“The lessons of history” were widely invoked in 2008/09 as analysts and policymakers sought to make sense of the global financial crisis. Specifically, analogies with the early stages of the Great Depression of the 1930s were widely drawn. Building on work in cognitive science and literature on foreign policy making, this article seeks to account for the influence of this particular historical analogy and asks how it shaped both perceptions and the economic policy response. It asks how historical scholarship might be better organized to inform the process of economic policymaking. It concludes with some reflections on how research in economic history will be reshaped by the crisis.

The papyri of Roman Egypt provide some of the most important quantifiable data from a first-millennium economy. This paper builds a new dataset of wheat prices, land prices, rents, and wages over the entire period of Roman control in Egypt. Movements in both nominal and real prices over these centuries suggest periods of intensive and extensive economic growth as well as contraction. Across a timeframe that covers several severe mortality shocks, demographic changes appear to be an important, but by no means the only, force behind changes in factor prices.

The introduction of mass production transformed many skilled tasks into repetitive and monotonous jobs. In industries such as automobiles, the workforce remained predominantly male despite contemporary assessments that women could efficiently do many of these jobs. This article explores why. It is argued that employers such as Ford concluded that the conversion of labor time into effort would be more difficult in a mixed-gender workforce. The paper shows how Ford developed a fraternalist labor strategy, a men's club, whose objective was to accommodate men to monotony and maximize labor productivity.

Infant mortality data gathered from the registers of nine parishes in the industrial North of England are used as a concrete indicator of living standards for the early nineteenth century. Rising infant mortality in the sample parishes provides evidence that the standard of living was not improving substantially in these towns up to midcentury. This conclusion remains after considering the effect on mortality of population growth, climate, and feeding practices.

From the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, Genoese bankers collected money from a variety of sources and lent it to the king of Spain. It was all made possible by the Bisenzone exchange fairs, which created an efficient financial network under Genoese control and permitted arbitrage among northern Italian financial markets. At Bisenzone, Genoese bankers raised money for these loans from a variety of sources, which reduced the risks of lending and funded the king's long-term obligations via short term loans. Bisenzone was in many ways an offshore capital market which operated on an international scale, or, in the language of the sixteenth century, a fair without a place—una fiera senza luogo.

From the earliest time, the United States and her predecessor colonies stood close to or at the very forefront of the world in the educational attainment of the mass of the populace. The first available literacy statistics of 1840 testify to that past impressive accomplishment: overall, more than 90 per cent of white adults achieved this degree of minimum competence, and even in the laggard South the record was not significantly poorer. At that date only Scotland and Germany are comparable, with England and France much farther behind. What therefore seems to be the case is that popular education successfully preceded an extensive system of publicly supported and controlled schools.

What were the economic costs of the disamenities that the British worker incurred when migrating to the city in the last century? How important were these costs in accounting for the higher nominal wages for unskilled work in the cities? How much of the rise in wages during the Industrial Revolution might therefore be spurious mismeasurement? This paper supplies some answers. Like the results on mid-twentieth-century growth by contemporary economists, the nineteenth-century estimates also suggest the disamenities' effects to be trivial.

It is nearly a quarter century since H. L. Beales produced his notable article on “The Great Depression.” Since then a great deal of work has been done on that period, especially by economists and statisticians, so that it is now possible to make a fuller assessment of the changes in Britain's economic position during those years. Most of this work has been in the form of specialized articles and books covering longer periods, on such subjects as national income, investment, or terms of trade, and there appears to be a need for some attempt at synthesis, especially as the various interpretations put forward are not always in agreement and are sometimes contradictory. It would be impossible, of course, in a mere article, to settle all the theoretical problems suggested by the facts or to resolve all the divergencies of opinion, but it is worth while to draw the evidence and opinions together in an effort to get a general picture.

In the three months after his inauguration—the now famous 100 days—Franklin Roosevelt proposed a veritable barrage of programs that were passed by Congress—programs which were to have a profound effect on the American economy. From this beginning sprang forth the economic policy of the 1930's which was aimed at returning the nation to prosperity and changing its social and economic structure. The programs were directed toward specific as well as general problems and affected differently the various geographic areas of the nation.

According to W. W. Rostow, “the introduction of the railroad has been historically the most powerful single initiator of take-offs,” having “three major kinds of impact on economic growth during the take-off period,” namely, lowering transport costs and bringing new areas and products into the market; developing a major new export sector; and leading on to the development of modern coal, iron, and engineering industries. But though all these three can be traced in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the railways are not accorded the role of initiator in that country since, in the Rostow schema, the take-off had already occurred before the invention of the locomotive. The size of the investment in Britain's railways is such, however, that it is worth examining their impact, even if this was not so overwhelming as in some other countries.

