Estimates of interstate migration after 1815 and before 1860 for white, U.S.-born adults are presented. The estimates come from a sample of military bounty land warrant recipients who served in the War of 1812 and show that a majority of veterans spent their adult lives in the same state. The limited amount of interstate movement did conform to traditional descriptions of an east-west pattern. I also consider the social basis for interstate migration.

Aside from their studies of the iron industry, historians have given relatively little attention to the non-household manufacturing industries of colonial America—perhaps, many would say, for the very good reason that there was not much activity along these lines before the conjuncture of the American and the Industrial Revolutions. Yet there were manufactures that reached significant volumes for those times. One of these was the colonial shipbuilding industry which not only provided most of the vessels that carried North American commerce with the West Indies and the Old World but also provided the capital starved colonies with a significant export. In spite of its importance this trade has not received much attention from modern economic historians, including those who deal with the balance of payments. One reason is, perhaps, that the British government in the eighteenth century did not consider colonial built ships as foreign in any sense and did not regard their transfer to metropolitan ownership as “imports.” Thus the values of such transfers were not included in the Inspector-General's accounts of imports from the colonies nor were any other records kept of them, except for the ship-by-ship entries in the Registries of Shipping (which for the most part have not survived).

We construct an individual-level data set of partnership contracts in late-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro to study the determinants of contract terms. Partners with limited liability contributed more capital and received lower draws for private expenses and lower profit shares than their unlimited partners. Unlimited partners in turn received higher-powered incentives when they contracted with limited partners than when they contracted with unlimited partners. A reform that changed the relative bargaining power further improved the terms of unlimited partners in limited firms. These findings highlight the roles of risk, incentives, and bargaining power in shaping contracts.

The rapid growth of deposits in New York over the late nineteenth century is often attributed to the release of pent-up demand for transactions services. I advance a complementary explanation that emphasizes the market for bank shares. The stock market was important because it generated quotations that signaled depositors about the condition of individual banks as innovations in banking practices allowed confidence to grow. A new database of prices, dividends, and balance sheet items for traded banks and a series of dynamic panel models show that fluctuations in bank prices influenced the course of the expansion.

Ferguson and Temin criticize my article for only paying lip service to the notion of a twin crisis while providing a story of a pure banking crisis. In fact, I have never claimed that the crisis was a pure banking crisis. The question is whether and to what extent banks contributed to the crisis. Ferguson and Temin take the position that the crisis was a pure currency crisis. I argue that weaknesses in the banking sector existed, which interacted with the currency problems in numerous ways. The focus of my article on banks reflects the nature of the question, rather than any view that currency problems were unimportant.

These brief quotes can serve as an excellent introduction to the volume under review. Solow was able, in a single phrase, to capture the main theme of this International Economic Association conference. And Gerschenkron adds a justified plea for tolerance on the part of critics. My own impression can also be stated at the outset: the boys may have had a fine bull session at Konstanz back in 1960, but as a book it doesn't add-up to much.

The formation of the Jewish national home in Palestine provides an opportunity to examine the economics of an unusual “nation building”: the planning and making of a national existence without a state. The revival of Jewish nationality in Palestine started in the late nineteenth century with the first immigration motivated by national ideology (Alia Rishona) and with, the establishment of the World Zionist Organization (1897), whose goal was to create a Jewish political entity and ultimately a state. It was not, however, until the end of World War I that the revival achieved momentum. The Balfour Declaration (November 1917) proclaiming Britain's intention to promote the formation of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine after the war provided the supportive political environment for the renewal of Jewish nation building. Moreover, both the League of Nations (which officially granted Britain the mandate) and the British government recognized the Zionist Organization as the legitimate representative of world Jewry and as the leading body of the emerging Jewish community in Palestine for matters concerning the national home. This gave the Zionist Organization an international legitimacy to add to its legitimacy among Jews as a quasi-governmental institution for the purpose of re-establishing their national existence.

When one compares ancient and modern economic institutions, the differences are many and deep. One of the most obvious is the appearance of slavery virtually everywhere among those societies that rose from simple village life to civilization. Social and economic specialization, the resulting necessity for interchange of goods, and a higher political organization in a firm, consciously organized state—these are aspects of the appearance of civilization, and with them one usually finds a spectrum of social classes from aristrocrats to slaves.

Economic historians have been aware for some time of the questionable nature of some of the tonnage figures given for the ships of the English colonies in the Western Hemisphere in the eighteenth century. Several authors who have written on colonial shipbuilding or colonial trade have noted the authoritative declaration of Thomas Irving which was laid before the House of Commons in 1792 and have tried to take his evidence into account in their own investigations. Irving, who from 1767 to 1774 had held the dual position of Inspector General of Imports and Exports and Register of Shipping in North America, stated that while he was in office North American vessels had been consistently registered at two-thirds of their real tonnage. He urged that this deduction be repaired and real tonnage re-established before any attempt be made to compare statistics from that time with those of a later period. Other scholars have either chosen not to notice Irving's claim or have discounted it as of moot significance. Such ambivalence is understandable, for Irving's assertion is narrowly based, confused, and misleading. Still, the sweeping scope of his charge and the even broader testimony of some of his contemporaries who have both agreed with him and expanded upon him have combined to leave the precise nature of all colonial tonnage figures in serious doubt. Given the renewed interest in tonnage measure and the growing trend toward the use of compiled tonnage statistics as a rough and ready measure of trade, it becomes important to resolve this doubt.

