The old-regime monarchy, particularly during the reign of Louis XIV, did much of its borrowing through the mediation of privileged corporate bodies that sought lenders on the private market and then acted as guarantors against royal default. After comparing the creditors of various privileged bodies and considering the reasons why some were more successful than others in attracting a wide circle of creditors, this study argues for a reconsideration of the constitutional-absolutist dichotomy in the historiography of the early modern financial revolution.

It is widely agreed that the burden of housework in the industrialized West did not decrease as much as might be expected since 1880, and may have actually increased for long periods. The article proposes a new explanation: that increases in knowledge on the causes and transmission mechanisms of infectious diseases persuaded women that household members' health depended on the amount of housework carried out. The article traces the origin of this knowledge in the scientific developments of the nineteenth century and describes the mechanisms by which households were persuaded to allocate more time and resources to housework.

Economics, like geology, is an historical science. Geology has made incredible advances by accepting it is an historical, rather than a laboratory science. Economic historians can help economics make similar advances by adopting the research strategies of modern geology. Intensely empirical and global in their range, today's geologists focus on the historical remains of shocking, usually catastrophic, events in the earth's past. Already empirical and global, economic historians have ample shocks to study whether their specialty is population, technology, or institutions. A few examples of the possibilities should stimulate us to reinvigorate our parent disciplines of economics and history.

Early North American railways chose different track gauges partly on the basis of differing engineering traditions and partly for mutual compatibility. The resulting dynamic process produced nine district common-guage regions by the 1860s. Growing demand for interregional traffic and increasing among railways yielded incentives to resolve this diversity, and the specific regional pattern of gauges led to selection pf 4'8.5” as the continental standard. The case offers support for aspects of differing views on the role of path dependence in determining features of the economy.

Did late-nineteenth-century U.S. tariffs promote infant industries? After earlier failures, the tinplate industry became established and flourished after receiving protection with the 1890 McKinley tariff. Treating producers' entry and exit decisions as endogenous, a probability model is estimated to determine the conditions under which domestic tinplate production will occur. Counterfactual simulations indicate that, without the McKinley duties, domestic tinplate production would have arisen about a decade later as U.S. iron and steel input prices converged with those in Britain. Although the traiff accelerated the industry's development, welfare calculations suggest that protection does not pass a cost-benefit test.

This article examines the effect of state-level legal innovations governing labor disputes in the late 1800s. This was a period of legal ferment in which worker organizations and employers actively lobbied state governments for changes in the rules governing labor disputes. Cross-state heterogeneity in the legal environment provides an unusual opportunity to investigate the effects of these laws. We use a unique data set with information on 12,965 strikes to show that most of these law changes had surprisingly little effect on strike incidence or outcomes. Important exceptions were maximum hours laws and the use of injunctions.

Apprenticeship was, at one time, the foremost means of acquiring skill in North America and Europe. Today it is rare in North America for reasons that are not well understood. I draw on the population of apprentice contracts signed in Montreal over a 50-year period to pinpoint the start of the decline and explore its origins. I find that the decline began around 1815. During its first phase masters responded to greater difficulties in contract enforcement. A direct effect of the rise of larger establishments on the market for apprentices appears later, in the late 1820s and 1830s.

This article investigates women's position in early modem Bohemia by focusing on female household headship, which was very low by European standards. Empirical analysis suggests that the factors hypothesized in the literature as influencing female economic independence in preindustrial Europe had little effect in Bohemia. Instead, it appears that the decline in female headship between 1591 and 1722 was a consequence of the growing power of landlords under the “second serfdom.” Not only did landlords eject female heads as poor fiscal risks, but landlord decisions were also manipulated by village communities and individual serfs for their own ends.

Recent work by Robert Putnam has revived a contentious debate about the role of culture in Italian regional disparities. Southern Italy is argued to have been locked in an impoverishing, no-trust equilibrium. This article explores an apparent exception to Putnam's historical evidence: the South's late-nineteenth-century cooperative banks (banche popolari). Econometric investigation reveals important differences in the strategy and performance of these banks in North and South during the crucial decade of the 1890s, and shows that these differences cannot be attributed to differences in the local environment. In fact, the evidence is broadly consistent with Putnam's hypothesis.

