Agricultural improvement, as analysts of economic growth often stress, plays an important role in a developing economy. Recent quantitative research has expanded our knowledge of developments in American agriculture during the period when the economy was becoming industrialized. The purpose of this article is to compute new estimates of average milk yields (output per milk animal) in American dairy agriculture and to analyze the sources of changes in these yields between 1850 and 1910.

If we were to reconstruct a blueprint of the Russian government's goals and priorities for industrial development in the late nineteenth century, it would include the following: (1) development of a network of internal transportation, (2) stabilization of the ruble in foreign exchanges through convertibility and the buildingup of an export surplus as a prerequisite for enabling the Russian government to borrow abroad, and (3) stimulation of the development of new industries in Russia and their protection in their “infancy.” Given the relative success of Russia's industrialization during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and the important role that the government played in this effort, there is no justification for outright rejection or condemnation of Russian government economic policies. There were, however, serious shortcomings in particular government policies, and the presumed effects that they had upon the industrialization process were not always desirable. This essay is a modest attempt to reexamine Russian government policies on the assumption that the industrialization of Russia was a continuing goal of the state policies beginning with the 1880's and one of relatively high priority. The implication of the analysis is that if some of the defects of the state's policies had been avoided, the process of industrialization in Russia would have proceeded at least at as fast a pace and the economic costs to Russian society would probably have been smaller.

Technological changes in the U.S. pulp and paper industry between 1915 and 1940 are chronicled, and three patterns—evolutionary bias, output-increasing innovation in response to technological disequilibria, and differences in the timing of innovations between the 1920s and 1930s—are identified and explained by means of a theoretical framework for induced innovation. The framework conceptualizes technological change as a means for growth-seeking firms to overcome barriers to accumulation and provides a general explanation of induced innovation that is situated in historical time.

This article uses anthropometric and archival data to reassess the standard of living in the Soviet Union. In the prewar period, the population was small in stature and sensitive to the political and economic upheavals experienced in the country. Significant improvements in child height, adult stature, and infant mortality were recorded from approximately 1945 to 1970. While this period of physical growth was followed by stagnation in heights, the physical growth record of the Soviet population compares favorably with that of other European countries at a similar level of development in this period.

This article describes a newly constructed data set of all U.S. state banks from 1782 to 1861. It contains the names and locations of all banks and branches that went into business and an estimate of when each operated. The compilation is based on reported balance sheets, listings in banknote reporters, and secondary sources. Based on these data, the article presents a count of the number of banks and branches in business by state. I argue that my series are superior to previously existing ones for reasons of consistency, accuracy, and timing. The article contains examples to support this argument.

An analysis of all appellate cases involving slave-sales reveals that southern courts helped minimize the costs of trading in slaves. Slave-sales law also surpassed other contemporaneous commercial law in sophistication. Why? Greater information gaps between slave buyers and sellers called for more complex institutional support. The enormous property value embodied by slaves also led to more litigation, greater need for settled law, and a more even match of power between plaintiff and defendant. Additionally, legal rules surrounding slave sales substituted for the employment law governing free-labor markets.

This article surveys the co-evolution of monetary policy and financial stability for a number of countries from 1880 to the present. Historical evidence on the incidence, costs, and determinants of financial crises (the most extreme form of financial instability), combined with narratives on some famous financial crises, suggests that financial crises have many causes, including credit-driven asset price booms, which have become more prevalent in recent decades, but in general financial crises are very heterogeneous and hard to categorize. Moreover, evidence shows that the association across the country sample between credit booms, asset price booms, and serious financial crises is quite weak.

Analysis of census data reveals that the size of the average factory in the United States grew more rapidly during the 1870s and 1880s than during any subsequent decade through the 1920s. While the average factory doubled in size between 1869 and 1889, it increased by only about a quarter between 1899 and 1929. These results support the view that the reaping of economies of scale was not an important motive for the great merger wave.

Was eighteenth-century London's financial market linked to domestic real capital markets? When did English capital markets cease to be regionally segmented? We compare London interest rates with annual registered property transactions in Middlesex and in West Yorkshire. This evidence, though tentative, suggests that London financial markets were weakly linked to local real capital markets in the mid-eighteenth century. By the late eighteenth century those links were strong. Regional markets were still segmented in the mid-eighteenth century but were integrated by the time of the Napoleonic War.

