This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success.

The gold money of the Byzantine Empire “is accepted everywhere from end to end of the earth. It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it.” These boastful words of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a contemporary of Justinian die Great, are a typical expression of die pride of die Greek nation. Cosmas was a monk who tried to demonstrate from the Scriptures that the earth was flat, but in his youth he had been an adventurous merchant and traveler, and well he knew where the true primacy of his nation lay. While die armies of Justinian had not marched as far as those of Trajan, and his law was not enforced in all die countries which had obeyed Theodosius, the monetary empire of New Rome was even greater than that of Old Rome. The gold nomisma (or bezant, as die Westerners later called it) was as peerless as die sovereign whose effigy it bore. Procopius, another contemporary of Justinian die Great, stated: “It is not right for die Persian king or for any odier sovereign in die whole barbarian world to imprint his own likeness on a gold stater, and that, too, though he has gold in his own kingdom; for they are unable to tender such a coin to those widi whom they transact business.”

The American workers' quest for an eight-hour day finally came to an end around 1919. I argue that the most important factors behind the rapid decline in manufacturing hours in the decade before 1919 include the rapid expansion of the economy, which increased wages and drew new participants into the manufacturing sector; the reduction of immigration during the war; the growth in organized labor's strength; federal and state legislation that mandated reduced work weeks; and the electrification of the manufacturing sector.

This article examines the Crusade against outrelief to determine why poor law unions endorsed it. Although initiated by the central government, the Crusade could reduce union costs because very few of those denied outrelief would enter the workhouse. As the tax burden on wealthier and more influential ratepayers rose, guardians had more interest in cutting expenditure. An increase in effective rateable value permitted improvement of workhouse facilities and the restriction of outrelief, even to the deserving poor.

Why did policymakers adopt the gold standard? We first examine the political economy of Japan's adoption of the gold standard in 1897 by exploring the ex ante motives of policymakers as well as how the legislative decision to adopt gold won approval. We then show that joining the gold standard did not reduce Japanese interest rates or lead to a domestic investment boom. However, we find that membership in the gold standard increased Japan's exports by lowering transactions costs. Joining gold allowed Japan to tap into its growing share of global trade that was centered on the gold standard.

Structural transformation is a key indicator of economic development. We present the first time series of male labor sectoral shares for England and Wales before 1800, using a large sample of probate and apprenticeship data to produce national- and county-level estimates. England experienced a rapid decline in the share of workers in agriculture between the early seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, associated with rising agricultural and especially industrial productivity; Wales saw few changes. Our results show that England experienced unusually early structural change and highlight the mid-seventeenth century as a turning point.

This article examines the geographic integration of U.S. labor markets from 1870 to 1898, using previously unexploited wage and price data for 23 occupations in 12 major cities. In contrast to the increasing nationalization found in other markets at that time, the labor market was characterized by large and persistent real wage differentials both within and between regions, leaving little doubt that late nineteenth-century labor markets remained far from completely integrated. The differentials, however, owed as much to substantial variations in labor demand growth as to the lack of labor market integration.

We use a standard metric from international finance, the currency risk premium, to assess the credibility of fixed exchange rates during the classical gold standard era. Theory suggests that a completely credible and permanent commitment to join the gold standard would have zero currency risk or no expectation of devaluation. We find that, even five years after a typical emerging-market country joined the gold standard, the currency risk premium averaged at least 220 basis points. Fixed-effects, panel-regression estimates that control for a variety of borrower-specific factors also show large and positive currency risk premia. In contrast to core gold standard countries, such as France and Germany, the persistence of large premia, long after gold standard adoption, suggest that financial markets did not view the pegs in emerging markets as credible and expected that they devaluation.

