In recent years economic imperialism in reference to Africa is being re-evaluated, and it is now sufficiently clear from the emerging literature on the subject that very few serious scholars would rigidly apply the classical interpretation or interpret the partition of Africa only in economic terms. One of the most significant recent contributions on the subject which has stimulated much useful discussion and is provoking further research is A. G. Hopkins' article “Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–1892.” He cites the case of Lagos in order to explore some neglected economic aspects of the partition of West Africa and deals with the economic aspects of the scramble for Africa. To Hopkins the critics of economic imperialism have tended to underrate all other economic motives.

Operating theories are more or less concealed in the structure of all historical writing. They are readily discerned when the theories are comprehensive and at variance with generally accepted ideas, as in the case of Thomism or Marxism. They are hard to detect when like Spencerianism they conform closely to the mores of American life. Writers may honestly deny in this latter case that they have any special theory; they are simply recording the “facts” from a “common-sense” viewpoint. But since theory must be either implicit or explicit, it is better for scholarly purposes that it should be explicit. Carefully formulated theory restricts unconscious bias, gives meaning to otherwise formless data, and is more likely to reveal unexpected relationships.

Intuition tells us that the scarcity of space on the earth's surface should be closely tied both to population growth and to economic growth. Population growth should make land more scarce by raising the demand for food and private space and by raising the supply of labor, a factor of production that must cooperate with land. Intuition says that economic growth should tend to do the same, all things considered. The demand for food, a prime land-using product, would be expanded little by a rise in per capita incomes, but the rent on land should be bid up somewhat by the growth of other inputs into production, such as skills and man-made equipment. Intuition also suggests that land scarity should in turn retard the growth of population and per capita incomes. If space, privacy, and food are expensive, children should seem relatively costly. At the same time, higher space rents should mean slower economic growth than would be experienced if man could manufacture extra land cheaply.

When Clapham began to teach economic history at Leeds in 1902 Schmoller had just finished his Foundations of Political Economy, and the first edition of Sombart's Modern Capitalism had just appeared. In the early editions of J. A. Hobson's Evolution of Modern Capitalism many aspects of the Marxian interpretation of history were effectively expressed and afforded a clear measure of the stimulus that economic history was to receive from this general approach. But these influences were not the dominant factor in Clapham's thought at the beginning of his career or at any later period. His interests in history came from Lord Acton and from Alfred Marshall. Marshall was anxious to draw him into the field of economic history, “he was eager to get historical work done.” Clapham says in the Inaugural Lecture, “… he pointed out to me tracts of economic history which needed someone's work. Then he pointed at me and said—‘Thou art the man.’ I hesitated then, for Acton's power was on me, as I hope it still is. But Marshall has prevailed.”

From the earliest period the communities of the Latin tribes of central Italy and of the remaining Italiots made use of a few slaves as herdsmen, field hands, and probably as domestic servants to meet the simple demands of their small-farm life. No doubt these slaves were employed also in the household weaving of wearing apparel, in the fabrication of those offensive and defensive weapons needed in the wars with their neighbors, and in the production of the tools required for the still simple operations characteristic of Italian farming of that time. Enslavement appears in the Laws of the Twelve Tables, which can safely be dated about 450 B.C. There is no mention of slaves in the two early treaties between Rome and Carthage, as given by Polybius. Livy tells us very briefly of the imposition of a five per cent tax upon manumissions, which was passed in 357 B.C. if we may trust the statement and accept his dating of it. The picture of early Roman slavery as gained from these few primary data, and from literary sources even less trustworthy, is that of a simple agricultural use of a slave population whose numbers were relatively small. This would hold true down to about 352 B.C.

The failure of French Canadians to settle the Canadian west before 1900, when substantial numbers of anglophones and Europeans were migrating, is a long-standing puzzle. Historians have relied mainly on cultural explanations. Using new data, we demonstrate that anglophones and francophones had very different personal characteristics, so that movement to the west was rarely economically attractive for francophones. However, large-scale migration into New England fitted French Canadians' demographic and human capital profile. Even if the United States had imposed immigration restrictions by the 1880s, this would not likely have diverted many French Canadians westward.

The Russian Industrial Society, the first national organization of commercial and industrial interests in the empire, attempted to win governmental support for a comprehensive program of economic development. It enjoyed some successes in the fields of tariff protection, factory legislation, and the conquest of Central Asia. The tsarist bureaucracy, however, proved unwilling or unable to implement rational reforms in such key areas as subsoil mineral rights, monopolies, and corporate law. Moreover, policy disagreements among the society's regional branches, especially those in Moscow, Warsaw, and Lodz, weakened the organization from the 1880s onward.

