It is extraordinary how little is known about the engineers who produced the water wheels, steam engines, textile and other machinery of the early Industrial Revolution. In most economic histories of this period there are merely a few brief and vague references to smiths, carpenters, and millwrights, based on Smiles or Fairbairn, with no contemporary evidence whatever. Most accounts of the development of mechanical engineering normally begin with Bramah and Maudslay, from about 1800, and carry on with such renowned nineteenth-century names as Fairbairn, Roberts, Whitworth, and Nasmyth. Before the nineteenth century, we are usually led to believe, mechanical engineering hardly existed. This belief is largely based on nineteenth-century evidence. William Fairbairn, for example, stated that when he first came to Manchester, in 1814, “the whole of the machinery was executed by hand. There were neither planing, slotting, nor shaping machines; and, with the exception of very imperfect lathes, and a few drills, the preparatory operations of construction were effected entirely by the hands of the workmen.” Similarly, the Select Committee on Exportation of Machinery reported in 1841 that “[machine] tools have introduced a revolution in machinery, and tool-making has become a distinct branch of mechanics, and a very important trade, although twenty years ago it was scarcely known.”

The labor markets in the railroad industry went through extensive institutional changes between 1890 and 1945. Federal laws increased railroad employers' liability for workplace accidents in several stages. Unions expanded to cover more occupations. The federal government set railroad wages during World War I and then mediated and arbitrated a large number of collective bargaining disputes between 1920 and 1945. We examine how these changes in institutions affected compensating differentials for fatal and nonfatal accident risk. The increasing role of unionization and government intervention coincided with a decline in the size of compensating differentials.

The hypothesis that a region's or nation's laggard industrial development can be explained by its relatively more expensive supplies of coal and iron ore is challenged here. A simple model, based on location theory, is developed. Using this model, I demonstrate the conditions under which this hypothesis holds. A case study of Quebec and Ontario industry suggests that the differential resource cost hypothesis seriously lacks explanatory power.

If problems of historical study are to be chosen on the basis of their importance in affecting the course of human affairs through time, no phase of life in Western culture during the century and a half after 1800 is more worthy of study than that of economic development. During these one hundred and fifty years there was an increment of total production within western Europe of an estimated 1,500 per cent and an increase of output per capita of some 500 per cent. At no time in history had an equal advance been made at such a rapid pace.

In 1930, the West—for present purposes, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado—had a level of per capita income payments that stood at 79 per cent of the national figure. In that same year, the figure for the South—Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—was 51 per cent.

I suggest that converting economic history from a topic to a discipline requires three steps: economic theory and quantitative methodology must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good economic history; economic history and historical statistics must be relevant and necessary for writing and teaching good economic theory; and economic history must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good history. Over the past 50 years the first task has been accomplished and the second nearly so. The third task remains, but incorporating the life-cycle perspective into economic history would hasten its successsful completion.

We test for wage discrimination and occupational crowding in the nineteenthcentury American whaling industry. Although our results indicate little evidence of wage discrimination, we cannot reject the hypothesis that certain groups—specifically blacks and Portuguese–experienced some occupational crowding, though it was by no means complete and the minority-dominated occupations were not low-paying ones. In addition, we find that members of the majority group—white American and Northern European seamen—did accept a negative compensating wage differential for working with members of their own group.

Although the aggregate growth rate of the American economy was relatively slow between the Revolution and 1840, certain sectors did expand at a rapid rate, and from these sectors originated some of the factors responsible for the later dynamic growth of the whole system. One such sector involved the making of clocks. Never large by any measure, the clock industry was, nevertheless, a leader in the introduction of the system of interchangeable parts production and in the mass marketing of a “luxury” consumer good. The purpose of this article is to outline and to analyze the transformation of this activity from a craft to an industry and, in particular, to indicate the factors which influenced Eli Terry, the main entrepreneur of the transformation.

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

A novel series of interest rates paid by the Corporation of London shows that interest rates in London declined by 350 basis points during the seventeenth century. The decline followed a similar pattern in Europe. Records from the Corporation’s archive provide evidence for financial development: an increase in the number and volume of debt instruments, an increase in the number of lenders, and the development of a secondary market. Econometric analysis establishes that increasing the debt instruments’ liquidity contributed to the convergence of interest rates between London and Amsterdam.

I use rice prices in three cities to analyze the efficiency of the marketing system and the institutional framework of Javanese agriculture, 1823–1853. I show that imperfections in rural capital markets caused the extreme fluctuations in rice prices and that the segmentation of the capital market modifies the McCloskey and Nash interpretation of the relationship between seasonal fluctuations of grain (or rice) prices and interest rates. I argue that these fluctuations proxy peasants' stress. Finally, I hypothesize that institutional and market failures explain the “noneconomic” behavior of Javanese peasants in Boeke's theory of dualistic economic development.

