The paper focuses on U.S. foreign investment. Part I notes its trivial impact on returns to U.S. capital and considers its greater importance for five industry groups. Part II reviews the economic advantages accruing to U.S. citizens from interventions in Panama and Cuba. Part III, the bulk of the paper, asks what impact U.S. foreign investment had on Latin American factor returns. It finds no evidence in the anti-imperialist literature for the assertions that such investment cut labor incomes or landowners’ capital gains in these nations. It suggests that a struggle between two groups of capitalists, native and foreign, was more central to the economic aspects of “imperialist” conflict.

Twenty years ago Professor Frederic C. Lane recognized the close connection between economics and political history and suggested that it is impossible to understand fully the first without some understanding of the second. Relatively little work has been done in that area over the ensuing two decades. In that period both social and political historians have become more quantitative, and although their work has permitted us to discuss some alleged explanations of social and political development, it has not really produced viable alternatives. This failure is linked with the theoretical nature of the analysis. Although there does not appear to be a useful body of theory in sociology, positive political science offers such a structure for our understanding of political history.

Although debate has raged ever since Marx and Engels openly condemned British capitalism in the 1840s, little hard evidence has been brought to bear on the issue of economic inequality. This paper estimates British earnings distributions for four years in the period 1827–1901. The evidence supports the view of increasing inequality up to mid-century and a leveling thereafter. Coupled with newly available evidence on British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wealth and income distribution, these estimates equip us to search for explanations. A strategy for modeling British inequality history is suggested.

There are times when researchers must struggle through the weeds and pass up the easier roads chosen by Crane's wayfarer. Such a time has come for research on the growth and structure of the English economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. Our rational preference for the easier roads has caused us to apply increasing amounts of our abundant analytical cleverness to an endowment of empirical raw materials that has grown relatively slowly. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to historical research as well as to other activities, and the relatively generous inputs of analysis have lowered their marginal returns and created a condition of raw material scarcity. The returns to hacking through the archival weeds for new raw materials now seem high.

Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry.

… O, wot een gulden Neeringh

en voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh;

hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft en

winnende sijn brood God dank en eere gheeft.

The economics of David Ricardo and the contemporary evidence for the economic importance of information suggest that time of entry into an economy should be an important determinant of wealth. This hypothesis is validated for nineteenth-century Utah, since time of entry into the economy had a larger impact on the level of wealth than did occupation, birthplace, sex, region of settlement, or age. This finding suggests that the effect on wealthholding of variables often given a discriminatory interpretation such as foreign birth may be overstated if time of entry into the economy is ignored. It also helps to explain the increase in inequality as the settlement process continues.

returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

“Europe's misfortunes from 1790 to 1810 unquestionably re bounded [sic] to America's benefit. In the absence of warfare among the Europeans, American output and incomes would have been less.”

This paper examines the widely held view that the French-Canadian farmers of Lower Canada in the early nineteenth century were notably backward and inefficient. Data from the Canadian census of 1851–1852 are used to estimate agricultural output and factor inputs for a large number of parishes and townships. The estimated differential between French and English districts in total factor productivity is shown to be small and probably not significant. The conclusion casts doubt on the importance of ethnic differentials in farm practice as a source of agricultural retardation in Lower Canada.

This paper provides evidence regarding the extent of antebellum trade in major agricultural products between the West and the Northeast, the types of products involved, and the magnitude of surpluses or deficits. We found that West-Northeast trade was more important than West-South trade.

In spite of the importance accorded the steam engine during nineteenth-century industrialization, little is known about its rate of diffusion and the determinants thereof in the United States. The primary purpose of this paper is to enhance our knowledge about the spread of this technology. New evidence on steam power use in 1820, 1850, and 1860, combined with published census data from 1870, permits quantitative estimates of the regional variations in timing, pace, and extent of usage before 1900. Second, we advance reasonable conjectures for the regional differences that appear. Although lack of evidence precludes a definitive delineation of causality, with simulation techniques we are able to use the limited evidence available on costs to reconcile, albeit imperfectly, the historical pattern with economic-theoretic predictions regarding the process of innovation.

Trade protection commonly is viewed as a support—external and perhaps occasional—granted to an industry by government policymakers. Focusing on the steel industry, this study argues that protection is better viewed as a commodity, an input into the production of steel. The development of the market for the protection commodity during the past century is related to the history of regional, national, and international markets for steel.

The steel industry of Wilhelminian Germany is especially known for its tariff protection; its anti-competitive collusion, and the rapid increases of its productivity and its output. This study analyzes the interdependence of these four phenomena. The tariffs and cartels were directly symbiotic in providing protection, which had substantial redistributive effects in favor of larger firms. The restriction of competition by tariffs and cartels may have contributed to the productivity advances of the German steel industry by reducing the riskiness of capital-intensive technologies. Productivity increases made a major contribution to the industry's growth.

The enclosure of the open fields is an example of Europeans' willingness to alter long-standing social and economic institutions in the interest of higher living standards. In Scandinavia, England, and Germany the rise in the value of enclosed relative to unenclosed land induced widespread abandonment of open-field forms of agrarian organization by the middle of the nineteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the traditional patterns of landholding maintained themselves until after the First World War. This paper examines some of the ways French farmers responded to the possibilities of agricultural change within the traditional framework of open-field agriculture.

The industrial revolution transformed Great Britain from a nation of agricultural villages into a nation of factory towns. Many of the social changes accompanying industralization aroused the indignation of contemporary critics and later historians. Perhaps the most despised was the employment of children. Edward P. Thompson alleged “that the exploitation of little children, on this scale and with this intensity, was one of the most shameful events in our history.”

This paper investigates the decline and regional differential in antebellum southern white fertility using published census materials and the 1860 population schedules. Demographic analysis is conducted with a synthetic total fertility rate that has four components: age at first birth, age at last surviving birth, surviving-child spacing, and the proportion of women who eventually have surviving children. The socioeconomic analysis employs regressions and focuses on causes of the underlying changes in the components. Family limitation appears to have been unimportant in this population. The distribution of wealth was.probably an important factor shaping the time trend and regional differential in fertility.

The Ottoman Empire did not escape the “price revolution” of the “long” sixteenth century. As far as the Bursa silk industry was concerned, however, the rate of increase of relative prices was such as to result in a price “scissors.” This situation led to declining profits in the production of cloth, while profits in the production of the raw material were substantial. A transformation of Bursa's economy from cloth production to raw material production followed. It appears that this transformation conformed to a cyclical pattern in the following centuries, a pattern that was chiefly dictated by European economic might.