This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

This study examines the interplay between financial crises, uncertainty, and economic growth during the interwar period. Comparing the experiences of ten countries, we provide evidence that reductions in the credibility of a country's commitment to the gold standard generated capital flight and higher interest rate volatility. This volatility, in turn, was inversely correlated with economic growth. These results suggest that financial crises helped propagate the Great Depression, in part, by increasing uncertainty.

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.

Some of the factors which influenced the international diffusion of the Gramme dynamo, the Edison dynamo, the revolvingfield alternator and the Alexanderson alternator will be examined in this paper. The selection of a few specific power generators as diffusant tracers represents a methodological compromise within a technological continuum bounded by a single invention such as a new armature winding and a complete power system such as Edison's. Each of the selected machines possessed a distinctive morphology so that the adaptations or mutations which may occur when the machine is introduced into a new national environment can be easily recognized.

We study the economic and political determinants of the Southern secession movement of 1860/61. While economic historians emphasize the importance of slavery to the South’s economy as the primary factor behind the movement, we demonstrate the important role that political inequality among whites played in facilitating secession. In particular, secession was decided in state conventions, which allowed secessionists to exploit biases to representation and may have been pivotal in Alabama and Georgia. Our results suggest that the region’s investment in slavery alone may not be sufficient to explain the electoral success of the movement in the largest Lower South states.

This article studies the effects of branch banking restrictions on American firm investment and growth. Authors have suggested that the lack of widespread branching bank networks hindered the development of large-scale industrial firms. This article presents a model that implies that restrictions on branch banking cause the severity of external finance constraints to increase with firm size. This hypothesis is tested using a panel data set of over 250 firms for 1911–1922. Investment and growth sensitivities are significantly higher for large firms than for smaller firms, suggesting that branch banking restrictions hindered the expansion of large-scale firms.

Construction of the first transcontinental railroad, financed with large federal subsidies, is an important event in American history. Were the subsidies necessary to induce private investment in the railroad? The ex-ante investment decision examined uses contemporary reports and a simulation model to show that investors expected the railroad to be profitable. Evidence also shows that the railroad created political conflicts in Congress between the North and South. The secession removed the South as a disputant in Congress, reducing short-term political conflict but not long-term conflict. Subsidies reduced political risk, rather than transport market failure, and encouraged private investment.

I study the changing role of the banknote market in interregional financial arrangements of the antebellum American economy, using the Old Northwest as a case study. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the cyclical behavior of the banknote market, I conclude that the role of the banknote market in interregional balance of payments adjustments declined as the Old Northwest became more closely integrated into the external financial system.

The continued importance of tenant plantations in some areas of the South since the Civil War suggests that there was some advantage to large-scale agriculture. One source of economies of scale was in the marketing of high-quality cotton.

The purpose of the following observations on serfdom in Western and Eastern Europe is to call attention to some of the problems, in part methodological ones, that arise in attempts to analyze the system of serfdom as a social institution in space and time.

Twenty years ago Professor Frederic C. Lane recognized the close connection between economics and political history and suggested that it is impossible to understand fully the first without some understanding of the second. Relatively little work has been done in that area over the ensuing two decades. In that period both social and political historians have become more quantitative, and although their work has permitted us to discuss some alleged explanations of social and political development, it has not really produced viable alternatives. This failure is linked with the theoretical nature of the analysis. Although there does not appear to be a useful body of theory in sociology, positive political science offers such a structure for our understanding of political history.

In 1747 the colony of Maryland enacted a law to improve the general quality of tobacco exports. Tobacco prices rose significantly after the law went into effect, while total tobacco exports continued to increase. The widespread use of tobacco as money, coupled with the exchange of inspection notes for tobacco at inspection sites, led to changes in the Maryland money supply due to the law. Transaction costs fell as a result of marketing all Maryland tobacco through inspection warehouses. The law also appears to have accelerated the trend toward diversification of the economy.

The section on colonial commerce in most textbooks oh American Economic History has changed little in the last three or four (or more) decades. Of course, slight variations exist, but they are usually for style, with the core of the subject seldom varying. In fact, a traditional view of American colonial commerce has been solidly formed, and it is widely read and taught in our universities and colleges.

A meeting of historians on “Colonialism and Colonization” certainly raises a terminological problem. Colonization is a great and old subject of historical study. The word “colonialism,” on the contrary, seems to me to have come to us from the international rostrums where diplomats and propagandists wage the psychological wars of today; and to my taste it has that Basic English quality of an international vocabulary ready-made for simultaneous translation, where the suggestive power of words is in inverse relation to their accuracy. In its current use it seems to be a synonym of imperialism or, more generally, of domination of one country by another, or by the rulers of another country. But imperialism, at least, says what it means: the policy of building and holding together an empire, a unit of domination which transcends the national state. Foreign domination is a self-defining expression apt to describe all degrees of dependency, from straight political and military to economic or even cultural ones. What, then, is the use of forging yet another term?

This paper brings together the existing commercial bank balance sheets for New England for the period 1785–1837. Approximately 79 percent of all balance sheets issued have been found, and data from these are presented in aggregated form. Data compiled from available statements were then used to estimate the balance sheets of missing banks and the missing items on individual balance sheets. The variables used in estimating included authorized capital stock, a time trend, age of bank, city population, paid-in capital, deposits, loans and discounts, bank notes in circulation, and reserves. The actual and estimated balance sheets are then combined and presented.

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy’s postwar economic development. It exploits differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize their infrastructure more quickly experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforces.

The problem to which this paper addresses itself may be posed as follows: What part in bringing about the phenomenally rapid industrial growth of Germany between about 1890 and 1914 was played by governmental activities; what part was played by the private enterprise of businessmen; and what was the relative importance of each?

This article briefly discusses the operations of the British Exchange Equalization Account, 1932–1939, on the basis of the Treasury records of the time and in the light of modern views on exchange management. Its conclusion is that although the float may not have been “clean,” the intervention was probably justified by domestic objectives and the state of international capital markets.