The most successful economies of modern, and perhaps earlier, economic history appear to have had “financial revolutions” that created innovative financial systems before they became leading economies. This suggests that good financial systems may have played a causal role in economic modernization. I identify the key institutional components of such financial systems. Using the United States and Japan as examples, I discuss how two financial revolutions occurred. Effective leadership on the part of strong-willed individuals was crucial in each case.

This article investigates the distributional impact of the abolition of “feudalism” during the French Revolution. Landlords ostensibly benefitted from laws permitting them to raise rents by the equivalent of the former tithe. Increasingly, however, the state appropriated this windfall by raising land taxes. Tenants ultimately shouldered a double burden of higher rents and heavier taxes, and they often responded with acts of evasion. But the new financial pressures on tenants and landlords were often offset—and occasionally overbalanced—by substantial productivity gains, which cushioned their disposable incomes in the face of these new obligations.

Standard treatments of U.S. agriculture assert that, before the 1930s, productivity growth was almost exclusively the result of mechanization rather than biological innovations. This article shows that U.S. wheat production witnessed wholesale changes in varieties and cultural practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without these changes, vast expanses of the wheat belt could not have sustained commercial production and yields everywhere would have plummeted due to the increasing severity of insects, diseases, and weeds. Revised estimates of Parker and Klein’s productivity calculations indicate that biological innovations contributed roughly half of labor-productivity growth between 1839 and 1909.

We present new estimates of the British industrial unemployment rate for 1870–1913, which improve on the Board of Trade's prior estimates. We use similar sources, but our series includes additional industrial sectors, allows for short-time working, and aggregates the various sectors using appropriate labor-force weights from the census. The resulting index suggests a rate of industrial unemployment that was generally higher, but less volatile, than the board's index. We then adjust our series to an economywide basis, and construct a consistent time series of overall unemployment for 1870–1999.

This article uses roll-call voting and constituency data to provide an improved understanding of how and why the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 divided the Democratic Party. The evidence suggests, first, that the predominance of southerners among Democrats who opposed the FLSA resulted in part from the widespread disfranchisement of low-wage workers in the South and, second, that Democratic opposition to the FLSA in the House of Representatives reflected a weakening of the coalition that had passed so much legislation during the earlier years of the New Deal.

The United States overtook Britain in comparative aggregate productivity levels primarily as a result of trends in services rather than trends in industry. This occurred during the transition from customized, low-volume, high-margin business organized on the basis of networks to standardized, high-volume, low-margin business with hierarchical management from the 1870s. This transformation from the counting house to the modern office was dependent on technologies that improved communications and information processing. The technologies were slower to diffuse in Britain as a result of lower levels of education and stronger labor-force resistance to intensification.

In the post–Second World War period the floor fell out of the market for films in the United States. However, while the average revenue of films fell, the “hit” end of the market sustained itself. The growing inequality in the distribution of revenues meant that the risks associated with high-budget productions could no longer be balanced against the steady earnings of medium-budget films. During the 1950s the “majors” all became distributor–financiers as they reduced their exposure to the risks associated with film production. In doing this they retained their dominant position in the industry.

Utilizing a large volume of archival documents, this study establishes for the first time the long-term trends in real wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, from the second half of the fifteenth century until World War I. A detailed consumer price index and nominal wage indices are constructed for the city of Istanbul for this purpose. These price and wage series are then inserted into a larger framework of price and wage trends in European cities during the same period.

How—and how well—do food markets function in famine conditions? The controversy surrounding this question may benefit from historical perspective. Here we study two massive famines that struck France between 1693 and 1710, killing over two million people. In both cases the impact of harvest failure was exacerbated by wartime demands on the food supply; we ask whether the crises were exacerbated yet further by a failure of markets to function as they did in normal times. The evidence, we conclude, is most consistent with the view that markets in fact helped alleviate these crises, albeit modestly.

Aujourd'hui ces matières paraissent d'une telle aridité qu'elles provoquent le vide, même au sein du parlement, si par hasard on les y discute…On ne voit plus des écarts de prix comparables à ceux des grandes années de famine de la fin du règne de Louis XIV: 1693 et 1709.Germain Martin (French historian) in 1908[Today these issues seem so stupifyingly dull that they produce an empty house, even in parliament, if by chance they are discussed there…. One no longer sees gaps in prices comparable to those of the years of famine at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1693 and 1709.] Martin, “Famines,” p. 150.

This article documents pre-1940 wage–rental ratios, land–labor ratios, the terms of trade, and other variables for nine countries in the periphery, and joins them to data previously collected for the greater Atlantic economy. Commodity-price convergence is found to have been stronger in the preindustrial Third World than in the industrializing Atlantic economy. A previously unnoticed Third World convergence in wage–rental ratios is also documented. It appears that relative factor-price convergence took place, even though average living standards diverged dramatically between center and periphery.

