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.

Jules Michelet remarked that the forms of association “must differ … among the different countries, according to the diversity of national genius.” and Denis W. Brogan once said (he is surely one who does not merit the reproach): “Because we have studied only France, we have not understood even France.” The second remark might apply to the United States, too. There has been talk of the value of comparative study of labor movements, but comparatively little application of comparative methods to labor history. A comparison of the history of association in labor unions in France and the United States may therefore throw a little more light on the “national genius” of each country as well as on die behavior of each labor movement.

Professor Gabriel Kolko in his recent work, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916, presents an interpretation or the origin, motivation, and consequences of the movement for federal regulation of railroads which differs in important respects from that which has hitherto been generally accepted. Thus it has generally been held that railway regulation was a response to the demands of farmers and other shippers for protection against monopolistic and discriminatory tactics on the part of the railroads and that regulation was bitterly resisted by the latter. Kolko, on the other hand, holds that regulation was actually welcomed by the railroads as a means of securing the rate and profit stability which they were unable to maintain by their own action, and that “the railroads, not the farmers and shippers, were the most important single advocates of federal regulation from 1877 to 1916” (p. 3). He concedes that “the movement for federal regulation of the railroad system was not, in any strict sense, deliberately initiated by the railroads’ (p. 20) and that legislation could not have been passed without shipper support, but points out that shippers were either inarticulate or divided with respect to the kind of regulation, if any, desired, and that the railroads were always able to secure the support of enough shipper groups to insure passage of the legislation which they favored. Furthermore, the railroads welcomed federal as opposed to state regulation, since they regarded the latter as punitive and restrictive and less amenable to their influence than federal regulation.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

The effects of Federal and state land-grant policies on railroad investment, railroad policy, and regional economic development are too varied to be treated in less than a volume. And such a book would require much research that has not as yet been attempted. The following discussion presents only brief notes on a few of the reactions of railroad entrepreneurs to land-grant policy. These notes were accumulated in the course of research on other problems and are in no instance complete enough to warrant broad generalizations.

This article uses the history of the Whiskey Trust to explore the competitive effects of vertical restraints such as exclusive dealing. The Whiskey Trust distilled alcoholic spirits and bribed distributors not to carry competing brands of spirits. For the Whiskey Trust, exclusive dealing was an ineffective predatory strategy. Despite the trust's market dominance and manifold predatory strategies, it failed to preempt entry. The trust failed, in part, because its rivals could vertically integrate at low cost. Competition disciplined the trust more effectively than did numerous antitrust suits.

The discussion of the social character of the English revolution is carried on at present largely in terms of the well-known controversy over the gentry. The debate which has been conducted has undoubtedly been welcomed by all historians as a valuable stimulus to think afresh and more deeply about the seventeenth century. But the preoccupation with the gentry, instructive as it has been, has also had its disadvantages, for it has served, I think, to obscure how much a general judgment on the social origin and development of the revolution depends on a knowledge of many other topics besides those to which R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, and H. R. Trevor-Roper have drawn to our attention.

One of the most controversial economic issues confronting the American public during the nineteenth century was that of protection. The plea for a protective tariff had been raised as soon as the First Congress met in 1789. The issue was sharply debated off and on throughout the nineteenth century but never finally resolved. There is now a large literature relating the outcome of this issue to the economic and political interests of various involved groups.

It will perhaps clarify the remarks that follow if we observe at the outset that the economic history of Latin America is in its infancy. This is not to say that the development of economic institutions, the operation of economic systems, the formation and growth of economic activities and attitudes, and the formulation and execution of economic policy have gone unnoticed in the history of Latin America. It is only to state that the formal discipline of economic history, even the use of economic history as part of a title, are of recent date. As in the historiography of most areas of the world, political developments and personalities in Latin America have constituted the core of historiography, and even today the “new” interdisciplinary history of half a century ago in the United States or the more recent French school of “total” history have drawn few adherents to Latin America. Many factors may be adduced to explain the delayed interest in economic history, but one may hazard the guess that there is a positive correlation between the degree of criticism of the nature and function of an economy and both the quantity and quality of economic historiography. At least in the United States, economic history owes no small debt to a muck-raking tradition. In Latin America, on the contrary, the nature of the literate elite and the limits on education have tended to stifle until recently the development of a body of economic literature of protest and, by extension, of economic history.

