An analysis of over 10,000 loans made by a major credit source in Keene, New Hampshire, from 1832 to 1897 is presented. The data sources are unique and include information on property ownership and wealth, occupation, involvement in businesses, age, and connections with the credit source. As time passed more funds were lent to borrowers out of the city and county, lending was used to support many new industrial and other enterprises, as well as for infrastructural and social capital investments. Many loans were made to individuals and businesses with close ties to the source of credit.

There has been some dispute about the impact of New Deal policies on the business climate. Some historians have argued that the New Deal frightened business, and others that it encouraged business. This paper analyzes the impact of the New Deal on business investment by looking at the response of investment to the outcome of the 1934, 1936, and 1938 elections, as well as the passage of certain New Deal legislation. The data reject the hypothesis that the New Deal frightened off business investment.

Based on the cost savings of tractors relative to horses, nearly twice as many farmers in the Corn Belt should have invested in tractors as actually did so in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, however, the proportion of farmers owning tractors jumped from 25 to 40 percent. I argue that financial barriers explain farmers' reluctance to buy this expensive invention during the 1920s, while two New Deal regulatory agencies altered farmers' investment climate and spurred the adoption of capital equipment.

The South's failure to industrialize more rapidly in the antebellum period did not lead to its immiserization. The South's terms of trade improved over the antebellum period so that its consumption potential expanded more rapidly than did production. Specialization in cotton production promoted a favorable movement of relative prices facing Southern producers. A customs union analysis shows that the South might have industrialized to a greater extent and might have raised its consumption potential further had it been able to impose an independent tariff on imports from all areas, including the rest of the United States.

Perhaps because the world had never before or since seen such a large proportion of national income devoted to accumulating overseas assets, the processes of British accumulation in the period from 1870 to 1913 have long been given disproportionate attention in the study of modern British economic history. Calculations based on C. H. Feinstein's latest studies of U.K. income, expenditures and product suggest that roughly half of the nation's annual savings took the form of net foreign lending during these years, savings averaging slightly less than ten percent of net national income. Undoubtedly, interest in these matters has been further augmented by the intriguing problem of the United Kingdom's loss of world leadership in both industrial output and per capita income during these same years.

This article explores the determinants of wealth for seventeenth-century Englishmen living in three very different environments—Worcestershire, East London, and Tidewater, Virginia. Wealth differences among these regions can be described in terms of the particular mix of occupational status groups, age groups, and literates each possessed. When all of these variables are accounted for, region becomes an insignificant determinant of wealth. Occupational status, predictably, had the primary influence on wealth, but the system, through provisions for age and education, also made definite allowances for the ability to use and consume resources efficiently.

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.

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.

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.

Comparing investment in transportation companies in Albemarle county, Virginia, and Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, I analyze why nineteenth-century internal improvements revolutionized the northern economy, but only seemed to increase the South's dependence upon plantation agriculture. In both counties local investors and financed early improvements.

Local governments played a notable and somewhat neglected part in the American movement for internal improvements. Their activities in aid of canals and railroads varied greatly in scale and method and in the scope of planning involved. They ran the gamut from the far-flung projects of great commercial cities striving for the dominance of the trade of vast areas to the donations of obscure rural townships trying only to make sure that the promised railroad should pass through their village rather than the adjacent crossroads. Among the greater cities, none played a more notable role than Baltimore in the promotion of internal improvements. Its total of railroad subscriptions, loans, and bond endorsements was about twenty million dollars—a figure of municipal contribution only exceeded by Cincinnati's investment in a city-owned railroad. Baltimore was in the field of internal improvements well before Cincinnati and remained in it long after such early rivals as Philadelphia had withdrawn. Baltimore's first investment in the Baltimore and Ohio was audaorized in 1827, and its last loan to the Western Maryland was made in 1886. It continued to vote stock and to appoint public directors to the board of railroad corporations until it sold its interest in the Baltimore and Ohio in 1890 and in the Western Maryland in 1902.

