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.

Recent studies, when taken together, suggest that the bureaucratic elites of nineteenth-century Germany and Japan were much less successful in stimulating economic development than has been traditionally asserted. Direct government investment was neither extensive nor successful. Government-sponsored institutional change, notably in financial structures, had little if any beneficial impact. Development in both nations resulted from the gradual emergence of a commercial culture, and on world factors exogenous to government policy. The bureaucratic elites failed to adjust to changed circumstances, instead leading both nations into disastrous wars. These results call into question development strategies based on central government control.

This article uses a variety of data in a simple regression framework to test various hypotheses about the regional differences in U.S. bank rates of return existing before 1915. We find that the observed pattern in the return differences is a function of the measures of bank returns used in previous studies, regional differences in economic conditions, restrictions on interstate branch banking, and private bank minimum capital requirements. These results are inconsistent with most of the bank monopoly-power hypotheses in the literature.

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 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.

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.

This article examines the establishment in the 1830s of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company and the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. Utilizing manuscript letters, company records, and government reports, the author contends that conservative financiers, exemplified by Isaac and Arthur Bronson of New York City, structured both firms in an effort to reform the speculative practices of commercial banks and to move capital into the agricultural sector, particularly in the West. The trust company's development also marked an important step in the financiers search for more efficient methods of capital mobilization and formation.

I test the hypothesis advanced by Richard Easterlin and others that the importation of modern technology and prospects for economic development in the Third World are principally a function of the local population's formal schooling. According to orthodoxy, manufacturing more than any other sector should repay investment in human capital. Yet the correlation of schooling with the manufacturing sector is much lower than with the mineral sector, an enclave in colonial economies and a symbol of underdevelopment.

Comparing the dating of turning points of fertility with real wage trends for the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Wrigley and Schofield reported that an average of 50 years elapsed between changes in real wages and in fertility. Using a formal statistical procedure, it is shown that over these three centuries the average lag length was closer to 16 years. With eighteenth-century regional wage data the estimates of average lag length range between 12 and 16 years.

This paper reexamines the well-known increase in cotton production in the postbellum American South, revealing a rather less well understood pattern. The shift to cotton was confined to the Piedmont area of Georgia and South Carolina; it was not a phenomenon of the entire South. The changes in cotton production between 1860 and 1880 followed patterns quite different from those shown in an analysis of 1880 alone. And the 1880 pattern is best explained by the racial composition of the inhabitants, as noted originally by DeCanio, not the tenure variables emphasized in much of the existing literature.

The paper presents an estimate of the limits to British economic growth in the period 1870–1914. It is argued that in contrast to the historical experience, vigorous and effective exploitation of the technological possibiites of the period would have required the relative expansion of some sectors—most of which, like engineering, were growing in relative size in any case—and the relative contraction of others. The conservatively estimated gains from such counterfactual sectoral shifts of economic activity were found to be of the order of 25 percent to 50 percent of British GNP in 1913. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why opportunities of this magnitude were not seized.

A Weakness often apparent in interpretations of economic history lies in failure to evaluate properly the factor of relative location and the mechanism of cultural diffusion through which it operates to affect the changing character of regions. In studies of the historical geography of New Zealand, for example, extant interpretations have both emphasized an almost teleological view of unilinear cultural descent and shown a strong tendency toward environmental determinism. Neither of these philosophies or approaches in the writing of history has proved satisfactory in itself, but, taken together (antithetical though they may seem), they have provided a deceptively simple interpretive base upon which there has been almost universal reliance.

Most students of Jacksonian America are familiar with the Locofocos of New York through the interesting and informative history of the party which its secretary, Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, published in 1842. But Byrdsall himself was primarily interested in the antimonopoly features of his party's program, and therefore his history all but ignores the even more significant monetary policy of the Locofocos. At the present time in historical writing, it is fashionable to emphasize the role played by the Jacksonian movement as a whole in liberating the expanding American economy from the fetters of a dying mercantilistic approach to business enterprise. There is much to be said for such an interpretation. But the Jacksonians faced toward many meccas, and one of the most articulate and widely known groups which rallied around the Jackson standard—the Locofocos—cannot be trimmed to this pattern.

This paper offers the hypothesis that the development of the textile industry in the South was shaped by the fact that by 1870 most experienced workers lived in the Piedmont. Thus, a firm which wished to hire experienced workers would have been led to choose the Piedmont; similarly, mills producing more difficult finer count cloth would have chosen the Piedmont in order to hire experienced workers. Finally, the persistence of a virtually all white workforce may be explained by the fact that most experienced workers were white and would have resisted working in integrated mills.

The power loom, which had almost completely replaced the hand loom in America by 1860, remained the center of continuous technical development until about 1880. The main effects of the improvements were to increase the speed at which the looms could be operated and to decrease the amount of attention a weaver had to devote to a single loom. Estimates of plain looms tended by one weaver range from four to twelve; six is the most frequently cited figure, based upon the census report for 1880. The number of looms a weaver could tend was limited because of the frequent need—at least once every eight minutes, or about one hundred times a day—for him to stop the loom to place a new bobbin of yarn in the shuttle. With the number of looms per weaver set at about six and allowing for certain improvements in carding and spinning, weaving costs formed at least half of the total labor cost of manufacturing textile fabric.

This paper deals with the relationship between tonnage capacity and utilization of the Erie, Welland and St. Lawrence River canals before 1850. Estimates are presented for the capacities of the canals, as built and modified. Comparison with the actual tonnage carried eastward for selected years shows that the British canals were grossly and increasingly underutilized, while the Erie's utilization was closely correlated with its capability, particularly through its eastern half. Reasons for this situation are given and it is argued that had British funds been redirected away from canal enlargement and applied to the construction of vessels and harbor facilities, the British might have entered upon a prosperous carrying trade within North America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

This paper offers a new interpretation of Canadian Prairie settlement during the “wheat boom” period. Rather than use a Nerlovian model on which most recent work has been based, I develop a method of simulating the extension of the feasible region of cultivation: the area on which farming is profitable. The model is applied to a wheat-growing district of Saskatchewan that experienced rapid settlement from 1898 to 1911. Comparisons of the actual area of cultivation with the simulated feasible region indicate that settlers responded quickly to changes in the profitability of wheat farming. I also find that the extension of rail lines and the increase in mean wheat yields accounts for nearly all of the increase in the feasible region.

During the winter of 1867–1868 readers of Le Temps were entertained by a series of articles on the municipal finances of Paris by one of the paper's sharp-tongued contributors, the republican deputy Jules Ferry. The substance of the articles was not original, nor were they the most revealing of the many publications on the subject that appeared during the ‘sixties, but they were cutting and witty, and in 1868 Ferry republished diem as a booklet with an arresting title, The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann. (Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann was a pun on Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, a play presented at the Odéon in 1851 and later set to Offenbach's music.) When more analytical studies were forgotten, Ferry's work was remembered. The title found its way into popular histories, and for most people, Baron Haussmann's financing of the rebuilding of Paris is still something seen darkly through the glass of Ferry's political pamphlet.