This paper employs the techniques of legal history to explore the relationship between the rise of big business and the size of the American market. It emphasizes law as a determinant of market size, and it analyzes judicial construction of the Constitution's commerce clause over time to delineate the role of integrated corporations in generating legal change. Specifically, the paper suggests that if the American market is defined as a free-trade unit, enlargement of the market was a result of, rather than a prerequisite for, the post-Civil War revolution in business organization.

Conventional wisdom holds that output per capita in colonial British America increased between 0.3 and 0.6 percent per year. Our conjectural estimates challenge this view, suggesting instead that such growth was unlikely. We show that the most likely rate of economic growth was much lower, probably close to zero. We argue further that to understand the performance of the colonial economy it is necessary to include the economic activity of Native American Indians. When this is done, we estimate that the economy may have grown at the rate suggested by previous researchers.

This paper attempts to make a contribution, both in method and in substance, to the debate about the timing and extent of market orientation in pre-industrial New England agriculture. The method consists in testing five quantifiable hypotheses, with data from manuscript account books and daybooks. The results, in repeated trials, confirm the influence of the market on the rural economy of Massachusetts from very early on.

Related lending, a widespread practice in LDCs, is widely held to encourage bankers to loot their banks at the expense of minority shareholders and depositors. We argue that neither looting nor credit misallocation are necessary outcomes of related lending. On the contrary, related lending often exists as a response to high information and contract-enforcement costs. Whether it encourages looting depends on other institutions, particularly those that create incentives to monitor directors. We examine Mexico's banking system, 1888–1913, in which there was widespread related lending. We find little evidence of credit misallocation, despite a financial crisis and government-organized rescue.

The lack of success of the 1807–1809 Embargo by the United States has generally been attributed, first, to a lack of effective enforcement, and, second, to an inability to inflict greater economic damage on Great Britain than was suffered by the United States. This paper challenges both explanations. It is argued, first, that the Embargo did effectively reduce both countries to autarky. It is argued, second, that in autarky the relative price in Britain of agricultural products that had previously been imported rose by more than the relative price in the United States of manufactured goods that had previously been imported.

Tontines were used more extensively by France than Britain. Comparative tontine history illuminates the differing evolution of public finance in the two countries and its political consequences. Archival materials establish the number of participants in French tontines. Internal rates of return on tontines and alternatives show subsidy of tontines by the French government. Repudiation in 1770 contributed to the political attitudes of life annuitants, the most important class of state creditors, during the fiscal crisis of the late 1780s.

Throughout the Great Depression, the unemployment rates of blacks exceeded those of whites in urban areas of both North and South. Among men, this difference was largely due to racial differences in occupational status, whereas among women, unemployment rates were dramatically higher for blacks even within specific occupations. The occupational pattern of the unemployment gap suggests that labor market discrimination played a role, especially in unskilled service jobs.

This study provides, for the first time, an overview of the growth record of the Middle East since 1820 and inserts it into a comparative framework. GDP per capita estimates are offered for individual countries in the region for the benchmark years of 1913, 1870, and 1820. The Middle East began to participate in modern economic growth during the nineteenth century. Yet, per capita income differences with the high-income regions of the world widened considerably until World War I. In the twentieth century, the most important single factor contributing to increases in per capita incomes was oil.

This is a subject about which we know little and where, in all likelihood, our knowledge will not grow greatly.Charles IssawiIssawi, Economic History of the Middle East, p. 103.

In spite of the importance accorded the steam engine during nineteenth-century industrialization, little is known about its rate of diffusion and the determinants thereof in the United States. The primary purpose of this paper is to enhance our knowledge about the spread of this technology. New evidence on steam power use in 1820, 1850, and 1860, combined with published census data from 1870, permits quantitative estimates of the regional variations in timing, pace, and extent of usage before 1900. Second, we advance reasonable conjectures for the regional differences that appear. Although lack of evidence precludes a definitive delineation of causality, with simulation techniques we are able to use the limited evidence available on costs to reconcile, albeit imperfectly, the historical pattern with economic-theoretic predictions regarding the process of innovation.

This article analyzes a large quantity of new data documenting the actual characteristics and behavior of early reaper adopters. It shows that a surprisingly large number of small-scale farmers were among the early purchasers and that institutional evolution—the emergence of local markets and cooperative exchanges for reaper services—encouraged rapid diffusion. These findings call into question the standard interpretation of northern farms as self-contained production units and, more specifically, challenge the usefulness of both the farm-specific-threshold model and the family-labor-constraint model.