Britain's textile industry contracted sharply in the interwar period due to the growth of domestic industries in many of its export markets. Lazonick and Mass argue that, because this growth was inevitable, British entrepreneurs should not have focused on the less developed countries. This article questions whether the interwar growth of the Indian textile industry was inevitable. A quantitative study of Indian import demand and production techniques suggests that the rapid growth of the industry was due to exogenous events—postwar British inflation and change in the Indian political regime—rather than to the natural evolution of Indian productivity.

The contract construction industry today represents one of the most important sectors of the American economy. Total new construction in recent decades has accounted for nearly one-half of the Gross Private Domestic Investment, while non-farm residential building alone accounts for nearly one-quarter of GPDI.

We test for the presence of market discipline in the banking sector in early-twentieth-century Mexico. Using financial data from note-issuing banks between 1900 and 1910, we examine whether bank fundamentals influenced the patterns of withdrawals and of note issue. We show that fundamentals were a strong determinant of bank withdrawals and note issue, indicating that market discipline was an important feature of the banking system in this period. This result crucially depends on correcting for selection bias generated by the exit of several banks in the 1907 crisis.

The Greek hyperinflation started during the Axis occupation and was the result of an excessive reliance by the puppet government on the inflation tax. The inflation reached a peak in November 1944 after liberation. The Greek government undertook three stabilization efforts spread over eighteen months before price level stability was achieved. The final effort involved fiscal reform and the creation of an independent supracentral bank. Controversy surrounds the origin and nature of the transition costs involved in stabilizing an economy. The Greek stabilization cannot resolve all the issues raised.

The first order of business for the new Congress under the Constitution of 1787 was raising revenue to fund the government's operation and to service the public debt. On 8 April 1789, two days after the first Congress achieved a quorum, James Madison introduced a proposal to levy duties on imported goods. This tariff proposal became one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Congress and was signed by President George Washington on 4 July 1789.The author thanks the National Science Foundation for providing partial research support.

Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine was a poor and backward economy. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is accordingly often considered the classic example of Malthusian population economics in action. However, unlike most historical famines, the Great Famine was not the product of a harvest shortfall, but of a major ecological disaster. Because there could be no return to the status quo ante, textbook famine relief in the form of public works or food aid was not enough. Fortunately, in an era of open borders mass emigration helped contain excess mortality, subject to the limitation that the very poorest could not afford to leave. In general, the authorities did not countenance publicly assisted migration. This article discusses the lessons to be learned from two exceptional schemes for assisting destitute emigrants during and in the wake of the famine.

This paper shows that the best practice of American methods for producing iron in 1890 was slightly better than the methods employed in Great Britain. It argues that the difference in technique was not of sufficient magnitude to have any bearing on Britain's “decline” as an industrial power. Profits in America are shown to be quite large, and it is hypothesized that these profits arose because the Americans did not anticipate the growth in the demand for pig iron.

Few economic historians have addressed the impact of poor health on economic productivity.1 This relationship, neglected and poorly understood, is the subject of my dissertation. Specifically, the dissertation examines the effect of a chronic debilitating disease on agricultural productivity in the American South between 1860 and 1940. As is well known, per capita gross agricultural output dropped sharply during the Civil War decade and remained low until 1910. Contrary to what one would expect, between 1870 and 1910 agricultural output was lowest in sandy soil regions and highest in regions composed mostly of clay soil. A rapid expansion of per capita agricultural output occurred after 1910. The income decline of the Civil War decade and subsequent increase of the post-1910 era were also related to soil region, with the greatest income swing occurring in sandy soil regions.

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

The mainstream of Russian historiographical studies holds that at the turn of the century peasant economic conditions were in a state of near collapse. In one of the poorest parts of the empire three measures of that economic impoverishment were seriously in error: draft animals were incompletely inventoried, and the meanings of both land leasing and fallow reductions were misinterpreted. These methodological errors have systematically distorted prevailing discussions about the wealth and poverty of peasant farms in Voronezh. Accumulating evidence is beginning to suggest reopening the question of the severity of the Russian “agrarian crisis” on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

This article uses the Bateman-Weiss samples of manufacturing firms from 1850 and 1860 to estimate the labor and total factor productivity of southern and midwestern manufacturing industries in the late antebellum period. The results indicate rapid growth in productivity, especially in the South. The article also demonstrates a positive association between measured productivity, firm size, and urbanization. Differences in manufacturing performance between the South and the Midwest are shown to be crucially dependent on the extent of markets within the two regions.

The Upcountry of the Lower South was located on the periphery of the antebellum cotton economy, but some of its subregions were integrated into the market system in the 1850s. An analysis of sample counties in the Georgia Upcountry demonstrates that the spread of market production into the western half of the region depended on local development which created opportunities for diversified market production and increased household wealth through capital gains on improvements. The absence of market development in the eastern half of the region, in contrast, limited the wealth of farm households, reinforcing their economic isolation.

I'm honored by this assignment: partly because I think after-dinner speeches are a necessary combination of regularizer and tranquilizer; also because it is a pleasure to share in our silver jubilee before silver vanishes from circulation. I wonder what the Association will do when the golden jubilee comes round. But the last two words of the title were not of my choosing, and when the program came I had to consult my dictionary. There I learned that “to evaluate” means “to ascertain the numerical value of”—which suggests I am to talk in digits. As for “reflective,” the good book says “throwing back images, light, etc., as in a mirror.” Of late years, since I gave up using a hairbrush and took to an electric razor, I haven't done much looking into mirrors; and when I do so my bifocals compel me to stand so close that the view is limited in area or to move far back and thereby get width and depth of vision.

The survivor technique is applied to a virtually complete set of plant and output data to determine the extent of scale economies in the plug, smoking, snuff, and fine-cut branches of the tobacco industry between 1897 and 1910. The data indicate that the relative cost advantage of large tobacco factories was substantial, with facilities of minimum efficient size often requiring market shares approaching 10 per cent of U. S. output. These results support one of the principal themes of The Visible Hand—that the realization of scale economies motivated the consolidation movement in American manufacturing at the turn of the century.

Historians argue that in late eighteenth-century North Aerica, apprentices often ran away form their masters. Masters’ inability to write enforceable contracts, the argument goes, sparked the decline of traditional apprenticeships. This article addresses the issue of enforcement. I analyze an apprentice’s incentive to run away and the role of enforcement with detailed archival evidence form Montreal. These data cast doubt on the claim that masters were unable to construct enforceable contracts and call into question the severity of a runaway problem.

The boll weevil's impact on southern agriculture poses a dilemma. Micro-level evidence suggests the weevil triggered a transition out of cotton, but macro-level indicators fail to register much long-term impact. Econometric simulation of boll weevil impact—taking into account the low demand elasticity for southern cotton, differences between states in the timing and levels of infestation, and long-term supply and demand shifts independent of the weevil—shows that the two sets of evidence are not inconsistent.

Previous studies explain the extension of royal power in fifteenth-century France by the professionalization of military combat or by the commercialization of economic activity. Neither approach can account for the turnaround in Charles VII's fortunes between 1435 and 1445. Using Lösch's model of spatial competition to examine the determinants of state borders, we suggest that the key factor in the formation of the French hexagon was an innovation in artillery projectiles that increased military scale economies. A reduction in state economic intervention apparently accompanied this development rather than the increase suggested elsewhere.