I can best summarize the content of this paper by exhibiting four quotations:

A trading community like early Victorian England, which can still profitably employ all its capital in its mills and ships, becomes indifferent to the acquisition of territory, and even tends to regard the colonies previously acquired as a useless encumbrance. That was the normal state of mind of our commercial classes during the middle years of last century. They dealt in goods, and in order to sell goods abroad, it was not necessary either to colonise or to conquer. To this phase belongs the typical foreign policy of Liberalism, with its watchwords of peace, non-intervention, and free trade. The third phase, the modern phase, begins when capital has accumulated in large fortunes, when the rate of interest at home begins to fall, and the discovery is made that investments abroad in unsettled countries with populations more easily exploited than our own, offer swifter and bigger returns. It is the epoch of concession hunting, of coolie labour, of chartered companies, of railway construction, of loans to semi-civilised Powers, of the “opening up” of “dying empires.” At this phase the export of capital has become to the ruling class more important and more attractive than the export of goods. The Manchester School disappears, and even the Liberals accept Imperialism. It is, however, no longer the simple and barbaric Imperialism of the agricultural stage. Its prime motive is not to acquire land, though in the end it often lapses into this elementary form of conquest. It aims rather at pegging out spheres of influence and at that sort of stealthy conquest which is called “pacific penetration.” The old Imperialism levied tribute; the new Imperialism lends money at interest.

As the key conveyance of nineteenth-century American industrialization and early experimentation with tariff policy, the antebellum textile sector has always received extensive attention by economic historians. In the past two decades, we have learned much about industrial financing, investment behavior, productivity growth, the nature of the production function, and the optimality of tariff policy, yet we remain ignorant still on some fundamental issues. One of these involves a better understanding of the equipment replacement decision under conditions of rapid growth, technological improvement, and variable tariff policies. But most importantly, the identification of sources of productivity improvement and their magnitude had remained inadequately understood until very recently with the appearance of Paul David's article in this Journal. David's important contribution applies aggregate production function analysis to textiles in an effort to isolate the determinants of labor productivity growth during the three decades preceding the Civil War. The model is neoclassical with a Cobb-Douglas specification, variable returns to scale, disembodied technical progress and with a learning variable explicitly introduced into the production function. David finds evidence of constant returns to scale, strong learning effects, high rates of disembodied technical progress, and improved labor quality, the latter sufficient to offset the alleged downward pressure on productivity attributable to a long-run decline in input (especially labor) utilization rates.

This article analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the market-purchased transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. Occupation was financed principally by printing large quantities of money. While some Southeast Asian countries had high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money and because of Japan's strong enforcement of monetary monopoly. Highly specialized Southeast Asian economies and loss of Japanese merchant shipping limited resource extraction.

This article investigates the impact of “learning-by-producing” on inventive activity. From 1870 to 1910, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak. Regional shifts in production did not lead to corresponding increases in invention. The location of inventive activity tended to mirror that of individuals with advanced technical skills appropriate to each industry. Consequently, scholars may have overemphasized the importance of learning-by-producing in accounting for geographic differences in inventive activity, and underestimated the significance of technical skills amongst the population.

This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain.

This article uses new linked full-count census data for Canada to document intergenerational occupational mobility from 1871 to 1901. We find significant differences among Canadian regions and language groups, with linguistic minorities experiencing notably lower rates of intergenerational mobility. International comparisons place Canada midway between other economies in the Americas and the most mobile European societies. Decompositions of overall mobility show that the Canadian experience shared the New World feature of high mobility from manual occupations, but also the Old World feature of greater persistence in white-collar jobs.

In this paper we shall try to do three things: first, to describe the economic conditions which prevailed before the arrival of Commodore Perry; second, to survey the economic policy of the Shogunate and the Meiji Government in responding to the impact of the opening up of the country; and third, to make a few general comments on some selected aspects of Japan's economic development between 1859, when three Japanese ports were opened to foreign trade, and 1894, when the Sino-Japanese War broke out. The latter date is chosen because it fairly clearly marks off the beginning of the rapid development of the modern sector of the Japanese economy.