The present study dealing with Russia and Germany undertakes to investigate the practical effect of tariffs on business and entrepreneur rather than the oft-discussed role of tariffs in international politics. Evidence from German industrial archives demonstrates that businesses were less concerned with tariff issues than one might expect from firms depending on exports. It shows that impediments other than customs duties (expenditures for credit, service, freight, investment, marketing; and competition, restrictions imposed on government orders, subventions, production costs abroad, technological changes) by far overshadowed inhibiting effects of tariffs. Circumspect responses of the entrepreneur helped to minimize the economic role tariffs played.

As Fritz Redlich has had occasion to point out, business history is neither of American nor of recent vintage–that interest in company histories which began on the Continent early in the nineteenth century had by 1900 prompted at least one prominent German scholar to suggest how a study of business might be developed into an academic discipline. What was new in the United States was the term “business history,” and what is more relevant for my comments in this paper were the circumstances that led to its emergence as a special field and the effect that this separation has had on the relationship between business history and economic history.

We apply disjoint principal components analysis to study institutional influences on the course of poverty in the nineteenth century. Classificatory data summarize varied facets of economic and noneconomic institutional structure and change.Four sets of countries are distinguished by characteristics of the course of poverty. The components models show that the impact of economic and demographic changes (export expansion, marketization, industrial expansion, immigration) have consequences for poverty that vary greatly between and within country sets, depending on the character of institutions: above all, land systems, dependence relationships, and political institutions.

A chronology of invention in farming is given, based on patent data, for England between 1611 and 1850. The chronology is explained using market analysis. Technological constraints determined the timing of some inventions, most notably for fertilizers. Relative input costs explain the early development of the seed drill and the threshing machine. Inventive output also depended on the market for food. The overall level of patents issued was related to the level of population and to changing food prices.The output market for food was influencing invention through of population growth on the advance of farming technology.

I Take it that what lies in the back of the minds of most of us when a subject like this comes up is the problem of the relation between economic unrest and political and social change, and more especially, the kind of change we call a revolution. We all know those for whom the solution of this problem is very simple: they say “look for the economic motive” as innocently as if they said “cherchez la femme.” Even at a more mature level of thinking the problem is still often put in such a way that something economic always lies at the bottom, or pulls the trigger, or provides the main impulse, or—and this is the precious word—“determines” everything.

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.

The incidence of fatherlessness among English emigrant servants was measured using contracts recorded in London between 1682 and 1686. This incidence was relatively high and systematically related to the servant's age, gender, county of origin, occupation, and father's occupation. Many emigrant servants were youths who had lost their fathers and lacked alternative support in England. Fatherlessness helps explain why the short-run supply of emigrant servants was relatively inelastic, and why some unskilled servants continued to migrate to America in spite of competition from slave labor.

The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State.

The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels reflect contemporary diets rather than historical diets.

During the late 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed a series of area descriptions with color-coded maps of cities that summarized mortgage lending risk. We analyze the maps to explain the oft-noted fact that black neighborhoods overwhelmingly received the lowest rating. Our results suggest that racial bias in the construction of the HOLC maps can explain at most 4 to 20 percent of the observed concentration of black households in the lowest-rated zones. We also provide evidence that the Federal Housing Administration had its own mapping strategies when evaluating mortgages and relied relatively little on the HOLC maps.

The relocation of Europeans across the North Atlantic during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was the culmination of the longest-lived and most widely documented transoceanic migration of modern times. This enormous population transfer was a great human drama, a major international demographic shift, and a massive historical experiment in cultural transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization. This migration was also a complex and powerful travel business containing both risks and rewards for its three fundamental participants: the movers, the moved, and the sovereign authorities on either side of the borders being traversed. Prior studies have not adequately explained this business nor appreciated the extent to which the various strategies for dealing with its associated risks were crucial, largely congruent, and self-reinforcing elements of the overall migration process.

The onset of the Great Depression did not spark a surge in personal bankruptcy. For debtors in default, state garnishment law played a significant role in the decision to file for bankruptcy. Only states that made it easy to garnish a debtor's wages experienced significant increases in bankruptcy as a consequence of the Depression.

The material progress of an area, large or small, depends upon its adaptability in facing up to the continuous pressures exerted the world economy. What determines such flexibility remains as yet, despite recent research on this matter, an open question. This investigation of the Aachen-area woolen trades provides no new answer. All it pretends to do is to stress those strategic aspects of the institutional setting which, by their influence upon demand and supply conditions, point to some of the issues that might have relevance for an understanding of this important problem.

Empirical evidence from the Third World on the impact of early industrialization on welfare has produced new ideas on relations between growth, distribution, and the quality of life. Historical welfare must also be reassessed with less emphasis on material living standards. Distribution should be more systematically analyzed, and quality of life indicators considered. By adopting the approach, historians will revitalize old debates and make these more relevant to issues in modern development studies. Historians also need to investigate welfare themes in recent and comparative history to a greater extent than hitherto, which requires closer integration between economic, social, and political history.

Scholars have long held strong views about the nature and extent of grain storage in early modern Europe. Direct evidence on the issue is quite poor and inconclusive.1 Randall Nielsen's ambitious attempt at solving the problem in a recent issue of this JOURNAL therefore deserves serious attention.2 Like others before him, Nielsen uses inferences from price behavior in assessing the nature of grain storage. Nielsen identifies three distinguishing implications of profit-maximizing storage for grain price structure.