Numerous empirical studies indicate that, as a result of rent-seeking behavior, public-sector workers are overcompensated relative to their private-sector counterparts, with pensions representing part of the difference. I present a history of the Federal Employees Retirement Act of 1920 and show that rent seeking by federal workers cannot explain several features of the act. Instead, I argue that the act represented an optimal incentive contract between Congress and civil service employees in which civil servants accepted mandatory retirement and a compensating wage differential in exchange for the federal pension plan.

In october 1959 a small group of scholars met under the auspices of the University of Chicago's Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change to discuss problems of research in Asian economic history. Papers prepared by two participants explored work already done in Indian economic history. It was felt that these two papers might be useful to others, those concerned with Indian economic history and those interested in comparative analysis.

In a recent issue of this Journal North and Thomas outlined a model of the rise and fall of the manorial system, with special reference to England. Unfortunately, their model contains a number of inaccuracies which weaken quite seriously its applicability. The propositions of the model are based upon a confusion of terms and an oversight of authorities, both of which have led to a questionable factual and theoretical interpretation. In the following paragraphs an attempt will be made to elaborate upon these criticisms, and to suggest an alternative approach.

I use new evidence from servant contracts, 1610–1890, to estimate male farm wages and the length of the work year in Japan. I show Japanese laborers were surprisingly poor and could only sustain 2–3 adults relative to 7 adults for the English. Japanese wages were the lowest among pre-industrial societies and this was driven by Malthusian population pressures. I also estimate the work year and find peasants worked 325 days a year by 1700, predating the “industrious” revolution in Europe. The findings imply Japan had a distinct labor-intensive path to industrialization, utilizing cheap labor over a long work year.

Differences in institutions are thought to be a key part of the explanation for large cross-country differences in per capita income. Unfortunately, recent empirical research suffers from severe endogeneity problems. In this paper we provide both a theory of why different countries have different institutions and a way of measuring this, which does not suffer from endogeneity. We focus on economies that were colonized by European countries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Institutions in these countries were shaped by their colonization experience and we can use the differences in these experiences as an exogenous source of variation in institutions. We focus on differences in state institutions that depended crucially on settlement patterns. We use data on the mortality of settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an instrument for current institutional differences and show that institutions are a major determinant of different income levels. In our basic empirical model, once we instrument for institutions, two-thirds of the variation in current per capita income is explained by them.

In The first half of the seventeenth century the northern mercan-Itile nations of Europe followed Spain and Portugal in flinging their Ncommercial frontiers westward to the New World. By the end of the century they had surpassed the Iberian nations in western trade and made of the Atlantic basin a single great trading area. Their economic enterprises created not only a crisscrossing web of transoceanic traffic but also a cultural community diat came to form die western periphery of European civilization. The members of this community were widely separated, scattered across three thousand miles of ocean and up and down the coasts of two continents. But the structure of commerce furnished a communication system mat brought these far-flung settlements together. The same structure proved to be a framework upon which certain important elements in colonial society took form. My purpose is to sketch certain characteristics of the Atlantic colonies in die seventeenth century which relate to these social consequences of commercial growth.

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.

Developments in industrial organization contributed to the lack of diversification in Britain's older industrial areas during the interwar period. The large-scale firm had not yet developed in appropriate industries to the point where large numbers of branch plants could be sent to the depressed areas (as they were after World War II), even if interwar macroeconomic policy had been more expansionary. At the industry level, barriers to new entrants and restrictive practices were high in the 1930s, precisely the period when the need for structural change in the depressed areas was most apparent.