Wyoming's Johnson County War of 1892 is the historical basis of later popular depictions of the West as violent, and it influenced the development of Wyoming. Many see this era as the end of the open range system and the ascendancy of stock ranching and farming. Popular depiction argues that the event was an act of vigilantism of large foreign-owned firms against small individual settlers. We argue that the war was a conflict of property rights systems and use a model developed by Alston, Libecap, and Mueller to explain why violence broke out in Johnson County in 1892.

Richer (the Rancher): We made this country. Found it and we made it … Made a safe range out of this. Some us died doin' it. We made it. Then people move in who never held a rawhide through the old days. Fenced off my range. Fenced me off from water. Some of them like you paw ditches, and take out irrigation water, and so the creek runs dry sometimes, and I got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no rights to the range. Stark (the Homesteader): You talk about rights. You think you got the right to say that nobody else has got any. Well, that ain't the way the government looks at it. Shane [Paramount Pictures, 1953]

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.

Despite certain common cultural elements, the component states of Malaysia—the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah—have each undergone a somewhat different historical evolution. But in the course of the last 180 years, they have evolved more or less a single regional economic system and common constitutional and administrative practices as the result of having shared British rule and influence. For this reason, this essay will confine itself principally to the period of British rule. Concern with an earlier period would mean involvement in the general economic history of the Malay Archipelago.

This study analyzes the content and distribution of shops in provincial England between 1550 and 1700. Its major finding is that although retail trade was declining at markets and fairs, most tradesmen did not develop product specialization until the mid-seventeenth century.

During the course of U.S. economic development, the institutions used to organize agricultural labor have undergone interesting and sometimes puzzling transformations. The transitions from wage contracting to tenancy observed in the post-bellum South and in nineteenth-century Iowa have been studied extensively.2 This paper evaluates the relatively neglected transition from wage labor to tenancy that occurred in the California fruit orchards during the period 1900–1910.3 Before 1903 Chinese and Japanese orchard workers were organized via the padrone system of wage labor, but in an abrupt series of events there ensued a shift into tenancy so dramatic that by 1909 contemporary observers noted that virtually all orchards were under tenant control. The fact that the new tenants were recent Japanese immigrants prompted investigations by the Immigration Commission as well as other agencies so that this particular shift into tenancy is documented in greater detail than those occurring in the South and in Iowa.

The paper examines the spread of sharecropping that followed a wave of investment in agriculture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Using results from the modern theory of share contracts, it argues that sharecropping was a means of risk sharing that favored both landlords and tenants. Although the evidence used in this paper comes from France, the results may well apply to other areas of early modern Europe.

The only official measure of overall Soviet munitions output in World War II, first published in 1965, was based on changes in values, not volumes, and grossly understates change in the level of real Soviet war production. Subsequently published official data on production of ground and air munitions in physical units, supplemented by information about real spending on naval munitions, provide foundations for a new index. During the war the USSR produced more munitions than Great Britain or Germany, but much less than the United States.

All scientific research requires at its initial stage as precise a formulation of the problem under investigation as is possible to the human mind. In a study of retardative factors in French economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the need for clarifying the implications of the subject and of removing possible ambiguities is particularly urgent. By economic development is meant here an increasing amount of goods and services which are customarily exchanged for money. I am eliminating from consideration many of the intangibles of life, which are important and which the French may have in abundance, like joie de vivre.

During the last twenty years Business History has become one of Economic History's most important subdivisions. This has been partly, but certainly not altogether, the result of prosperity. With highlevel employment and income the general attitude toward the businessman has changed. He is no longer popularly regarded as the personification of viliainy. In the “new Business History” he has fared very well indeed. He has not been restored to a place among the saints, but he certainly is back among the choir boys. There are two points of view on this whole development. One is to condemn the new Business History as a sinister plot on the part of Big Business to bamboozle the American public. The other is to regard the new Business History as the most promising of the three major developments that have taken place in Economic History during the last thirty years.

The belief that the state should, can, and must contrive to make its subjects wealthier, and that in part this can be done through its taxing powers, certainly is one of the most powerful concepts in modern times. Intuitively it seems that this belief must arise from important and strongly rooted developments starting far back in the history of Western thought and institutions. Economic historians concerned with the history of economic growth ought to be able to demonstrate which developments produced this belief, and when. But work on this highly interesting problem of origins has yet to be begun. The dimensions of the problem, at least, can be presented by sketching in the main developments for one country, France, over the whole period from a time when the concept of a beneficent national fisc obviously was still unborn to that point when it was alive and thriving. Viewed as an essay on the history of economic thought, this paper is a suggestion that some of the concepts concerning French mercantilism found in modern writings need to be improved. The questions to be raised are: At what point did influential persons in France begin to argue that by changing its tax policies the state could promote what we call economic growth? And when can we say that an important part of royal fiscal policy was aimed at promoting the wealth of the king's subjects?

The economic importance of the sanctuaries of antiquity has long JL been recognized. The Babylonian shrines were no exceptions; not only were the chief Mesopotamian temples religious centers, law courts, schools, and archive depositories, but they were also banks and mercantile establishments. Indeed, as fiscal institutions of the Babylonian economy, the importance of the sanctuaries cannot be overemphasized: “In financial or monetary transactions the position of the Babylonian temples was not unlike that of national banks; they carried on their business with all the added weight of official authority.”

In 1696 the British began to keep records of their imports and exports in terms of money values. For this purpose, tables of prices were prepared first for England, and subsequently for Ireland and for Scotland, with the rates based, it is said, on market conditions at the time. Some adjustments in the initial valuations were made in the early years, but thereafter, for over a century and a half, the same prices were used in calculating “official” values. For imports and re-exports they supplied the sole basis for computing money values throughout this period. For exports of domestic produce and manufactured goods, however, a concurrent series of declared values was begun when a convoy tax was imposed ad valorem in 1798; but this series, though continued after the war, has been overshadowed by the “official” valuations which attained something of the respectability of a time-hallowed tradition. Year after year through peace and war, dearth and plenty, high prices and low, the clerks meticulously multiplied their quantities by these unchanging rates. In other words, British “official” trade values became progressively more useless as measures of current market values until the system was reformed in 1854. As a result, historians and economists are faced with frustration or distortion in any question dependent on a fairly accurate knowledge of the course, or the terms, or the balance of British trade in the period.

How do changes to taxation policy affect the organizational choices of firms? Using historical firm data constructed from Japanese corporate genealogies, we examine the short-run impact of introducing a personal income tax (PIT) in 1887 on tax-motivated incorporation. Between 1880 and 1892, we find that the introduction of PIT increased the share of incorporated firms by more than 3 percentage points, indicating firms chose their organizational structure to avoid new taxation. Furthermore, our results suggest that a corporate income tax may have acted as a backstop to maintain revenue collected through PIT.

Since at least the seventeenth century the economic development of Spain has been limited because the rates of growth achieved in the peripheral areas of Catalonia, Valencia, and Vizcaya were greater than that of the interior under the old Crown of Castile. The stagnation of the Castilian interior not only created a dull market for manufactured goods, but conserved a persistently strong traditionalist faction which long hampered Spanish political development. The resulting tension between the interior and the more modern peripheral sectors of society dominates Spanish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.