One seemingly certain characteristic of the social structure of Europe between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries was the persistence in power, wealth, and eminence of limited numbers of individuals or families. These made up the aristocracies, the nobilities of feudal origin, the ennobled officeholders of the new monarchies, and the patrician oligarchs of the towns. Political structures provided these families with privileged status and favored their preservation of wealth and influence, while a relatively slow rhythm of economic change and growth in general population tended to secure them against displacement by newcomers. In Italy, distant from the new centers of Atlantic trade, where tensions between absolutism and traditional liberties were fought out mainly within the ruling groups themselves, this stratification of society seemed almost a “new feudalism” in the seventeenth century as the powerful families of the petty courts consolidated their power.

Analysis of 80 skeletons from Cedar Grove, Arkansas, permits comparison of the skeletal data with historic accounts and interpretations of textual data. The high frequencies of skeletal lesions indicating dietary deficiencies and infectious disease demonstrates that this was a highly stressed population and that Cedar Grove participated in the historically documented nationwide decline of Afro-American health. The evidence is overwhelming that congenital syphilis was a major contributor to high infant mortality and population decline.

Alexander Gerschenkron's research on industrialization in Europe suggests that both the timing and character of growth may have conditioned the institutional structure of nineteenth-century industrializers. He argues that:

…the more backward a country's economy, the greater was the part played by specialized institutional factors designed to increase the supply of capital to nascent industries and, in addition, to provide them with less decentralized and better informed entrepreneurial guidance; the more backward the country, the more pronounced was the coerciveness and comprehensiveness of those factors.

The broblem with recent historical debates over the segmentation and intergration of labor markets iis that they typically fail to sort out disequlibrium demand shocks from equlibrating migrant-supply responses. This article does so, by exploring the determinants of wage gaps between farm and city for eight countries over the century following 1860.

The Mexican expropriation of 1938 was the first large-scale non-Communist expropriation of foreign-owned natural resource assets. The literature makes three assertions: the United States did not fully back the companies, Mexico did not fully compensate them for the value of their assets, and the oil workers benefitted from the expropriation. This article finds that none of those assertions hold. The companies devised political strategies that maneuvered a reluctant President Roosevelt into supporting their interests, and the Mexican government more than fully compensated them as a result. Neither wages for oil workers nor Mexican government oil revenue rose after the expropriation.

We use newly compiled evidence on inter- and intra-continental shipping costs to investigate the relationship between transportation and trade for trans-Atlantic iron markets from 1870–1913. Although we find a surprisingly weak connection linking ocean freight rates to British exports, after controlling for endogeneity and measuring all costs associated with inter-continental pig iron shipments and the intra-continental assembly of raw materials, the importance of transportation strongly asserts itself. The cost to transport pig iron across the Atlantic, and the cost to transport iron ore and coking coal within North America, were important determinants of the volume of British exports.

A large literature examines men's unemployment and their wives' labor-market participation. In response to her husband's unemployment, a woman may adjust her labor supplied to household production as well as to the market. This article tests for this effect and measures its impact using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost of Living survey of 1917–1919. Households altered both household-production decisions and the wife's labor supplied to the market in response to the husband's unemployment. But the household-production-response effect was smaller than the added-worker effect, in terms of women's labor hours and household consumption.

The West India sugar crisis of 1830–1832 dealt a shattering blow to an economy that was already in the grip of secular decline. Contributing to die decline were certain changes of a structural nature. In its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century, the British Caribbean economy was an important part of an international economy organized on the basis of imperial complementarity; it consisted of a base—the sugar colonies themselves—which was supported by three legs—the North American trade, the African trade and the British Isles trade. The base expanded geographically, largely as a consequence of military conquest, until fourteen Caribbean sugar colonies or groups of colonies were possessed by Great Britain in 1815. Moreover, the slave-plantation regime spread from colony to colony under a system of near-monoculture in the production of cane sugar.

NEXT to John Law's Banque Royale, the most important mercantilist monetary experiment attempted in western Europe during the pre-Adam Smith era took place in Sweden. The Bank of Sweden (Riksens Ständers Bank), which had been established as a national bank in 1688, was used by the Swedish government in the mid-eighteenth century as an engine for economic development. Sweden's experiment in paper money mercantilism gave rise to an active debate which may be called the “Swedish bullionist controversy” because of its similarity to the monetary debate in England at the outset of the nineteenth century. This controversy took place in a highly charged political environment. Political power in Sweden from 1739 to 1772 was centered in the Swedish Riksdag, a representative body composed of the Four Estates: burghers, nobles, clergy, and peasants. Within this organization, the mercantile class predominated by virtue of its control of the influential House of Burghers when the Riksdag was in session and its control of the Secret Committee, which directed government policy when the Riksdag was not in session. The two political parties—the Hats and the Caps—vied with one another for control of the government from 1739 to 1772, a span including most of the epoch known in Swedish history as the “Age of Freedom,” 1719–1772. Participants in the bullionist controversy typically fell into one or the other political camp, and the political element is strong in most of the economic literature of the period. The two political parties locked horns on the issue of the “correct” monetary policy. At stake in the struggle was not only the correctness of economic theories and policies but, ultimately, also the viability of the Swedish parliamentary form of government. It is the purpose of this article to review the policies of the Riksbank in the mid-eighteenth century and to examine the economic theories of the two contending political parties.

