representing special interests, within government, and within the motor industry (broadly defined to include local suppliers of components and equipment, from tires to electrical fittings), had become an important influence on policy. In several instances, the effects were both perverse and hilarious. A fragmented and inefficient industry operated within effective tariff protection, of which the principal beneficiaries were American multinationals. The “complete car project” of the 1930s was a failure, though it was revived under wartime conditions in the 1940s. With subsidies in mind, the government persuaded reluctant American and British producers to submit plans for full car manufacture, the first to do so being GM-H, the Australian subsidiary of General Motors (incorporating Holdens, the, long-established local body manufacturer).

The paper analyzes family-level wealth inequality and social mobility in Dudelange (Luxembourg) over five generations between 1766 and 1872, a period that saw the end of feudal social relations. While the integration of Luxembourg into the French revolutionary regime produced a reduction in the Gini coefficient for the ownership of land, the social mobility analysis reveals a relative stability of family positions within the land-wealth distribution throughout the period. This shows that family-level transmission mechanisms limit social mobility and strongly advantage those with ancestors owning property wealth, even when there are significant changes in the organization of property relations.