Hollywood converted to sound in three years. In comparison, Hollywood's conversion to color required more than three decades, and included a three-year period in which the share of color movies declined from 58 to 31percent. We investigate this puzzling adoption profile using detailed data on 7,022 movies between 1940 and 1959. These data indicate differences in studio size and complementarity between genre and color impeded the rapid diffusion of color. These data also indicate that disadoption followed weak returns to a wave of color releases that were encouraged by the introductionof a low-cost color process.

In the eighteenth century, Haiti was the world’s leading sugar producer, but when cane surged in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century, Haiti produced none. Instead, the land sat idle while workers emigrated to work on sugar plantations. I examine the hypothesis that historical property rights institutions created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production. I collect new data on land-use from 1928–1950 and a proxy for transaction costs. The evidence suggests transaction costs impeded the land market from responding to the sugar boom.

Any advance in our knowledge about the growth and development of the American colonial economy must first start with a balance-of-payments study. The trade of the thirteen colonies with other areas— principally Great Britain, Ireland, southern Europe, the Wine Islands, the West Indies, and Africa—certainly must have formed, together with the coastal trade between the colonies, a large share of the total market activity. My conclusions from such a study are that the description given of commodity trade by colonial historians has been accurate but that once services as well as goods are considered the picture changes to one where there are only small positive or negative balances remaining on current account for the various regions. As a result, I would conclude that long-term capital flows from Great Britain to the colonies were either small or nil during this period.

Our task here is to inquire into the relations between two familiar sets of phenomena—the economic development of the Western Hemisphere and the involvement of British investors, financiers, engineers, contractors, and financial groups in railways in that area. As a matter of convenience we shall look chiefly at the United States and Argentina, and at the time span of three quarters of a century preceding the First World War. It is no secret that during that period both countries underwent rapid development, whose contours included such matters as the effective occupation of new areas of vast extent; the growth of population, partly fed by immigration; the effective application of technological improvements to the exploitation of natural resources; an increasing complexity of the division of labor; and a rise in productivity and real income per capita, participated in by large segments of the population. During the same period, the Western Hemisphere was normally the outlet for from 40 to 60 per cent of British foreign investment, the United States and the Argentine being two of the countries chiefly affected. We are familiar with estimates that British investments in the United States, on the eve of the First World War, amounted to over 4 billion dollars, approximately 3 billion of which were in railway securities, and that something like half as much was invested in Argentina, with a somewhat smaller percentage directly in rails.

During the two decades prior to 1900, electrical manufacturing companies grew from small, single-plant firms, producing only a few items and employing several hundred workers, to large, multiplant organizations, with hundreds of products and thousands of employees. This change in the scale of operations required the invention and application of new organizational forms and new administrative procedures. The men who were responsible for these developments were among the first to recognize and solve the administrative problems of large industrial corporations. The work of these men is the subject of this paper.

Two ideas contrary to those of the existing literature are advanced. First, the early years of the Hudson's Bay Company/Northwest Company duopoly were characterized by passive rather than by predatory competition. Second, the Hudson's Bay Company initiated the changes that eventually led to predatory competition. The Company's financial crisis of 1809–1810 brought about by the decline in demand due to the Napoleonic Wars shocked it out of complacency and into aggressive competition.

Every economist must be pleased to start some hares; it can become embarrassing, however, when they begin to breed like rabbits. In the ten years since we first tried our slavery model in public, in Professor Gerschenkron's history seminar, more than thirty published arguments addressed to that model have come to our attention. We don't pretend to know whether that represents an increased output over preceding decades. Besides, in our youthful enthusiasm we gave the impression that we were disposing, once and for all, of a piece of intellectual game that was already rather high. In any event, the apparent egocentricity that turned up all those papers and articles may be explained, if not justified, by Ralph Barton Perry's dictum that every reader looks up two references in an index: sex, and his own name.

This note presents some statistical evidence on the growth and geographic distribution of membership in the Economic History Association. The interpretation suggests that, despite a reasonable growth of membership on a national basis, particular areas of the country are under-represented in the Association, relative to the probable extent of their interest in economic history. An attempt is made to identify the areas of under-representation and thereby to provide some guidance for missionary work.

In this paper I shall limit myself to various comments on integration narrowly conceived, that is, within the discipline of economic history itself, and to a few historical cases used to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of comparative method as a means to this end. Comparative study, as Miss Thrupp has stressed, scarcely represents a new departure in economic thought. The novelty seems to be rather in the almost universal appeal it now has for those who would explore the mysteries of change. This interest appears to be a consequence of the impact of recent developments in backward-area studies and the closely related pursuit of a general theory of growth; these tend to focus attention on different kinds and rates of growth and comparison becomes inevitable. In turn, accumulations of knowledge about economic change in very different contexts lead to the need for some means of correlating diese, partly for aesthetic reasons but also because a synoptic view of the landscape of change has its very practical use. Unless the whole field can be surveyed from a single point of view, and by this I do not mean the same point of view, it is very difficult to know where the need for more intensive exploration is greatest.

The turning point in the history of the Genoese merchants in Spain was the discovery of America and the subsequent opening of trading relations with the new continent. From then on, their ascent to economic predominance in Spain paralleled that nation's emergence as the dominant power of the sixteenth-century world. Fortune gave Spain two empires simultaneously, one in the Old World, the other in the New. Spain's unpreparedness for imperial responsibilities, particularly in the economic sphere, was the springboard for Genoese advancement. Strengthening and enlarging their colony in Seville —after 1503 the “door and port of the Indies” —the Genoese prepared to move across the Atlantic in the wake of Columbus.

The phenomenon of change lies at the core of economic and business history. Otherwise, in common with other branches of economics, we would be engaged in the dull task of describing and explaining the static state of the classical and neoclassical theorists. The historical economist deals with the field of dynamic economics on the largest possible scale. Furthermore, unlike the theorists of dynamic economics, he is under obligation to deal with actual situations as they have arisen, and to reach judgments in the light of all-important observable factors. This is a difficult assignment.

Monetary historians have contended that Free Silver advocates were inflationists seeking debt reduction. We offer an alternative interpretation using a theory of money demand with differential returns on nominal units and a nonoptimum nominal money stock. Our explanation is more logically appealing and more consistent with contemporary evidence. The restrictive coinage laws of the period produced chronic shortages, and our empirical analysis provides clear evidence of these shortages. A shortage of coins valued at a half-day's wage and less, raised transactions costs, produced hardship and spawned protest.