When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servants were positively selected to American mainland colonies in terms of their unobservable human capital and negatively selected to the West Indies. Thus, the relative quality of migrants' human capital may have played a role in the subsequent relative economic performance of these regions.

Between 1890 and 1938 Japan experienced rapid economic growth. India stagnated. This national divergence was reflected in the performance of both countries' leading modern industiy, cotton textiles. The parallels between national and industry performance suggest the problems of the Indian textile industry may have been those of India as a whole. Weak management is widely blamed for poor performance in textiles. An analysis of managerial decisions in Bombay shows, however, that on all measurable dimensions Indian managers performed as well as they could. The problem instead was one factor they could not change—the effort levels of Indian workers.

Monetary innovation, the development of new forms of money, has not received much systematic study from economic historians. This essay presents a framework for analyzing the determinants of monetary innovation and illustrates the argument by means of a sketch of monetary innovation in America from colonial times to the present.

In 1842 Lowell textile firms increased weaving productivity by assigning three looms per worker instead of two. This marked a turning point. Before, weavers at Lowell were temporary and mostly literate Yankee farm girls; afterwards, firms increasingly hired local residents, including illiterate and Irish workers. An important factor was on-the-job learning. Literate workers learned new technology faster, but local workers stayed longer. These changes were unprofitable before 1842, and the advantages of literacy declined over time. Firm policy and social institutions slowly changed to permit deeper human-capital investment and more productive implementation of technology.

Indians depleted the beaver, yet we do not understand why. We analyzed the pattern and determinants of beaver exploitation in the hinterlands of three Hudson's Bay Company posts. Simulating beaver population, we found declining beaver stock within each hinterland, but overharvesting in only two. Central to this process was the Company reaction to French competition. Managers raised prices in the Albany and York hinterlands, and in response the Indians increased their harvests. Churchill, which did not experience French competition, had more stable fur prices and showed no evidence of overexploitation of the beaver.

Alone woodsman erecting a log cabin, wagon trains curling across the prairies, fur trappers high in the mountains, Indian war parties, gold strikes, frontier marshalls and gunmen—of such stuff the legends of the American West have been formed and in the popular imagination they are the Westward Movement. Of course, serious historians have long recognized that this is merely a fascinating but veneer-like overlay which disguises a massive movement of people from East to West.

Early twentieth-century social reformers claimed that public insurance was necessary because employers ignored the financial needs of their unemployed, injured, or ill workers. Reformers dismissed the idea that competition in the labor market would boost the wages of workers who faced greater chances of job-related financial distress. This article reports a test of the compensating-wage-difference hypothesis on wage samples of men, women, and children from 1884 to 1903. We found mixed support for the reformers' claims: unemployment risk tended to be fully compensated; accident risk was only partially compensated; and occupational illness went unremunerated.

Historical scholarship on the politics of nineteenth-century Chinese immigration emphasizes the interests of labor and management in the genesis of congressional legislation in 1882 that limited Chinese immigration into the United States. This article examines early state attempts at the exclusion of Chinese workers after the first major wave of Chinese immigration during the California Gold Rush. Opposition to exclusion occurred in California in the early 1850s because Chinese immigrants were important taxpayers when both the state and localities were experiencing major fiscal difficulties. State attempts to legislate exclusion were successful only after financial conditions improved in the late 1850s.

This article investigates the impact of official language policies on education using state formation in India. Colonial provinces consisted of some districts where the official language matched the district's language and some where it did not. Linguistically mismatched districts have 18.0 percent lower literacy rates and 20.1 percent lower college graduation rates, driven by difficulty in acquiring education due to a different medium of instruction in schools. Educational achievement caught up in mismatched districts after the 1956 reorganization of Indian states on linguistic lines, suggesting that political reorganization can mitigate the impact of mismatched language policies.

The impact of China's demand for silver on global trade in specie and monetary metals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains poorly understood. Conventional wisdom postulates that seventeenth-century China became so dependent on foreign silver to sustain domestic economic growth that a sharp fall in silver imports in the 1640s led to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. This hypothesis rests on dubious theoretical and empirical grounds. The demand for silver in China was determined by long-term changes in indigenous demand for money rather than short-term fluctuations in the flow of silver imports.