This study investigates the relationship between income and fertility in Nuits-Saint-Georges, a small Burgundian town. Nuits offers a rich location to study fertility because of its broad range of occupations, income, and literacy. I constructed a data set that linked fertility through 1792 for couples married between 1744 and 1779 with fiscal records tracking the families' tax payments. Controlling for occupation and literacy, my principle findings were that wealthier families had more births, changes in fertility were positively correlated with increases in income over the life cycle, and marital fertility in Nuits steadily declined over the latter eighteenth century.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. This article is part of a thesis written under the supervision of Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. The author would like to thank Jean-LaurentRosenthal, Kathleen McGarry, Duncan Thomas, Pia Orrenius, Rosemary Hyson, George Deltas, Aileen Thompson, Shawn Ulrick, three anonymous referees, and two editors at this JOURNAL for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.

We analyze all slave manifests housed at the National Archives—some 24,400 documents involving approximately 135,000 slaves who were transported in the coastwise trade from 1810 to 1861. The manifests list the name of the owner or shipper, which allows us to match names with traders found in other sources. We also utilize demographic characteristics of the manifests to estimate the probability that a trader organized the shipment. Commercial transactions increased over the antebellum period, and on average were responsible for approximately 55 percent of slaves who migrated from Atlantic to Gulf coast ports.

This article tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across the states from 1880 to 1950. Human capital matters to a state's income level and to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South, whose overwhelmingly agricultural society relied more heavily on work experience than formal education, and whose racial discrimination in school resource allocation lowered human capital accumulation of both blacks and whites, presents a unique pattern. The South's low human capital levels following the Civil War and its active postbellum resistance to education reduced its speed of conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation.

The idea that a monopolist would adopt a pricing strategy to deter entry is found in a wide body of research. We explore why the monopolist in the American telephone industry, AT&T, did not pursue such a strategy when its initial patents expired.

For many Western countries the history of the last two centuries reveals both a sustained rise in per capita output and a tendency toward a more equal distribution of the economic product. The experience has been characterized, however, by repetitive fluctuations in the levels and growth rates of aggregate production and its components. The length of the shorter of these fluctuations, the business cycle, ranges from the 40- to 45-month inventory cycle to the so-called Juglar of seven to ten years. Two other classes of interruptions in the secular trend have also been singled out for study by economic historians. The first is the Kondratieff cycle, a movement of roughly fifty years which has been primarily identified in price series. The second is the Kuznets cycle, or “long swing,” which in length is between the Juglar and the Kondratieff. The long swing constitutes the primary theme of this study.

In his classic paper on the significance of railroads to American economic development, Leland Jenks distinguished three principal avenues of influence: (1) The railroad was what Jenks called an “innovating idea” with important psychological impact “manifested in a wave-like profusion of new enterprise of many sorts.” (2) The railroad and railway construction and maintenance were a stimulus to the industrial and financial sectors of the economy. The railroad not only stimulated the iron and steel, timber, and other industries directly but “encouraged innovations in financial enterprise.” (3) Finally, the railroad contributed directly to the generation of national income through the rendering of transportation services. Although on this last point Jenks despaired that, “There appears to be no satisfactory technique for giving a precise measure to the extent of this contribution.”

This paper offers a revised series of nineteenth-century Anglo-American foreign exchange rates. The new series is based partly on the reinterpretation of data presented earlier by other scholars and partly on a recently rediscovered source of continuous information on sterling-dollar rates after 1869. The pioneering work in this area was done by Lance Davis and Jonathan Hughes. They published in 1960 a quarterly dollar-sterling exchange rate series (1835 to 1895) based on the actual prices paid for approximately 3,000 sterling bills by Nathan Trotter's Philadelphia-based metals importing firm.

The connection between the spatial pattern of the urban growth spurt of the 1880s and the mortgage market is an aspect of the familiar capital market segmentation hypothesis that has received little attention. Although mortgage lending expanded most rapidly in the smaller western cities during the decade, I conclude that an underlying pattern of segmentation impeded urbanization in these areas at least until 1890. The initial advantage that segmentation conferred on borrowers in the East was reduced to some extent by binding usury ceilings along the Atlantic seaboard.

This note contrasts the familial origins of 136 Jewish American entrepreneurs with those of 187 American non-Jewish entrepreneurs described in a previous study of mine. Information on both groups was drawn from published biographies. In addition, manuscript biographies were used to gather information on Jewish entrepreneurs.