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.

We document how intermediaries shaped markets or, conversely, how market institutions constrained intermediaries. In Dijon, where the Estates of Burgundy’s debt amounted to nearly half of all bonds in that small market, there was limited need for intermediaries. In the 1740s the borrowing needs of the province expanded, and the estates began to borrow in Paris, where their debt remained a small fraction of the market, and where they relied on notaries to place their bonds and to create a secondary market. These developments assured the estates’ capacity to borrow and thus Burgundian autonomy from the French Crown.

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.

Is Economic History one subject or two? The question has been posed twice during the present century, each time by the growth of a vigorous body of research concerned with economic changes over time but developed largely in isolation from conventional economic history. In each case the new work was quantitative in method, and the result was the phenomenon of two separate bodies of scholarship—the one written in prose and calling itself economic history, the other written mainly in figures and calling itself by another name.

An improvement on Mark Overton's method of computing crop yields from probate inventories is proposed. Harvesting costs are explicitly allowed for and a new procedure for eliminating cost-of-production valuations is offered. Applying these methods to a sample of Oxfordshire probate inventories generates higher yields than Overton's investigation of East Anglian inventories. The finding lends support to the view that most of the yield increase in early modern England occurred in the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth.

Recent work by Robert Putnam has revived a contentious debate about the role of culture in Italian regional disparities. Southern Italy is argued to have been locked in an impoverishing, no-trust equilibrium. This article explores an apparent exception to Putnam's historical evidence: the South's late-nineteenth-century cooperative banks (banche popolari). Econometric investigation reveals important differences in the strategy and performance of these banks in North and South during the crucial decade of the 1890s, and shows that these differences cannot be attributed to differences in the local environment. In fact, the evidence is broadly consistent with Putnam's hypothesis.

In recent years much research work has been done on the economy of Communist China. With respect to economic development in the pre-Communist period, however, although several writers have attempted to view contemporary developments in the light of past performance, the existing stock of knowledge does not permit exact statements.

Historical verdicts on the economic effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal have been decidedly mixed. This article examines the New Deal's impact on the electric utility industry. In contrast to Roosevelt's cartel-like policies toward other sectors, his approach to the electric utilities involved the infusion of various forms of direct and indirect competition. Statistical evidence and econometric analysis suggest that Roosevelt's procompetitive strategy produced superior outcomes relative to traditional “natural monopoly” approaches to electric utility regulation.

Recent articles have drawn attention to the general significance of the American export “invasion” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novack and Simon have concentrated on the origins of the invasion and on the attitudes of American businessmen, and to a lesser extent of others, to it. Elsewhere, Saul has considered the impact of intensified American competition upon British industry, underlining the need to reexamine the process of industrial transformation particularly during the two decades pre-ceding World War I. In the latter connection, the fundamental changes that occurred in the British boot and shoe industry, both in terms of rapidity and extent, make a case study of its history during this period especially rewarding, culminating, as it did, in a “Victory for British Boots”—the title of an article in The Economist in 1913. While the fact of successful response on the part of the industry is well known, the circumstances under which the trans-formation took place and the various elements which together produced the effective industrial counterattack have received less attention. In this article an attempt is made to remedy these deficiencies, to explain why the industry responded so successfully, and in particular to examine the role of American shoe machinery makers in this process, for in terms of control they virtually monopolized the supply of boot and shoe machinery in Britain toward the end of our period.

Though Social critics have often spoken of the “wage slavery” associated with modern capitalism, it is more common to believe that coerced labor was banished with the coming of modern standards of civilization. Thus the corvee of ancient China, the feudalism of Western Europe and Japan, and the New World enslavement of blacks in the 17th-19th centuries are seen as products of those earlier and less enlightened ages, mere way stations in the historical evolution of modern day economies.

The different rates of technical progress in Western Europe and the United States, exemplified by the motor industry, created a problem of adjustment in international payments by the 1920s. American direct investment in manufacturing in Europe was a manifestation of technological superiority and a partial solution to the payments problem. The scale of their operations gave the American motor vehicle firms an advantage even in foreign production. An alternative way of closing the technological gap, the transfer of machine tools and trained men from America to Europe, allowed the European motor vehicle producers to compete without becoming entirely American-owned.

Paper money, a major component of the colonial money supply, was critical to the economic policies of the colonial legislatures. Why did the state legislatures relinquish the power to issue money to the new federal government through the ratification of the Constitution? Hostility between states with radically different philosophies regarding paper money raised concerns about the viability of the union, and it was this fear which led to the clause in the Federal Constitution that prohibited state paper money issues.

The author traces and evaluates the major trends in the history and theory of the modern corporation: the literature dealing with market control, the New Business History that emphasizes efficiency, and recent developments by the Chicago School and the theorists of transactions costs. He concludes with an analysis of the recent problems U.S. corporations have experienced in managing innovation.

Taking as a frame of reference the relationship between equilibrium in the balance of payments and domestic economic growth, the objective of this paper is to examine the role of central banking in financial policy in Japan in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Certain of the financial problems which Japan then faced are those which perplex many underdeveloped countries today. They may be considered in terms of three highly interrelated problem areas: government expenditures and revenues; the monetary system; and the balance of payments.

We revisit the story of technology adoption and diffusion in Japan's Meiji-era cotton spinning industry, the study of which was pioneered by Gary Saxonhouse (1974). Using a novel data set and modern methodology, we argue that both the ease with which the best technology diffused and the role of “slavish imitation” in this process may have been overstated. We find an important role played by market competition, including asset reallocation. Our analyses provide richer insights into the complex phenomena of technology diffusion, innovation, and economic growth.

Differences in regional prices and wages are examined for the United States in 1890, together with the relationship between the cost of living and city size, and the determinants of regional industrial growth. Results indicate that regional cost-of-liying differences were sufficiently large so that money wages cannot be used for purposes of comparing the economic well-being of wage earners across regions. Except for the South, money wages and the cost of living were positively correlated. The relative differences in money wages, however, were greater; consequently real wages in high wage-price areas were generally higher.

Edwin F. Gay, my predecessor, in the inaugural presidential address of this Association described the continuity of the history of economic history from Europe to North America as illustrated in his own work. As your second president I represent a later stage of this continuity, a student of Chester W. Wright who in turn was a student of Edwin Gay. I am in a sense one of Edwin Gay's grandsons. This, particularly as it appeals to my strong Scottish interest in genealogy, provides the only satisfactory explanation I have been able to find of the honor you have done me in appointing me his successor. For the same reason it is a source of satisfaction to me that my successor can be said to fill the intervening gap as one of Edwin Gay's sons.

The economic development of Venice claims attention for several reasons. As the birthplace of capitalism, Venice has been assigned a leading role in a semi-Marxist scheme of world history. Within a more specifically historical and geographical framework, it presents a classic case of maturity and decay. After being for centuries a leader among world markets it was so placed as to register the effects of the oceanic shift in the world's trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.