The character and revolutionary potential of Russian factory labor in the early phases of industrialization have been a source of controversy for over two generations. While no longer a matter of the utmost consequence, the problems of analysis and the conclusions involved in this debate have retained their significance not only for the study of the Russian revolutions but also for our contemporary experience with labor in underdeveloped countries. The following pages, dealing with the crucial years around 1900, intend to apply a modern approach to an ancient subject, starting with the question of the relationship between peasants and workers in the Russian factories and advancing to the problem of the “exploitation” of the workers by the “capitalists.”

There are few words whose mere employment is capable of throwing American listeners into such paroxysms of righteous or offended indignation as the words “American imperialism.” This reaction is largely a reflection of the fact that “imperialism” is one of those words whose implicit domain of meaning is very large and even encompasses mutually contradictory elements as revealed by single user's notions of the world let alone different users' notions. In addition, the word conveys a strong connotation of ethically undesirable behavior to almost all users and readers.

This article examines key questions about the development of Pennsylvania's mid-nineteenth-century iron industry. The analysis is based on new data and exhaustive examination of previously underutilized sources within the framework of a geographic information system (GIS). Hypotheses are tested on the timing of adoption of mineral-fuel technologies across the state; the temporal relationships between investment in ironworks, business cycles, and tariff policy; the substitutability of different types and qualities of iron; how transport costs affected iron prices; and the geographical segmentation of iron markets in the antebellum period. The findings reveal complex and dynamic patterns of regional economic development.

Beliefs shape the choices of institutions. Beliefs are generally stable, but shocks that cause sufficiently unexpected economic and political outcomes make beliefs malleable. Within these windows of opportunity, leadership can play a role in shaping a new belief among the dominant organizations that in turn generates new institutions and over time a possible transition to a new developmental trajectory.

What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low. In this article, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940, constructing a large linked sample of twin brothers to account for differences in unobserved ability and family background. We find that each additional year of schooling increased labor earnings by approximately 4 percent, about half the return found for more recent cohorts in twins studies. These returns were evident both within and across occupations and were higher for sons from lower socio-economic status families.

Mutual and stock insurers have coexisted and competed against each other in insurance markets for centuries. In this article, we examine the risk management strategies and underwriting profitability of the different organizational forms in Sweden's property fire insurance market between 1903 and 1939. We demonstrate that stock insurers acted as intermediaries between policyholders and reinsurers to operate effectively in the potentially high-risk segments of the fire insurance market. In contrast, nationwide mutual insurers kept larger reserves to balance fluctuations in claims experiences, while local insurance pools relied on social obligation and trust to mobilize capital after adverse fire events.

We examine the income of older men in London around 1930, based on a large sample. The income of nonworking older men was substantially below that of men still working. We find no evidence that retirement rates increased at the state-penionable—unsurprisingly, since pension paryments provided less than a povertyline income. Less demanding or part-time work was unavailable. Hence we conclude that the decision of older manual workers to leave the labor market was determined primarily by the absence of appropriate employment opportunities, rather than the presence of substantial assets or nonlabor income.

The paper focuses on U.S. foreign investment. Part I notes its trivial impact on returns to U.S. capital and considers its greater importance for five industry groups. Part II reviews the economic advantages accruing to U.S. citizens from interventions in Panama and Cuba. Part III, the bulk of the paper, asks what impact U.S. foreign investment had on Latin American factor returns. It finds no evidence in the anti-imperialist literature for the assertions that such investment cut labor incomes or landowners’ capital gains in these nations. It suggests that a struggle between two groups of capitalists, native and foreign, was more central to the economic aspects of “imperialist” conflict.

This article examines the recent view that economic distress was not an important cause of English immigration before 1860. Demographic information is used to show that characteristics of males on suspect passenger lists (those that listed only laborers) matched those of laborers on other lists. Based on this result and other information, laborers appear to be the dominant group of immigrants. Support is thus provided for the view that distress was the most important cause of immigration, even though many other immigrants were not fleeing economic distress.

“Europe's misfortunes from 1790 to 1810 unquestionably re bounded [sic] to America's benefit. In the absence of warfare among the Europeans, American output and incomes would have been less.”

In the study of Roman money Theodore Mommsen remains 135 years after his work a towering figure, more pragmatic than theoretical in his economics, yet still sound. He saw the politics in monetary history, and especially its connection with the strength of the state. His view is more penetrating than MV = PT, fashionable in twentieth-century scholarship on Rome. And it is better economics than offered by the Polanyi School as the alternative line of analysis. The Polanyists infer an absence of a Roman monetary system from the failure of some part to be as sophisticated as the best. On the contrary, the Roman monetary system does not look so different from that of Europe since Mommsen wrote, uneven in its use of monetary devices, but sensibly so.

Having had no previous experience in giving presidential addresses, I spent most of the last year on a study of such addresses, delivered before our own and other scholarly associations. The conclusion of my research was that most of those addresses could be readily classified under one of two headings. The subject matter was either “The Discipline and I” or “The Discipline, Its Past, Present, and Future.“ Faced with this alternative, I found the choice between being either frankly egotistic or grandly universalistic rather hard. Although naturally leaning toward the former, I could not quite suppress my interest in the latter. Finally, I resolved my doubts by recalling the well-known proposition that since chocolate is good and oysters are good, chocolate and oysters together must be excellent indeed. What this means is that I should like to make a number of remarks—some anticritical, but some also self-critical—about my approach to the industrial development of Europe in the nineteenth century; but in doing so I shall select those aspects of the matter which have more general significance and try to connect them with some methodological observations.

When blacks began to leave the South, one of their first stops was the West Virginia coal fields. There they met with reasonable success. Until the Depression, high-paying machine jobs were open to them and job segregation had almost no impact on their wages, but management positions were off-limits with a few exceptions for all-black workforces. The findings suggest two patterns worth more attention in studies of other industries.

Investment in machinery is a key component in the analysis of long-term economic growth during the spread of industrialization. This article offers consistent annual series on the magnitude of machinery imports per capita into all Latin American countries for the period 1890-1930. Analysis of these series shows that machinery imports diverged across countries from 1890 through 1913. After 1913 a number of the more backward countries experienced rapid growth in machinery imports. These large differences in machinery investment contributed to unequal development across the Latin American countries.

The 1911 Canada–United States Reciprocity Agreement had a central role in the campaigns of the Liberal and Conservative parties in the 1911 Canadian General Election. Consequently, Laurier's defeat in 1911 has been interpreted as Canada's rejection of reciprocity and her commitment to tariff protection. This analysis shows that reciprocity bolstered support for Laurier in 1911. In the absence of opposition from pork packers, particularly in Quebec, Laurier would have retained his majority mandate. Thus, Canada was not committing to a path of protectionism after 1911.

This paper considers the German principality of Hesse-Cassel in the 1850s, comparing inheritance institutions and landholding inequality for roughly a thousand mostly agricultural villages and towns. The principality lay between impartible northern Europe and the partible southwest. Inequality in landholding size is measured, showing an average Gini of 0.615 and substantial variation across communities. Places with relatively larger populations and ones that practiced impartible inheritance had mostly higher wealth inequality. The main result is that inheritance norms played a role in causing higher landholding inequality. Higher emigration rates in the impartible communities helped to alleviate landholding inequality.

I utilize data from the Civil War income tax to calculate the income shares of the top 1 and 0.1 percent of the population in the United States in the late 1860s—extending Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez's series back in time. As we will see, income inequality during this period represents a low comparable to the late 1970s.

While economists predicted a return to double-digit unemployment rates during the reconversion from World War II, this outcome did not materialize. This article explores the role that the significant rise in net exports—which accounted for nearly 4 percent of GDP in 1946 and 1947—played in helping the United States avoid a postwar unemployment problem. Using an input-output analysis, we find that the export surplus directly accounted for 1.33 million jobs in 1946 and 1.97 million jobs in 1947. This accounts for close to half of the gains to private sector employment during these years.

Department stores represented one of the most advertising-intensive sectors of American interwar retailing. Yet it has been argued that a competitive spiral of high advertising spending, to match the challenge of other local department stores, contributed to an inflation of operating costs that eroded long-term competitiveness. We test these claims, using both qualitative archival data and establishment-level national data sets. The quantitative analysis confirms that the relationship between advertising expenditure and sales deteriorated markedly over the period, but indicates that the growing negative impact of retaliatory advertising by rival department stores was less important than contemporaries perceived.

This article argues that one contributing factor to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was the 1956 revision of U.S. sugar quotas. Its significance has been overlooked because its real economic impact was programmed to occur after 1959. Combining a statistical simulation and an event study of sugar companies' rates of return on equity, we show that the revision had adverse long-run consequences for sugar exports, and that forward-looking investors anticipated them and incorporated them into their valuation of sugar-company stocks after 1953. Further evidence shows that the Batista regime and prominent insurgents understood the vital nature of Cuba's sugar import quota.