I study the mobility and economic outcomes of European immigrants and their children in nineteenth-century Argentina, the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration. I use new data linking males across censuses and passenger lists of arrivals to Buenos Aires. First-generation immigrants experienced faster occupational upgrading than natives. Occupational mobility was substantial relative to Europe; immigrants holding unskilled occupations upon arrival experienced high rates of occupational upgrading. Second-generation immigrants outperformed the sons of natives in terms of literacy, occupational status and access to property, and experienced higher rates of intergenerational mobility out of unskilled occupations.

This article develops the first comprehensive set of estimates of daily hours of work in 1880 using new data from the Census of Manufactures. We conclude that the average workday was almost exactly 10 hours in 1880—almost a decade earlier than hitherto supposed. Our statistical analysis also reveals small but statistically significant variations in hours between firms and industries, between regions, and by location. We also find that higher-paid workers probably substituted leisure for income, that total employment was unresponsive to hours, and that hours and days of employment during the year moved together.

Economists and historians have raked over the economic experience of Europe like a family ransacking the town dump for a diamond ring inadvertently dropped into the trash. Now and then they run hurriedly over the whole field. Most of the time they are digging deep in one corner or rushing anxiously from one spot to another, picking up the objects they find there, examining them closely and then discarding them. The results are a junk collector's delight. But they do not necessarily include any diamonds.

Big data is an exciting prospect for the field of economic history, which has long depended on the acquisition, keying, and cleaning of scarce numerical information about the past. This article examines two areas in which economic historians are already using big data – population and environment – discussing ways in which increased frequency of observation, denser samples, and smaller geographic units allow us to analyze the past with greater precision and often to track individuals, places, and phenomena across time. We also explore promising new sources of big data: organically created economic data, high resolution images, and textual corpora.

The French economy has been criticized for a lack of integration of women in business and for the prevalence of inefficient family firms. A sample drawn from patent and exhibition records is used to examine the role of women in enterprise and invention in France. Middle-class women were extensively engaged in entrepreneurship and innovation, and the empirical analysis indicates that their commercial efforts were significantly enhanced by association with family firms. Such formerly invisible achievements suggest a more productive role for family-based enterprises, as a means of incorporating relatively disadvantaged groups into the market economy as managers and entrepreneurs.

New estimates of mean stature indicate declining heights in Northern Italy from 1730 to 1860, corroborating recent findings of a deterioration in per capita GDP and real wages—though possibly calling into question its severity. The level of heights in the 1830s is respectable in international comparison. Estimated geographic and occupational effects show the influence of the disease environment, malnutrition, and income. Declining living standards suggest a Malthusian interpretation of the economy, in which even a relatively flexible agricultural sector was not quite able to keep up with the growing pressure of population on resources.John Komlos arranged the collection of the data analyzed here and made them available to me. I am also indebted to him for ongoing discussions about anthropometrics and helpful comments on this article. I am grateful to Jörg Baten, Giovanni Federico, Paolo Malanima, Gianni Toniolo, and Vincent Tassenaar for reading and commenting on the article, and to three anonymous referees for their com-ments. An earlier version of the article was presented at the Seminar for Economic History, University of Munich.

The period 1861 to 1920 witnessed sharp price convergence in British Indian grain markets. Previous research attributed this to the construction of railways. But tests examining price differences between districts provide surprisingly weak support for that hypothesis. Railways mattered, but seem capable of explaining only about 20 percent of the decline in price dispersion. One explanation may be that India was a partially integrated economy at the time of railroad expansion. Lines connecting districts on preexisting trade routes had very small price effects. There is also some evidence of a “border effect” on lines between British India and princely states.

Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of trade. The establishment of a foreign diplomatic network that lowered beachhead costs and enabled the entry of new products was an essential fact of the trade boom. Interestingly, the expansion in trade in certain sectors did not translate into faster productivity growth. We offer some explanations.

We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was not sufficient for their success. The Danish legal system, which we compare to that of other countries, was also of crucial importance, along with the way in which rules were monitored and enforced. Of particular interest is the Danish cooperatives’ use of contracts, which we explore with evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources.