Prevailing theory regards subsistence or pastoral agriculture as a prerequisite for the spread of proto-industry. Commercial agriculture and proto-industrialization are viewed as incompatible. The expansion of the cotton industry in the pays de Caux, a fertile cereal-producing region in Normandy, contradicts the theory and indicates that seasonal unemployment and landleness, not subsistence agriculture, were the distinguishing features of proto-industrial regions. When these regions were located near market towns, the peasants' need for off-season work complemented the growing demand of eighteenth-century merchants for a large labor supply and determined the location of proto-industries.

Critics who doubt the sources and meaning of some four inches of catch-up growth claim that market-based distortions created by slave traders biased measured heights of children and adolescents. Here we analyze this possible bias using a new database of all slave manifests available at the National Archives. Employing procedures to match names of shippers with known or suspected professional traders, we find that biases in height by age due to trader selectivity were negligible relative to the four inches of catch-up growth.

A side from some overworked generalizations regarding poor soil, shortage of capital, lack of arable land, population density and such, there are no studies in English that deal with the general economic history of Greece or with specific problems in her economic development since the establishment of the modern Greek state in the third decade of the last century. An analysis of the influence of the legal system on this development, therefore, may throw light on Greek economic history in general and open a useful discussion. It may also add something to our knowledge of the larger problem of the relation of socialcultural institutions and economic activity.

Based on a large sample from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the long-term private credit market in Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and analyzes how it was affected by government-caused redistribution. It estimates the level of private indebtedness from 1662 to 1789, explains the problems the credit market faced, and determines who profited and who lost when government defaults, banking reforms, and currency manipulations struck private borrowers and lenders. It concludes by accounting for the expansion of the credit market in the last half of the eighteenth century.

This article proposes to do three things: to test for and date the emergence and integration of regional farm labor markets in Massachusetts; to demonstrate their growth consequences for the preindustrial economy; and to present new wage and labor productivity indices for the agricultural economy of Massachusetts from 1750 to 1855. Together with my previous studies it makes the case that the economy of rural Massachusetts was transformed by and under the subtle dominion of commodity, capital, and labor markets, the simultaneous emergence of which by 1800 is observed in the behavior of relevant prices and ratified in the growth of labor productivity.

The honorable program chairman has appended to my paper a title I had not entirely foreseen, and this drove me to modify my line to some extent. I had toyed with the idea of taking a long look at a short period in the fifteenth century, when the Genoese did all they could to adjust to shrinking opportunities and to find new markets in the place of those they were losing. This will still take about one half of my time, if only because it dovetails with the paper of Harry Miskimin. But if Genoa has to be considered as a test case for market expansion, we cannot restrict ourselves to the years when the going was not so good.

The Irish immigrations during the First Industrial Revolution serve to complicate any assessment of Britain's economic performance up to the 1850s. This paper estimates the size of the Irish immigrations and explores its impact on real wages, rural-urban migration, and industrialization. Using a general equilibrium model, the paper finds that the Irish did not play a significant role in accounting for rising inequality, lagging real wages, or rapid industrialization.

The managerial revolution resulted in the concentration of production decisions in the hands of management. Radical economists and historians have disputed the conventional view that these changes in work organization were necessary to increase production efficiency. Yet curiously there seem to be few issues of fact in dispute between the radical and the conventional accounts. I offer here an interpretation of the radical position which explains why this is so, and why profitable and efficient organizations of work will differ in capitalist economies. The argument hinges on the conditions under which workers were able to act collectively.

Since its publication in 1949 Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has been received as a major addition to the literature of early modern history. In France, the excitement over this eleven-hundred-page work has centered on what would appear to be its revolutionary innovations in historical method. Lucien Febvre, for example, in an article in the Revue historique, after describing the book as more than a “perfect work of an historian with a profound grasp of his métier” and even more than a “professional masterpiece,” declared that the book introduces a revolution in the mode of conceiving history. “It marks,” said Febvre, “the dawn of a new time, of that I am certain.” His article concluded with this charge to youth: “Read, re-read, and meditate on this excellent book. … Make it your companion. What you will learn of things, new to you, about the world of the sixteenth century is incalculable. But what you will learn simply about man, about his history and about history itself, its true nature, its methods and its purposes—you cannot imagine in advance.” Braudel himself devoted an article in the Revue économique to elaborating the method used in his book and presented it to economic historians for their consideration.