In seventeenth-century England the relatively open trades to America attracted ventures by hundreds of small merchants and shopkeepers. This ease of entry was checked after 1685 by very high customs duties on tobacco and intense regulation. Between 1685 and 1775 the number of firms in that trade was radically reduced and the size of the average firm increased ten to thirtyfold. Comparable if less extreme trends can be detected in the sugar, slave, and Levant trades. Insurance enabled large firms to use shipping more efficiently. The increased availability of credit also benefited larger and more secure firms.

Between the years 1940 and 1947 the demand for female labor in the United States shifted rapidly. Wages for women rose swiftly during the war, then fell suddenly when industries converted to peacetime production. This paper makes use of household production theory to explore the behavior of different segments of the female labor force as they responded to the radical changes in demand brought by World War II. The analysis suggests that a crucial turning point in the efforts to hire women was reached in the second half of 1943.

Economists played a crucial role in military intelligence during World War II. Economists working at the Office of Strategic Services estimated enemy battle casualties, analyzed the intentions and capabilities of both enemies and allies, and helped to prepare for negotiations regarding the postwar settlement. Economists working at the Enemy Objectives Unit helped to select enemy targets for bombing. Finally, economists working at the Statistical Research Group worked on a variety of problems brought to them by the U.S. military services. As a consequence of their usefulness during the war, the military continued to employ economists after the war.

An important unknown in understanding the impact of climate change is the scope of adaptation, which requires observations on historical time scales. We consider how weather across U.S. history (1860–2000) has affected various measures of productivity. Using cross-sectional and panel methods, we document significant responses of agricultural and individual productivity to weather. We find strong effects of hotter and wetter weather early in U.S. history, but these effects have generally been attenuated in recent decades. The results suggest that estimates from a given period may be of limited use in forecasting the longer-term impacts of climate change.

Improved techniques of production have been an important part of the history of agricultural change in all modern economies. The search for policies to bring about the rapid introduction of improved techniques of production in traditional or less developed agricultural sectors has been a central focus of development agencies for the past two decades. It has proven to be a very difficult task, however, to develop policies which actually achieve the transfer of new techniques. The record of success in development efforts towards this end in agriculture has been, on the whole, rather poor.

No one seriously questions the familiar association either between levels of urban development and degrees of industrial maturity or between rates of change in these two indices. It has even become commonplace in macroeconomic growth theory to simplify the complexities of structural change into some variation of the urban-rural two-sector model although, in the real world, shifts from commercial to industrial urban employment, let alone more complex intersectoral shifts, are of prime importance. Indeed, many of these growth models place great emphasis not upon changes in sector productivity but upon resource shifts between low- and high-productivity employment, while in empirical studies urban and rural population data very often appear as explicit substitutes for sectoral employment. But given the paucity of macroeconomic data for the antebellum period, especially prior to 1839, one is left puzzled by our relative inattention to the wealth of population census data by residence. American economic history textbooks are stuffed with quantitative information on the number of cities, their spectacular growth, and the percentage of population urbanized, but these may not be the most effective uses of this great data pool. The plethora of urban histories and the abundant attention to urban rivalry may be useful complements, but they are not very effective substitutes for quantitative analysis of overall American urbanization and experience with city size distribution. The very attention which the topic is currently receiving by economists, geographers, and historians suggests that much remains undone in the study of early American urbanization.

The Lower South remained a financial outlier in postbellum America, partly because it lacked developed metropolises. As focal points of regional economic networks, metropolises spawn externalities necessary for financial intermediaries. This cumulative process was constrained in the Lower South by the plantation system and staple monoculture. Only after 1880 did metropolitan networks form around new wholesale distribution centers, notably Atlanta and Dallas. Unlike coastal ports, these cities mediated more diverse commercial and financial transactions and attracted more correspondent banks. Consequently, Atlanta and Dallas were the most likely Federal Reserve cities in their districts, a view shared by local banks.

Soviet planners developed the “unchanged prices of 1926/27” to facilitate the solution of an agency problem—the regulation of self-interested producers as they worked to fulfill plans for heterogeneous products denominated in rubles. The system limited but did not eliminate producers' opportunistic behavior, which took the form of inflating the plan prices of new products. Through the 1930s and 1940s the “unchanged” prices proved resistant to reform, and following their abolition in 1950 the system was soon afterwards reinstated with a new base year. The history of the “unchanged” prices illustrates the limits of command.