The pendulum of scholarship has swung too far towards the position that the profits from slaving were small. Thomas and Bean in concept and Anstey and Richardson in practice have reckoned them too small. The detailed accounts of several dozen ventures in the late eighteenth century show that the trade was difficult to enter, dominated by a few large merchants, and subject to long runs of high “short-run” profits, as in 1779–1788: The best firms earned upwards of 50 percent on their investments, well above the normal profits of an easy trade.

We estimate the effect of age at arrival for immigrant outcomes with a new dataset of arrivals linked to the 1940 U.S. Census. Using within-family variation, we find that arriving at an older age, or having more childhood exposure to the European environment, led to a more negative wage gap relative to the native born. Infant arrivals had a positive wage gap relative to natives, in contrast to a negative gap for teenage arrivals. Therefore, a key determinant of immigrant outcomes during the Age of Mass Migration was the country of residence during critical periods of childhood development.

In his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a letter written by Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch. Febvre and Bloch were the first editors of the journal Annales, and Febvre's exhortation on this occasion to break down the barriers among the social sciences was only one among many. Gallman's “Notes on the New Social History” would have pleased both French scholars, especially the allusion to verve and “trumpet call.” Today we are concerned with the role of economics in the galaxy of disciplines the Annales claim to unify in their “grand alliance.”

The Great Kanto Earthquake occurred on 1 September 1923 and inflicted serious damage on Yokohama City. About 90 percent of the factories in Yokohama City were burnt down or completely destroyed. However, these manufacturing industries appear to have swiftly recovered in the aftermath of the damage. This article investigates the role of creative destruction due to the Great Kanto Earthquake. Using firm-level data on capital (horsepower of motors) before and after the earthquake, we find substantial creative destruction, that is, upgrade of machine technology and/or survival of efficient firms. We find further collaborating evidence of this at the prefecture level.

The depression of the nineties, including the Panic of 1893, has been a subject of great interest for economic historians, as well as for analysts of the business cycle. Coming at the climax of the bitter struggle over the gold standard, this crisis has usually been explained in polemical or oversimplified terms. Despite its significance, there is no published work dealing exclusively with the depression other than W. J. Lauck's The Causes of the Panic of 1893, which treats only the early phases of the crisis. Most explanations of the depression continue to reflect strongly those advanced as plausible during die period itself, with a few qualifications added as the result of the availability of some quantitative data and furdier reflection. Recent construction of additional quantitative series makes possible a more systematic analysis of the economic factors which interacted to precipitate a depression of major proportions.

During the second half of the nineteenth century important technological changes in shipping and shipbuilding resulted in the practical disappearance of an important shipbuilding industry in North America and the concentration of most of the world's shipbuilding in Britain. This shift of shipbuilding activity was quite clearly the result of the adoption of metal in place of wood as the structural material in shipbuilding. The adoption of metal was a slow process and the old and new techniques coexisted for decades. By the mid-1850's, British shipbuilders had developed the building of iron ships to a routine process and further improved their techniques in the following decades, but wooden shipbuilding in North America remained an important industry until the mid-1880's.

In the literature on India's economic history, there has been a long debate on the influence of railroad development on the welfare of Indian farmers. Some economists and historians have argued that rail development increased welfare by providing new markets for agricultural products and permitting rising rural incomes. Others have argued that railroads had detrimental effects on welfare because, by encouraging cultivation of non-food crops (like cotton) and export crops (like wheat), they reduced the domestic food supply. Those who have stressed the adverse effects of railroads have seen these effects as a consequence of imperialist economic relations between Britain and India. In this view, the combination of British land revenue policy and rail construction transformed the rural economy. The need to pay the land revenue in cash forced fanners to grow some crop for sale; the railroads permitted non-local (or even non-Indian) demand to influence the prices at which different crops could be sold.

The period 1880–1910 saw great improvement in the health of city dwellers. Life expectancy at birth for males in Boston rose from 37 in 1880 to 46 in 1910; in New York City it rose from 29 in 1880 to 45 in 1910. The improvement in the state of health came largely from a decline in the incidence of infectious disease. Recent studies have suggested that most of this decline is fairly attributable to improvements in the standard of living—especially as reflected in diets and housing—and, for cities, to new public health measures—especially the installation of sanitary sewers and the provision of central supplies of pure drinking water. Government installation of public health projects in the United States was a part of the “sanitation movement,” which began some time around 1880. During the thirty-year period 1880–1910 there was a rapid increase in the fraction of the urban population served by sanitary sewers and improved water systems. For example, in 1875 fewer than 30,000 urban citizens were supplied with filtered water. By 1910 the figure had risen to over 10,000,000. That the improved health resulting from these public health measures must have been regarded by its recipients as an increase in their well being is clear. What is not clear is whether the recipients of improved health would have been even better off if the resources used in constructing and maintaining public health projects had been put to alternative uses unrelated to health. In this article I shall estimate the social rates of return on the cumulated investments in public health projects as could have been perceived by their builders and show that it may have exceeded the market rate of return on capital by several times.

