That the Black Death of 1348–1349 disrupted the economies of Europe during the later middle ages is not open to doubt. That the economic effects of the plague varied from sector to sector is perhaps equally indubitable. The diversity of its impact upon various economic sectors reveals itself both in contemporary evidence and in the fiery controversies generated by modern economic historians, each basing his argument on conflicting statistics or inferences drawn, often without careful regard, from disparate sectors. It is thus not accidental that even the most cursory review of the literature concerning the period after the plague will unearth a surprising lack of agreement among the specialists.

When the Chairman asked me to undertake this paper he reminded me that the general theme was the West as an underdeveloped area and suggested that some comparison be made with underdeveloped areas today. However, it should be made clear at the outset that the problems of the development of the American West in the nineteenth century are very different from the problems of achieving sustained growth in the underdeveloped areas today. The underdeveloped areas today are most typically characterized by a factor combination of abundant labor with scarce capital and land (and resources), usually complicated by a social and political structure not geared to economic advance. America in the nineteenth century, in contrast, was characterized by scarce labor and capital combined with seemingly endless land (and natural resources) set in a framework of social and political institutions that was highly favorable to economic growth.

We are concerned here with the evasion of price controls in the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II. The evidence suggests that controls produced less evasive activity in the United Kingdom. After considering several explanations we conclude that the key was the degree of regimentation. The British controlled all stages of production, limited the range of products available at each stage, and allocated relatively more resources to managing and enforcing controls.

This article creates a new database that covers all U.S. banks in the census years between 1870 and 1900 to test the interaction between inequality and financial development when the banking system was starting over from scratch. A fixed-effects panel regression shows that the number of banks per thousand people in the South has a strong positive relationship with the size of farm operations. This suggests that large southern farm operators welcomed new banks after the Civil War. When the analysis is extended into the 1900s, the relationship becomes more negative, as bankers may have tried to block entrants.

This article reappraises export performance on international markets before World War I by examinnig the case of cotton textiles. The German industry expanded its market share from the 1850s to 1914 despite remaining a high-cost industry relative to Great Britain. Evidence from contemporary accounts and analysis of trade data from 1913 suggests that German success arose in part from the importance of monopolistic competition in export markets for finished cloth. Germany’s relative wealth, geographic position, and perhaps the intensive marketing efforts of its industry may have enabled it to counter the cost advantage of its British rival.

Their heads are still gay with crimson kerchiefs, but those kerchiefs do not come from Manchester.

—E. E. Williams

Black families included in the 1918/19 BLS Consumer Purchases Survey used installment credit more frequently and merchant credit less frequently than White families. Economic and demographic characteristics explain the racial difference for installment but not for merchant credit. I argue greater demand for installment credit by Black families was satisfied because repossession of collateral upon buyer default overcame merchants' personal prejudice with regard to creditworthiness, but absence of tangible collateral impacted the availability of merchant credit. Low use of merchant credit can account for relatively high interwar saving rates for low-income Black families.

Population growth in eighteenth-century England was due mainly to a fall in mortality, which was particularly marked during the first half of the century. The fall affected all socioeconomic groups and does not appear to have occurred for primarily economic reasons. In addition to an explanation involving the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the major hypothesis considered in this article is that the significant improvement in domestic hygiene associated with the rebuilding of housing in brick and tile brought about a major reduction in mortality.

As a nation becomes economically developed, the pace of development usually tends to vary between sectors and between regions of the nation. Industrialization usually involves more rapid growth and technological change in some industries than others. Often regional specialization accompanies industrialization, and, in fact, can become an important determinant in the industrialization process. With differential growth among industries, and increasing regional specialization, the performance of the factor markets in mobilizing and reallocating capital and labor among industries and regions becomes extremely important.

Railways were integral to the development of the Indian economy before World War I. This article presents new estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) for railways from 1874 to 1912, which highlight the strong performance of this key industrial sector. Railway-industry TFP growth was substantial averaging 2.3 percent per year and generating a 2.7 percent social savings for the Indian economy. A combination of factors contributed to TFP growth including greater capacity utilization, technological change, and improvements in organization and governance. Railways had higher TFP growth than most sectors in India and compared favorably with TFP growth in other countries.

A decade has passed since I surveyed the first 50 years of the Journal of Economic History.Whaples, “Quantitative History.” This note picks up that story by documenting changes in the “supply” of economic history since 1990—the topics of the JOURNAL'S articles, who has had articles published in its pages, and how rankings of economic-history programs are reflected by recent publications. In addition, I use data on articles published in the JOURNAL to examine the “demand” for economic history—which articles have been cited the most often and what types of articles are most likely to be cited.