An analysis of grain prices from Zhili (Hebei) province in North China for the period from 1738 to 1911 demonstrates that while the province's local grain markets gradually fragmented, the provincial market as a whole simultaneously grew more closely integrated with external markets, first with Fengtian (Manchuria) and later with the Lower Yangzi region. The Qing state's food policies, the deterioration of transport routes, and the condition of rural markets provide a context for understanding these seemingly paradoxical trends.

Understanding industrial decline is important from both historical and policy perspectives. The United States was the world's leading producer of gum naval stores in the early twentieth centuiy, but by the late 1970s production had all but ceased. Evidence presented here indicates that changing relative prices induced forest owners, the key stakeholders, to shift production towards other forest products. Nevertheless, the federal government continued to provide transfers to this industry even as political support for it vanished. The demise of this once-great American industry lends support to the received notion that once instituted, transfer programs tend to persist.

In 1855 the volume of immigration to the United States dropped precipitously, signaling the end of the first mass migration of Europeans. Although other work blames the decline on an economic depression, the outbreak of the Crimean War, or the improvement of conditions in Europe, this article argues that the rise of nativism was the initiating cause of the decline. This result is important because it affects our view of the factors that have cyclical effects on the volume of immigration.

We use the Soviet state and party archives to study the creation of the Soviet financial system. Although its framers intended to centralize all emission and monitoring of money and credit, in practice the system was characterized by informal mechanisms involving multiple players, soft budget constraints, and massive moral hazards. Enterprises issued “illegal” commercial credits and surrogate monies, causing liquidity growth to far outpace real economic activity. When confronted with the choice of solvency versus plan fulfillment, firms always chose the latter: credit risks were passed on to solvent enterprises, the state bank, and the state budget.

Convicts account for at least one-quarter of British migration to mid-eighteenth-century America. Their transportation to and disposal in America was essentially an experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice. A model of this trade is developed that yields testable implications regarding the relative distributional moments of convict auction prices, the size of shipper profits, and how convicts were selected for transportation.

Geographic clustering in inventive activity has often been attributed to clustering in production. For the glass industiy, we find that despite a general association between location of invention and production, there were significant deviations. Centers of production were not always centers of invention, and some of the most inventive areas, such as southern New England, had very limited production. We hypothesize that the growth of a market for technology facilitated a geographic division of labor between invention and commercial exploitation and stimulated inventive activity in places where there were institutions capable of mediating among inventors, suppliers of capital, and firms seeking new technologies.

Southern unions were the weak link in the American labor movement, organizing a smaller share of the labor force than did unions in the northern states or in Europe. Structural conditions, including a racially divided rural population, obstructed southern unionization. The South's distinctive political system also blocked unionization. A strict racial code compelling whites to support the Democratic Party and the disfranchisement of southern blacks and many working-class whites combined to create a one-party political system that allowed southern politicians to ignore labor's demands. Unconstrained by working-class voters, southern politicians facilitated strikebreaking and favored employers against unions.

Spain's contribution to the “New Emigration” differed from that of other Southern European countries in that it was oriented to Latin America far more than to the United States, in that it reached massive proportions only after 1900, and in that the various Spanish provinces varied greatly in their emigration rates. Differences in wealth, income, literacy, urbanization, and migratoly tradition best explain these international and interprovincial differences.

The three articles that follow this introductory essay reflect a rapidly growing effort in the social sciences to integrate institutional analysis with more traditional theory. In economic history, institutional analysis attempts to expand and enrich our understanding by modeling the ways in which the “rules of the game”–specifically, political and economic institutions–have affected economic behavior. By drawing on the literature of political economy, for example, economic historians can explore how institutions have interacted to affect economic performance over time.

John Stuart Mill's comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.

In 1791 the $10 million capitalization of the First Bank of the United States was vastly greater than the combined capital of all other banks. The Bank had an enormous impact on the economy within two months of opening its doors for business by flooding the market with its discounts and banknotes and then sharply reversing course and curtailing liquidity. Although the added liquidity initially helped push a rising securities market higher, the subsequent drain caused the first U.S. securities market crash by forcing speculators to sell their stocks. Several reasons are analyzed for the Bank's credit restriction.