This article studies slave and other long-distance trades in eighteenth-century France. The data cover 238 ventures from seven French harbors between 1710 and 1780. Using the undiscounted benefit-cost ratio as a proxy for the internal rate of return, the article shows that these investments were more liquid, shorter, and more profitable than private notarized credit, without higher risk. They were safer and had a shorter duration than government bonds, without being less liquid or less profitable. The conclusion, that investment in these trades was preferable to domestic alternatives, may be explained by barriers to entry.

This study suggests that the militaristic orientation of the Meiji government and the wars fought against China and Russia contributed significantly to technological development in Meiji Japan (1868–1911). The roles played by the arsenals and the government-owned shipyards and factories in adopting and disseminating foreign technology are described to demonstrate their importance in the rapid Meiji industrialization. The article suggests that it is necessary to reexamine the view, primarily based on macro-economic analysis, that Meiji militarism was basically detrimental to economic growth in Japan.

This article analyzes the stability of bimetallism for countries operating in integrated bullion markets that enact different legal ratios. I articulate a new theoretical framework to demonstrate that two countries can both be bimetallic only if they coordinate their legal ratios. The theoretical framework is applied to the mid-eighteenth century when London's legal ratio was 3.8 percent higher than that of Amsterdam. I find that Amsterdam was effectively on the bimetallic standard, whereas London was on a de facto gold standard.

I study the impacts of one of the largest regional development projects in American History, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), on a variety of economic outcomes. The TVA has been noted as an example of how to develop a region's water power potential to stimulate growth. In what follows, I show using a county-level panel dataset, that the TVA had little impact on economic growth in the South. I attribute these results to the institutional history of the TVA and the contractual agreements it signed in an effort to expand its service territory.

“…as a pebble dropped in a pond causes ripples to flow outward to the surrounding shores, the influence of TVA'slow rates flows outward to surrounding areas…”

TVA's Influence on Electric Rates 1965

The thesis that free banking laws lowered barriers to entry in the U.S. banking industry is tested by examining entry of firms and output of banking services before and after the institution of free banking. The output of banking services and the number of banks remained the same or declined after the institution of free banking, in all states with viable free banking laws except New York. In light of this evidence, the belief that free banking in the antebellum United States increased competition and efficiency of the banking industry by lowering barriers to entry must be reconsidered.

The question at issue is whether estimates of GNP and unemployment before 1930 exaggerate cyclical volatility enough to produce a false impression of increasing economic stability over the twentieth century. Based on research to be reported in detail at a later date, the answer is no. The range of possible exaggerations is small relative to the observed change.

The first systematic estimates of mortality on immigrant ships are presented in the paper. From passenger lists of immigrant arrivals, a sample of 1077 ships that arrived at New York between 1836 and 1853 was obtained and analyzed. Immigrants died at a rate of about 10 per thousand boarded per month with a significantly higher rate for 1849. Mortality was found to vary by sex, port of origin, and season of arrival. No significant variation was found between mortality and the following variables: crowding, nationality of the immigrant, and year of arrival.

Economic history, as a subject of separate study, is now nearly a hundred years old. No other idea which has emerged from it has gained a tithe of the attention that scholars, teachers, and the general public have focused on the “industrial revolution.” Yet there is scarcely a conception in economic history more misleading than one which relates all the important problems of our modern civilization to economic changes that are represented as taking place in England between 1760 and 1832. There is scarcely a conception that rests on less secure foundations than one which finds the key to an understanding of the modern industrialized world in these seventy-two years of English economic history.

In the eighteenth century, European embassies in the Ottoman Empire started selling exemption licenses called berats, which granted non-Muslim Ottomans tax exemptions and the option to use European law. I construct a novel price panel for British and French licenses based on primary sources. The evidence reveals that prices were significantly high and varied across countries. Agents acquired multiple berats to enhance their legal options, which they exploited through strategic court switching. By the early 1800s, berat holders had driven other groups from European-Ottoman trade.

Industrial investment in colonial India was segregated by the export industries, such as tea and jute that relied on British firms and the import substituting cotton textile industry that was dominated by Indian firms. Empirical evidence in this article does not suggest that barriers to entry faced by Indian entrepreneurs created this separation. Informational asymmetry played an important role. British entrepreneurs knew the export markets and the Indian entrepreneurs were familiar with local markets. Conditional on the initial advantage in entry, social network effects determined subsequent entry of firms by ethnicity and created separate spheres of industrial investment.

In the post–Second World War period the floor fell out of the market for films in the United States. However, while the average revenue of films fell, the “hit” end of the market sustained itself. The growing inequality in the distribution of revenues meant that the risks associated with high-budget productions could no longer be balanced against the steady earnings of medium-budget films. During the 1950s the “majors” all became distributor–financiers as they reduced their exposure to the risks associated with film production. In doing this they retained their dominant position in the industry.

Microeconomic evidence reveals that the incidence and duration of unemployment in the 1930s varied significantly within the labor force. Long-term unemployment, which was especially high by historical standards, may have been exacerbated by federal relief policies.