Housing was a major item of English consumer expenditure. Yet little is known of its average quality or rental cost. I estimate average rents, constant-quality rents, and housing quality from 1550 to 1909. Constant-quality rents rose substantially relative to other costs of living during the Industrial Revolution. This probably explains why, despite rising real wages, housing quality appears to have declined from 1760 to 1860. There were, however, substantial quality gains in the eighteenth century prior to the Industrial Revolution. The implications of these new series for measurement of growth during the Industrial Revolution are briefly explored.

This article describes the institutional transition from a centrally managed interregional payments system to an unmanaged, decentralized one after President Andrew Jackson's veto of the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, and evaluates the effect on the level and variability of exchange rates. Comparison of the reduction in specie points, driven by falling transportation and insurance costs, with the reduction in exchange rates in two Ohio cities over the period from 1830 to 1859 lends support to the article's conclusion that decentralization was one cause of higher and more volatile inland exchange rates.

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this article we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. Although the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire supports the transaction cost explanation, suggesting that risk matters less because insurance can be obtained in a variety of ways.

This paper uses a simple physiocratic model to examine forms of economic organization prevailing in Ghana before it was incorporated into the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. It is divided into three parts. The first analyzes the village subsistence economy and suggests that the egalitarian nature of the land-tenure system prevented the emergence of a land-owning class and the appropriation of an economic surplus. This led to an economic structure characterized by a low level of material production and a low degree of specialization and exchange. The second part analyzes forms of economic organization associated with long distance trade: that is, the very old northern trade with other parts of Africa, and the southern coastal trade with Europe which began in the fifteenth century. It argues that foreign trade not only expanded the consumption possibilities of the society, as predicted by the theory of international trade, but also introduced a new class structure and greater income inequality, since it allowed a small group to appropriate a surplus for its own use. The third part discusses the relevance of Pre-Colonial forms to twentieth century economic development.

The process of technical change from the economist's viewpoint may be broken down into three phases: invention, innovation, and diffusion. Invention, or the increase in technological possibilities, is the discovery or perception of new configurations of technical processes or principles that alter the array of possible production functions. An innovation consists of using any given production function for the “first” time. Diffusion is basically imitative and involves the gradual replacement of old methods by the new. One example will suffice to illustrate these distinctions. The invention of the automatic bottle machine consisted of the conception, experimentation, and model-building activities of Michael J. Owens; the pioneering efforts of the entrepreneurs at Toledo, Ohio, to demonstrate that the new production function was both practical and economically feasible constituted the innovational phase; and the gradual replacement of hand-blown and semiautomatic machine methods by the new process in both American and foreign markets involved diffusion.

The ranching economies of California, southern Brazil, and Argentina resorted to different mechanisms of labor control in order to meet the growing demand for their products. Each area used different combinations of slave and wage labor as well as sharecropping arrangements, and these varied over time. I argue that this diversity cannot be explained by differences in the regions' modes of production or relative factor endowments. An alternative interpretive framework that incorporates social conflicts, civil strife, and the interaction between ranchers and the state is needed to explain the differences in modes of labor control.

The enclosure of the open fields is an example of Europeans' willingness to alter long-standing social and economic institutions in the interest of higher living standards. In Scandinavia, England, and Germany the rise in the value of enclosed relative to unenclosed land induced widespread abandonment of open-field forms of agrarian organization by the middle of the nineteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the traditional patterns of landholding maintained themselves until after the First World War. This paper examines some of the ways French farmers responded to the possibilities of agricultural change within the traditional framework of open-field agriculture.

The traditional view of cotton mechanization, first advanced by rural sociologists in the 1920s, is that southern agrarian institutions impeded progress. Recently their view has been questioned. New studies attribute much of the southern lag to factors like small-scale production, cheap labor, the cotton crop, and environment. I contribute to the debate by emphasizing how the structure of the southern economy encouraged landlords to use annual labor contracts that hindered attempts to mechanize. I present evidence that supports the traditional view and suggest how the incentive structure of annual labor contracts delayed invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

The comparative method will accomplish great things. … The historical specialist asks for a method which is a technical instrument, generally used, easily manageable and capable of giving positive results. The comparative method is precisely such an instrument. … I believe that this method can and must penetrate monographic studies. Marc Bloch