During the last four years before the outbreak of war in 1914 the people of England experienced an unprecedented combination of political strife and labor unrest. The struggle over the budget of 1909 had led to a constitutional crisis over the powers of the House of Lords in 1910–1911; suffragettes were resorting to obstructive and exasperating tactics to win the vote for women; the question of home rule almost resulted in civil war in North Ireland and brought what amounted to a threat of dereliction of duty by high military officers, who could not contemplate the use of force against the opponents of home rule; while the restlessness of labor brought a series of massive strikes in which the rank and file of workers often broke from the discipline of their leaders.

The federal policy of granting land in aid of railroad construction in the mid-nineteenth century has been the focus of many heated discussions. Both praised and attacked by contemporaries, it has remained a lively issue in the pages of history books and in journal articles. Several “land-grant legends” have developed, referring to different problems in the evaluation of these measures. At issue have been the question of the justification for land grants, the value of the benefits provided the railroads, and the determination of whether the government aid did provide net benefits to society as a whole. While the “land-grant legend” has been frequently buried, it has invariably been resurrected in one guise or another. In large measure this state of affairs has been due to the failure to specify fully the problems under discussion, and to approach systematically their resolution.

The Surplus Property Act of 1944 established several social objectives for the disposal of war surplus. In particular, small business was to be benefited; concentration was to be reduced. Such objectives are better considered as part of the war mobilization rather than the peacetime reconversion. While suggesting that concentration was not reduced, the evidence also suggests that concentration is not an inevitable consequence of war. Social objectives can be incorporated into war mobilization, but their realization involves a substantially higher cost.

Central banking institutions during the past quarter-century have been almost free of the constraints that inhibited their actions during the nineteenth century. The special conditions under which earlier central banking institutions were formed and operated frequently have been lost to view; and while contemporary observers have come to regard the first two Banks of the United States sympathetically, the functional evolution of these institutions within the framework of specie standards has been largely neglected. The period between the end of the Second Bank and the organization of the Federal Reserve System is subsequently treated as the Dark Ages of monetary policy, better forgotten than deplored.

Given the present state of the study of Chinese economic history, this survey ought either to be limited to a single paragraph—or else it should comprise a monograph of several hundred pages. Thirty pages of selected titles may leave the reader with a false impression that these are the cream of a very large crop; on the other hand, within this space I can barely adumbrate the thousands of potential sources—printed and in manuscript, ephemeral and lasting—that will eventually have to be digested before the economic history of China will be definitively written.

The revolutionary technological changes that have come to typify our modern industrial society were first felt in the New England textile industry. The American zeal for useful improvements that greeted the industrial revolution was counterbalanced by a patriotic fear that the ill consequences of European manufacturing would be repeated here. The textile manufacturers who introduced the factory system into the United States early in the nineteenth century found it necessary, in order to win a full measure of public support and secure workers in a land where labor was dear, to demonstrate that “the moral standards of the community would not be impaired.”

Since the end of World War II Americans interested in international economic affairs have faced a painful dilemma. Almost every set of international policies advanced during this period has called for the widespread use of American capital to assist in the development of underdeveloped areas in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The United States government has furnished much of this capital during the last decade, but private capital has borne a share of the effort in the past and may well be called upon for a larger share in the future. Unfortunately, in a period of frequent small wars, revolutions, and expropriations, American investors naturally hesitate to send their capital abroad if they can invest it profitably at home. One of the most vexing problems in modern international economic relations is that of predicting or assuring regular returns from American investments abroad.

In a recent Journal article Professors Ransom and Sutch (R & S) suggest “debt peonage” as a broad explanation for the course of southern economic development after the Civil War. They summarize their general thesis in the following three statements:

“(1) That because of the readjustments in agriculture and the difficulties in forming new banks under the banking laws, the South was unable to re-establish a viable network of commercial banks to serve her agricultural economy.

The British Workmen's Compensation Acts of 1897 and 1899 were “astonishing” to contemporaries and have not been adequately explained by historians. Although passed under a Conservative-Liberal Unionist Cabinet, these acts put heavy burdens upon industry and agriculture, interests that were very influential in both of these parties. “It was no wonder that Tories asked themselves what they were coming to, nor that the usual answer to the question was that they were being swallowed by Mr. Chamberlain.”

Nearly seventy-five years have elapsed since Henry Carey complained that the term laissez faire had become a meaningless symbol, an object, as he put it, of “word-worship.” If the task of definition seemed imposing in his time, it is not less so in ours. The concept has been used with abandon on various levels of political and economic discussion. It belongs to a whole category of catchwords in our social thought whose connotations, if they ever were precise, have become blurred through constant and polemical usage. They are dangerous labels for the historian. This paper seeks to analyze the ideas developed in Pennsylvania to oppose governmental action in economic life during the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. For the present purpose it is not a matter of significance whether one chooses to believe that any of these ideas are genuinely laissezfaire in character or not.