The records of the United States Army, which hired civilian workers in the nineteenth century, have produced a large sample of wage rates. New estimates of nominal daily wage rates from 1820 to 1856 are presented. There is no evidence of a long-term increase in the skill differential. The growth of real wages in the Northeast appears to have been slower and more erratic than previously thought. Regional trends in wages are consistent with other evidence on patterns of regional growth and internal migration.

I suggest here that change in a number of social variables, including values, vertical mobility, political and social power, technology and law, appear to be associated with economic growth or decline and that the study of economic history would be enriched by investigations of the nature and timing of those linkages. Illustrative models of the linkages are drawn for the early Middle Ages in Western Europe and for the colonial and antebellum periods of American history.

This article examines the Crusade against outrelief to determine why poor law unions endorsed it. Although initiated by the central government, the Crusade could reduce union costs because very few of those denied outrelief would enter the workhouse. As the tax burden on wealthier and more influential ratepayers rose, guardians had more interest in cutting expenditure. An increase in effective rateable value permitted improvement of workhouse facilities and the restriction of outrelief, even to the deserving poor.

In seventeenth-century England the relatively open trades to America attracted ventures by hundreds of small merchants and shopkeepers. This ease of entry was checked after 1685 by very high customs duties on tobacco and intense regulation. Between 1685 and 1775 the number of firms in that trade was radically reduced and the size of the average firm increased ten to thirtyfold. Comparable if less extreme trends can be detected in the sugar, slave, and Levant trades. Insurance enabled large firms to use shipping more efficiently. The increased availability of credit also benefited larger and more secure firms.

The traditional view of cotton mechanization, first advanced by rural sociologists in the 1920s, is that southern agrarian institutions impeded progress. Recently their view has been questioned. New studies attribute much of the southern lag to factors like small-scale production, cheap labor, the cotton crop, and environment. I contribute to the debate by emphasizing how the structure of the southern economy encouraged landlords to use annual labor contracts that hindered attempts to mechanize. I present evidence that supports the traditional view and suggest how the incentive structure of annual labor contracts delayed invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

This article examines the productivity of American watch manufacturing technology between 1850 and 1900 as representative of the industries collectively known as the American System of Manufactures. It then compares and contrasts products and responses to market events in British and American horology in the nineteenth century. Finally it weighs factor-substitution models which purport to explain the sharply different British and American responses to mechanization, specifically why the American System of Manufactures is indeed American.

The Upcountry of the Lower South was located on the periphery of the antebellum cotton economy, but some of its subregions were integrated into the market system in the 1850s. An analysis of sample counties in the Georgia Upcountry demonstrates that the spread of market production into the western half of the region depended on local development which created opportunities for diversified market production and increased household wealth through capital gains on improvements. The absence of market development in the eastern half of the region, in contrast, limited the wealth of farm households, reinforcing their economic isolation.

A decline in nutritional status is inferred from data on the height and weight of West Point cadets in the antebellum period. The decline was geographically widespread and affected farmers and blue-collar workers the most; middle-class cadets did not experience a decline in nutritional status until the Civil War. Nutritional status declined because meat output did not keep pace with population growth. Urbanization and the expansion of the industrial labor force increased the demand for food. However, the agricultural labor force grew at a slower pace, and productivity growth in food production was insufficient to redress the imbalance.

The study of mass production has been strongly influenced in recent years by two dissimilar bodies of work—that of Alfred D. Chandler and that of Harry Braverman and others who argue that mass production helped managers “deskill” and “control” industrial workers. The history of the U.S. tire industry between 1910 and 1930 underlines the value of Chandler's analysis and the limited applicability of the deskilling and control hypotheses.

This article challenges the traditional view of French industry—that small, inefficient family firms retarded France's economic growth—by examining data for the French textile and flour milling industries taken from the industry census of 1861–1865. The evidence suggests that the average size of French firms suited the economic and technological conditions of the day. The industries studied exhibit constant returns to scale over a wide output range. France would not seem likely to have gained much from larger firms. This is consistent with revisionist contentions that French industry was as rational as that of other nations.

