Toward the end of the eighteenth century Spanish America had about 400,000 slaves, which made 3 percent of the population. Before this time the importance of slavery had been greater, having received a large stimulus because of the sharp demographic decline of the natives following the Conquest. The arrival of Africans meant that in 1650 the proportion of slaves to total population was from 5 to 10 percent.

Theories of the demographic transition often center on the rising price of children. A model of fertility derived from household production in the antebellum United States contains both own children and slaves as inputs. Changes in slaveholdings beget changes in the marginal product of the slaveowners’ own children and, hence, their price. I use panel data on slaveowning households between 1850 and 1870 to measure the slaveowners’ own fertility responses to exogenous changes in slaveholdings. Results indicate a strong, negative correlation between own child prices and fertility.

Writing in 1845 Friedrich Engels (and with him many other informed contemporaries) had few hesitations in pointing out the driving forces of the epochal transformation he was witnessing:

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and the machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognized.

Between 1933 and 1973 the federal government funded the construction of over 1 million units of low-rent housing. Using county-level data, I find that communities with high densities of public housing had lower median family income, lower median property values, lower population density, and a higher percentage of families with low income in 1970. However, I find no negative effects of public housing in 1950 or 1960, implying that long-run negative effects only became apparent in the 1960s. The effects found in 1970 are partially due to a decline in human capital.

We explore the effects of human capital on workers during the latter nineteenth century by examining the U.S. Navy. Naval officers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned for their specialized training. We compile education and career data for officers from Naval Academy and navy registers for the years 1858 to 1907. Wage premia for “engineer-skilled” officers deteriorated over their careers; more traditionally skilled officers enjoyed higher gains in earnings and more frequent promotions. This compelled those with engineering skills to leave the service early, hindering the navy's capacity to further technologically develop.

Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the greater profitability of the mergers indicates they were a better fit to the economic environment than their smaller predecessors, their creation was only made possible by a special combination of historical circumstances.

The relation of theoretical economics to empirical historical analysis has been one of the central problems of economic historians ever since the recognition of economic history as a separate discipline. Recent studies in logic and philosophy, by constructing new frames of meaning for both theory and history, have opened up several avenues for a fresh approach to this and other problems of importance to the historian and the economist.

The analysis summarized below was made in an attempt to study long-term changes in the level and composition of national income in the United States. For reasons that will become dear, this attempt had to be limited to measures for years since 1870; but before this decision was reached, I had to scrutinize and reject the current and rather widely used estimates for the years prior to 1870. The notes below summarize the results of this scrutiny and may be of interest to other workers in the field.

The mainsprings of the entrepreneur's activity are his expectations of profit. Being aspirations, these are rarely expressed, but they are founded on objective facts—upon the experience of profits actually earned. Until the days of the limited company or corporation, actual profits were close secrets. Few records survive of the profits of individual enterprises before the nineteenth century, and little is known of general levels of profits and profit expectations. This paper attempts to throw some light on the subject by an exploration of some financial records of the English shipping industry in the decades around 1700. The records are of special interest because the assets of this industry were expensive and long-lived units; it was natural to relate earnings to an annual rate of return on the capital invested in those units. The industry was, moreover, a large and rapidly growing one.

This article investigates the feminization of poverty prior to 1960 by focusing on three factors that contributed to the increase in the propensity to form female-headed households and to the poverty rate among such households. Compared with 1939, households headed by prime-age women in 1959 included fewer adults, thereby reducing earnings potential. The earnings level at which such women formed independent households was lower relative to the poverty line; and although higher earnings allowed more women to form independent households, the increase was not large enough to lift some of these households out of poverty.

If the Town of Birmingham or Sheffield etc. have reason to apprehend that Manufactories are set up from time to time in any foreign Countries, thro' the means or by the assistance of English workmen from hence, who not finding the advantages such as they expected etc. may be desirous of returning—and if any set of Traders chuse to enter into an agreement to encourage the return of such men by promising them Employment the same as before and to contribute to the expence of their Journey home in such Terms as they shall Judge best, the King's Minister at the respective Courts shall have orders to make it a particular object to enquire about such Manufactories and Men, to make them acquainted of such an Agreement, and to give them every Assistance and Encouragement possible for their Return…. Lord Dartmouth to Matthew Boulton, n.d., Assay Office Library, Birmingham

Using newly collected data, this article compares the wealth and status of New York City households who owned corporate stock to the general population both in 1791, when there were only two corporations in the state, and in 1826, when there were hundreds. The results indicate that although corporate stock was held principally by the city's elite merchants in both periods, share ownership became more widespread over time among less affluent households. In particular, later corporations were owned and managed by investors who were less wealthy than the stockholders of corporations created in earlier, less democratic periods.

A reconsideration of regional economic development during the antebellum period is underway. Emphasis thus far has tended to center on economic aggregates, on one region (the South) or on a single sector (agriculture). While the results of this work have altered our understanding of the antebellum South's relative economic position—or at least have sharpened the debate on the issues—comprehension of the role and position of the period's industrial sector remains faulty, largely because it has been derived from indirect evidence.

The Old Poor Law has recently found a forceful defender in Mark Blaug, who in two articles has challenged the critics of England's first public welfare system and displayed the clay feet of that towering structure of words, the evidence for the 1834 Report. This is a notable achievement, but Mr. Blaug's case should not be accepted in toto: indeed, that it has survived so long without criticism is surprising. G. R. Elton felicitously referred to one of his critics as a “self-appointed hound of heaven,” but scholars who propound provocative theses are likely to provoke responses. Mr. Blaug's interpretation of the Old Poor Law is, to at least one “selfappointed hound,” eminently provocative.

There is widespread agreement among historians of the colonial period, as there was among contemporary observers, that a significant deficit existed in the American colonies' balance of trade with Great Britain. That a large deficit did exist in the late colonial period is shown by estimates of commodity trade given in Table 1 for the period 1768 through 1772 (for which period statistics of all legal overseas trade exist in the “American Inspector-General's Ledgers”). It is clear from Table 1 that the overall deficit in the commodity trade with the British Isles was due mainly to the deficits incurred by New England and the middle colonies. Similarly, it appears that on the average for this five-year period, the southern colonies, as well, incurred a deficit—although a small one—in their commodity trade with Great Britain.

Based on findings in Massachusetts probate records, 1650–1753, this paper argues that the average value of consumer goods among farmers and other rural inhabitants in that colony did not decline over the course of the colonial period but fluctuated around an average value little different from that for an equivalent segment of the population at risk in Maryland at the turn of the eighteenth century. Similar findings by Jackson Turner Main for.colonial Connecticut extend this absence of trend to a wider area of New England and to the years immediately preceding the American Revolution.