There have recently been a number of studies concerned with the equality of wealth distribution in the nineteenth-century U.S. Collectively, these studies have arrived at the following conclusions: 1) the distribution of wealth was much more unequal in the South than in the North; 2) both the North and South were characterized by a high degree of inequality. Gavin Wright analyzed the degree of concentration in several measures of agricultural wealth (improved acreage, farm value, slaves, and cotton output) in the “cotton South” in 1850 and 1860; he found no evidence to reject the traditional view that antebellum southern agriculture was characterized by a highly unequal wealth distribution. Wright was careful to point out, however, that his conclusions only held for the “cotton South” and might not hold for the rest of the slave region. In this paper, I have calculated the degree of inequality in the distribution of slave wealth in five major agricultural regions (cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice) in the South in 1860, and I have found no evidence that the wealth distribution in the cotton region was substantially different from that in other southern agricultural regions.

Peter Solar highlights some shortcomings of our treatment of government spending. However, correcting for these shortcomings using data rather than assumptions confirms our principal findings. GDP per capita in the leading region of China remained around the same level as in the leading region of Europe until the eighteenth century before declining substantially during the Qing dynasty. The Great Divergence thus began around 1700, earlier than originally suggested by the California School, but later than implied by earlier writers. The new data do not support Solar’s novel chronology with its Great Crossing, Great Convergence and Greater Divergence.

Using new and uniquely detailed data, we examine how construction workers’ wages in Sweden developed between 1831 and 1900. Wages grew rapidly from the 1850s, and comparisons with Northwestern Europe show that Swedish workers benefited more from growth than workers elsewhere. Globalization forces, most notably overseas migration, in combination with flexible and well-integrated labor markets—signified by strong regional convergence, falling skill differentials, and small urban-rural wage gaps—pushed up wages in Sweden.

This study uses supply and demand analysis to interpret the expansion of Canadian newsprint production and exports after World War I. Canada and the United States played complementary roles in this expansion, and by 1930, 90 percent of Canadian production based on relatively abundant natural resources went to satisfy U.S. demand. At the same time, U. S. tariffs against Canadian newsprint were relaxed, and Canadian provinces imposed a manufacturing condition on Canadian pulp and paper producers prohibiting the export of pulpwood cut from Crown lands. The analysis shows that the growth of U.S. demand and Canadian supply conditions can account for almost all the Canadian newsprint expansion, whereas policy initiatives generated at most two years of growth.

Taking a fresh look at the institutions of economic management in colonial India explains much about the history of the last decades of the raj. The concept of political economy—the interaction of economic forces and political choices—provides a useful approach to the study of government economic policy and practice that can give a new perspective on the history of the late British Empire as a whole.

There is some speculation that there was more economic egalitarianism in the United States among free men in the period from 1776 to 1790 than there was at any time in the following seventy years until the abolition of slavery. One would like to believe the speculation since it is known that there was extensive inequality of wealth in I860 and one would like to believe that the formation of the nation took place within a context of economic equality. This would be produced from a condition where aggregate wealth is shared fairly equally rather than being owned by a few. Let us give this ideal, this proposition relating to wealthholding for the Revolutionary era from 1776 to 1790, a title of romantic equality.

Why do voters publicly fund education? I examine two explanations: public funds may be a means for decisive voters to transfer wealth to themselves or voters may subsidize the education of others to raise social education levels and realize external benefits. I test these theories in the 1800s, when full tax support of primary schools emerged. States where median and mean wealth was closer together had higher fractions of education revenue from public sources. Attendance rates rose when the public share of education funding rose, especially for poor children. These facts are consistent with a model with external benefits of education.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the patent office of the German state Wuerttemberg strategically discriminated against foreign inventors by charging comparatively high patent fees. We show that this administrative practice was driven by fiscal and protectionist motives.

Land was the resource that nineteenth-century America possessed in greatest abundance. A large part of the land was initially in the public domain and was transferred to private ownership in the course of the century. Land policy, therefore, had the potential for creating significant and long lasting effects on the American economy—on the rate of settlement of the West, the distribution of income, the rate of economic growth. A substantial body of literature, much of it severely critical, has developed concerning the economic effects of nineteenth-century American land policy. Unfortunately, the criticisms often rest primarily on tales of corruption and thievery, rather than on economic analysis. Certainly many of the stories are true, but they represent an insufficient basis for evaluating the economic effects of land policy. A detailed economic analysis of individual policies is required.