Scholars still disagree about why nineteenth-century Britain adopted the factory system. Traditional historians emphasize the scale requirements of new technology; radical economists stress the possibilities that factory production held for worker exploitation; other economists and economic historians argue that the factory system was preferred because of its superior transaction-cost properties. This paper tests these competing hypotheses by examining the technological and organizational developments in the British silk industry. It concludes that in this Industry technological factors were primarily responsible for the adoption of the factory system.

Most explanations of trends in women's work emphasize women's role in childbearing, along with technological and organizational changes in production. The explanations neglect an important factor: the need to control sexuality in order to secure demographic order. Segregated employment enabled almost all family members to work, while discouraging heterosexual intimacy. Nineteenth-century attitudes illustrate the anxiety felt when unrelated men and women worked together. The argument is tested by correlating regional variation in illegitimacy, as a measure of failed social control, with variation in sex segregation.

This article explores the operation of the international capital market between Amsterdam and London in the early eighteenth century and concludes that both markets were efficient and well integrated from 1723 on.

In the southern Russian coal and steel region between 1874 and 1900, labor policy was outlined by the Russian managers of predominantly foreign firms through the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. This policy was shaped by chronic labor shortage, by the strained relations between industry and local government, and by managers' sensitivity to their position as spokesmen for foreign interests. The posture southern managers developed was that of welfare capitalism. Considerable expenditure on wages and welfare, however, did not establish labor peace.

Substantial regional differentials in mortgage rates persisted throughout the postbellum period. I find that these differentials reflected not only variations in lending risk, but also the costs incurred in transferring funds between markets and unexplained regional premia. The results are consistent with the traditional interpretation that capital markets were at least partially segmented throughout the late nineteenth century. The effects on home and farm mortgage rates in the South and West were substantial and suggest that market segmentation could have had a substantial impact on the regional pattern of urbanization as well as agricultural development.

This article considers how and why American industry has supported research and development during the last century. It examines the differences in methods and results of Thomas Edison (inventor-entrepreneur), William Coolidge (General Electric engineer-scientist), and Irving Langmuir (General Electric Nobel Prize winner). The article concludes that Edison's effective use of organized research and development paved the way for scientifically trained people to use varied methodologies to advance science, technology, and commercial interests together.

Available evidence on interest rates and government borrowing during Britain's industrial revolution, while limited, does not support the idea that war spending crowded out private investment. This article demonstrates the importance of using data on net receipts from borrowing, rather than changes in government debt. Weaknesses of the crowding-out model concerning capital markets and investment, openness of the economy, and full employment are identified for the historical case. The case raises broader issues of whether conceptions of saving and investment based in neoclassical supply-constrained models are as appropriate as theories of capital accumulation.

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, accomplished scientists and prominent executives in the BASF and IG Farben chemical corporations, were drawn together by mutual admiration and common technical interests. In the Nazi era, however, they came to embody competing liberal and nationalist conceptions of German political economy. This article examines their relationship, the reasons for their divergent stances, and their individual contributions to the economic and productive power of the Third Reich. Ironically, Bosch's understanding of his industry, his nation, and scientific progress led him to oppose the Nazis, but also to lay the basis for their recruitment of Krauch and the German chemical industry for their expansionist purposes.

Between 1905 and 1915, as state price regulation became widespread, electric utilities in the United States faced severe competition. The primary source of electricity for industry then was not utilities but self-generation by the user in an “isolated plant.” The demand-charge rate structure first became widespread during this period. The demand-charge rate structure has been interpreted as a misapplication of the peak-load pricing principle, a view which has made its popularity a puzzle. Instead it was adopted as a sophisticated mechanism which institutionalized profit-maximizing price discrimination given the competition from isolated plants.