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

This article shows that the Whiskey Trust used exclusive dealing and unusually low prices to deter entry and competition. Evidence of this is based on a unique dataset that allows us to estimate a firm-level demand curve for the trust, and to construct direct estimates of marginal cost. This article also shows that the strategies employed by the trust failed to deter entry. Market structure and state-level antitrust enforcement account for the failure of these strategies.

We document how intermediaries shaped markets or, conversely, how market institutions constrained intermediaries. In Dijon, where the Estates of Burgundy’s debt amounted to nearly half of all bonds in that small market, there was limited need for intermediaries. In the 1740s the borrowing needs of the province expanded, and the estates began to borrow in Paris, where their debt remained a small fraction of the market, and where they relied on notaries to place their bonds and to create a secondary market. These developments assured the estates’ capacity to borrow and thus Burgundian autonomy from the French Crown.

This article addresses two related questions. To what extent did cities and towns provide African Americans adequate water and sewer services during the era of Jim Crow (1880–1925)? What motivated local governments to allow African Americans access to water and sewerage services? In light of the treatment African Americans received from state and local governments in areas such as education and police protection, it seems odd that blacks would have received any water and sewer service. Two explanations considered focus on fear of epidemic disease, and variation in the extent of residential segregation over time and across cities.

After beginning as a kind of outdoor poor relief, long-term indenture of poor children evolved into a specialized form of craft apprenticeship. Analysis of indenture terms indicates that relationships between end payments (“freedom dues”) and education and training clauses varied by region. In Boston, education and training clauses were associated negatively with freedom-dues clauses, but in Rhode Island and Charleston the relationship was positive. Variation in freedom dues to suit the needs of the master or overseer of the poor, without reference to the worker-child's own interests, resulted from the child's lack of advocacy during contract formation.

The weather-information problem faced by settlers of semi-arid regions of the Great Plains hindered their attempts to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes. Episodes of homestead settlement and collapse in western Kansas in 1893–1894 and in eastern Montana in 1917–1921 are examined. A Bayesian learning model indicates how new climate information was incrementally incorporated to revise views of agricultural prospects. Primary data show homesteaders' lagged response to new drought information and illustrate drought's differential impact on small farms. Dryfarming doctrine, despite its optimistic claims, was an imperfect response to drought. Indeed, some dryfarming practices hastened homestead failure.

“No one need be in doubt about the sharp change in climate that occurs somewhere between the 96th and 100th meridians. It can be felt on the lips and skin, observed in the characteristic plant and animal life, seen in the clarity and/or dustiness of the atmosphere, determined by measurements of rainfall and evaporation, tested by attempts at unaided agriculture. Practically every western traveler in the early years remarked the facts of aridity, though not all used the word ‘desert’. …”Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, p. 399.

We provide evidence that the problem of raising capital in the early days of the U.S. electric-utility industry motivated industry leaders to embrace state rate-of-return regulation in return for a secure territorial monopoly. Utility executives anticipated that this would lead to a reduction in borrowing costs. Using firm-level bond data for 1910–1919, we estimate a model and find that state regulation led to lower borrowing costs but that the magnitude of the reduction was small. We also find evidence that output of electric utilities in states with regulation was higher than output in states without regulation.

Racial or ethnic wage differentials are common in labor markets composed of easily identifiable groups. This article analyzes a rare source of historical wage data for nonwhite populations. An American labor-market survey of Manila in 1900 revealed that average Chinese wages were about a third higher than Filipino wages. This differential appears to have been in large part an overtime premium that compensated Chinese for their longer workdays; partly it reflected Chinese segregation into higher-paying industries. It is, by contrast, very hard to identify any “pure” ethnic wage premium.

This article presents new annual price indices of equities traded on British exchanges for the period 1870–1913, as a replacement for Smith and Horne's widely used index. The data set contains 40,677 observations on 3,103 securities issued by 2,740 companies, providing substantially broader coverage of the market: from 520 to 1,150 issues per year, compared with Smith and Horne's 25 to 77 securities. In addition, the data set contains information on shares outstanding, par values, and dividends, allowing the construction of weighted and unweighted return indices and price–dividend ratios. The new database suggests an agenda for further research.

Interindustry factor mobility is a crucial determinant of the income-distribution effects of exogenous changes in relative commodity prices. This examination of interindustry variation in wages and profits using data from manufacturing industries from 1820 to 1990 suggests that interindustry factor mobility may be strongly related to the processes of industrialization. Development in the nineteenth century produced a sharp rise in mobility (a decline in interindustry wage and profit differentials) due to rapid improvements in transportation and the introduction of factory production. Twentieth-century industrialization, involving greater reliance on specialized equipment and knowledge, reduced levels of interindustry mobility.