Prior to the Civil War in the United States much of the economic development of the country was financed by means of European credit, extended for both short and long terms. The flow of capital was chiefly from England and considerable Continental capital moved through England to the United States. A few firms in England were the chief instruments in this process of financing American trade and marketing American securities. These Anglo-American merchant bankers are the subject of this paper.

To what extent do rising income levels explain the decline in adult mortality rates experienced in the United States a century ago? I explore this question by investigating the income effect of the country's first wide-scale entitlement program: the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted pensions to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from patronage politics to estimate the semi-elasticity of disease onset with respect to pensions. Income effects are large for cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory illnesses.

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks.

How did the wartime health of Union Army recruits affect their wealth accumulation through 1870? Wounds and exposure to combat had strong negative effects on subsequent savings, as did illnesses while in the service. The impact of poor health was particularly strong for unskilled workers. Health was a powerful determinant of nineteenth-century economic mobility. Infectious diseases' influences on wealth accumulation suggest that the economic gains from the improvement of the disease environment should be enormous. The direct economic costs of the Civil War were probably much greater than previously thought, given the persistent adverse health effects of wartime experiences.

Being a brief account of Northern money market conditions from 1861 through 1865, including representative empirical tables, together with yield curves and graphs, and containing speculations on the influence of gold.

This paper utilizes a survey of U. S. manufacturing firms from 1832 to investigate the structure of manufacturing investment during early industrialization. The relative magnitudes of investments in fixed and working capital, and how they varied with firm size, location, and industry, are documented. This variation across industries in the composition of capital investments is indicative of a more general variation in factor intensities, and bears on the issues of why industries became concentrated in the regions they did, and the degrees to which they were adversely affected by the limited availability of long–term loans. Evidence that most manufacturing industries had quite modest investments in machinery and tools per unit of labor is also presented, serving to undercut the notion that the early period of industrialization was based on a proliferation of new, machinery–intensive technologies.

In 1948, in an address before this association, the late J. B. Brebner spoke of laissez-faire as a “myth,” describing it as a battle cry of the middle classes in their struggle with the landed aristocracy, and noting particularly that the philosophic Radicals—the Benthamites—were proponents not of laissez-faire, as they had been represented to be, but of a new bureaucratic collectivism. It is becoming clear that the reputed mid-Victorian policy of “anti-colonialism” is likewise a myth, as two Cambridge dons argued in an article in 1953, for England continued to extend her empire—both “formal” and “informal”—during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Was the policy which led to the extension of the empire in direct contradiction to the ideas of the men who had revealed the absurdities of the “Old Colonial System” in the bright beam of the new science of political economy and had brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and of the Navigation Acts in 1849? Or is the “anti-colonialism” of Radical doctrine also a myth? I hope to show that Benthamite Radicals, far from being ideological opponents of colonialism, as they are usually depicted, were advocates of positive programs of empire, and, grounding their argument upon the new economic science, constructed and maintained a set of doctrines of which the keystone was the necessity of empire to an industrial England.

The rollout of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the early twentieth century dramatically increased the frequency with which rural voters received information. This article examines the effect of RFD on voters' and Representatives' behavior using a panel dataset and instrumental variables. Communities receiving more routes spread their votes to more parties; there is no evidence it changed turnout. RFD shifted positions taken by Representatives in line with rural constituents, including increased support for pro-temperance and anti-immigration policies. These results appear only in counties with newspapers, supporting the hypothesis that information flows play a crucial role in the political process.

Was the adoption of state utility regulation the result of a negative-sum competition among special interest groups vying for the monopoly rents created by regulation or a positive-sum elimination of corruption arising from appropriable quasi-rents? Previous empirical studies of the adoption of regulation have assumed the former. Using discrete hazard analysis, this study considers the latter and finds the data more consistent with the positive-sum protection of quasi-rents than the negative-sum creation and appropriation of monopoly rents.

The factors regulating the production and distribution of material wealth cannot be reduced exclusively to market relationships. This being the case, the economic historian cannot limit his borrowings to economics alone. The present article uses meteorology both in its theoretical and historical dimensions to show the interaction between economic and meteorological fluctuations. The attempt of W. S. Jevons to find a theoretical connection between solar cycles and trade cycles is well known. Economic historians of preindustrial Europe have identified weather patterns as a primary independent variable determining prosperity or depression. The impact of meteorological fluctuation on economic activity has also been noticed for the nineteenth century, acknowledged by theorist and historian alike as one of the major variables inducing trade cycles. But in these accounts weather patterns are introduced as a run of good or bad luck, affecting essentially regional or national economies.