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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the early nineteenth century, the Suffolk Bank established a regional banknote clearing network. Despite the benefits offered, many of the system's member banks were unhappy with it and quickly affiliated with an alternative clearing network as soon as it appeared. The reason for the quick abandonment of the Suffolk system was that it failed to price its network clearing services efficiently. Pressured by large Boston banks to shift the costs of the system to small country banks, the Suffolk engaged in inefficient cross-subsidization. Once a competitor emerged that priced efficiently, it drove the Suffolk from the market.

When Soviet central planners began to mechanize the cotton harvest in earnest in 1958, they expected more rapid diffusion than the market-driven process that had begun in the United States a decade earlier. But despite high output of cotton-picking machines, the share of the crop harvested mechanically grew more slowly than in the United States. The factor proportions in Central Asia did not justify mechanization: although planners could enforce introduction of the new technology, investment in cotton-harvesting machines was largely a waste of resources. The costs of premature introduction are estimated at over $1 billion in 1960s prices.

Between 1890 and 1930, the development of refrigerated rail transportation enabled a national U.S. apple industry to emerge. Apples were shipped over long distances, and sold in the terminal market on consignment or FOB, or in the auction market. There were frequent disputes over quality, caused by the long distances between buyers and sellers, the natural decline in apple quality over time, and because farmer and railroad moral hazard could accelerate quality deterioration. By 1930, apple transactions relied on government quality standards and inspection services. Evidence suggests that these institutions emerged in response to contract-enforcement and quality problems.

Recently, a speaker addressing a group of academics unfamiliar with the literature on medieval economic history referred to Bruce Campbell as a “godlike figure” in the field. The characterization was based upon a career's work that Campbell has invested in the study of medieval English agriculture. Heretofore this work has appeared in a very large number of articles and a clutch of edited books. Now, however, Campbell has produced his first monograph on the subject—in effect, his equivalent to the Ten Commandments.

The dual-editor regime, which has governed the operations of the JOURNAL for so long, assumed the form of a San Francisco Bay axis last year, as Gavin Wright at Stanford joined Jan de Vries at Berkeley to guide the JOURNAL's affairs. Now the time is approaching to pass the baton of the Rest of the World editorship. At the end of June Jan de Vries and assistant editor Heath Pearson will return to civilian life and send their files and the burdens of editorship to C. Knick Harley of Western Ontario University.

This book reproduces, in expanded form, 19 papers presented at a conference held in Venice in 1996 on the subject of silk in Italy from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. The conference brought together a diverse group of scholars who addressed a broad range of topics: from technology to folklore, to the use of silk fabrics as markers of status, to the role of various social groups in the growth of the silk industry, and, above all, to the rise of the silk industry as a leading component of the Italian economy. All the papers are the work of distinguished specialists in their respective fields of expertise, and they all embody fresh evidence culled from archival or archeological sources. Students of economic history will be especially interested in the 12 contributions that approach the subject from an economic perspective, and it is on these that this review will focus, however briefly.

Historians of the Discoveries and of medieval Iberia have long anticipated this study of Henry the Navigator. The result has been well worth the wait. Peter Russell is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost scholars on late medieval Portugal. This gracefully written work is a major achievement reflecting a lifetime of historical inquiry; that he is now eighty-two makes this exceptional work even more remarkable. In the English-speaking world, Henry of Avis (1394–1460) is easily the most recognizable figure in Portuguese history. High-school and college texts laud Henry and his “school of Sagres” as the indispensable force behind Western exploration of the South Atlantic prior to the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and Columbus's landfall. Perhaps Russell's most useful contribution for general readers is that, by demolishing the various myths surrounding Henry, he may finally hasten their exit from future textbooks.

Social history isn't what it used to be. Over the last several decades, the old concern with the macro and the social, inspired by Marxism and the Annales school, has gradually given way to a focus on the micro and the cultural. When contemporary historians study the social, they usually do so at the micro level, focusing on particular cities or villages. And when they turn their attention to the macro level, they generally view it through a cultural lens, which throws language and symbols into relief. In principle there is nothing wrong with this, of course. Political fashions and intellectual preoccupations are bound to change, and historical research is bound to follow. In this particular case, though, the shift in perspective has sometimes resulted in a narrowing of perspective as well, as the old concerns of social history have fallen by the wayside. Class, state, revolution: these are important subjects which are not much studied today, at least not by historians. Gone, indeed, are the days of Christopher Hill and Perry Anderson!

Originating in a 1998 seminar in Cambridge, England, the historical essays in this volume explore the connections between the economy, marriage, and demographic change in the rural populations of eight northwestern European countries. Only one of the essays (Richard Smith's, on England) reaches as far back as the medieval era, and one (Theo Engelen's, on European nuptiality) deals primarily with the twentieth century. The other essays concern the period 1600–1900, and the bulk of these employ data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The editors describe the collection as “[presenting] the current state of research on the European Marriage Pattern” (p. 13), that is, on the distinctive pattern—relatively high ages at first marriage, relatively high proportions of the population not marrying—attributed to northwestern Europe in John Hajnal's seminal 1965 essay (“European Marriage Patterns in Historical Perspective.” In Population in History, edited by David Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, 101–43. Chicago: Aldine.). Hajnal's research hypothesized the pattern, but did not concern itself with the reasons for its existence; by contrast, the present essays seek to describe and interrelate the geographic and temporal variants of the basic pattern, and the long-term changes in the economic contexts in which they appeared. On the whole, these essays perform their task admirably: the editors should be thanked for holding their team together as well as they have, and for producing a volume that does not have the patchwork quality of many conference-based collections.

For many years now, the multinational research team of Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (HPR) have been presenting tantalizing bits of their research into the notarial archives of Paris, while diligently collecting further data from the overwhelming mass of material stored in the Archives Nationales. At long last, this volume brings together the initial results of their collective labors in a provocative and well-written book. The material and the interpretations given it are important both for French history and for financial history. It will generate not only controversy, but also further research, in which the authors are already engaged.

The economy of early modern Europe has always posed a particular problem for the economic historian trying to grasp the big picture. Four centuries, give or take, separate the medieval from the industrial era—two systems that, rightly or wrongly, appear well defined and even understood. While most early modern historians find in such themes as absolutism, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and exploration convenient pegs on which to hang their particular story, those for whom the past is above all a story of economic development are not so fortunate. Indeed, one senses in the book under review an almost defensive desire to attract the interest of nonspecialist economic historians: we too have something important to say about the sources of economic growth. However, the swirls and eddies of activity, to say nothing of divergent experiences in smaller and larger regions and limited quantitative data, make it hard to pick out the strand of development that resulted in such clear economic differences between the Europe of Joan of Arc and that of Napoleon. Gutenberg, Newton, Galileo, and Columbus would seem as important, even to economic life, as Adam Smith, James Watt, François Quesnay, or Abraham Darby. Why is their influence so hard to trace? Early Modern Capitalism, then, tries to find that elusive thread.

Keith Snell and Paul Ell have written a superb and definitive study of the geography of religion in Britain circa 1851, relying upon a massive database constructed by them from the original returns of the 1851 census of religious worship, which the government undertook, for the first and only time, as part of its decennial population census. The religious census measured attendance at worship, not individual professions of faith; the returns were head-counts at morning, afternoon, and evening services on census Sunday, submitted by the presiding minister of each denomination. These returns, despite inevitable doubts about their reliability, have long been recognized by historians as an extremely valuable source. But until now they have not been analyzed comprehensively or with the aid of multivariate statistics. Not only do the authors describe the distribution of the strength of each denomination across the whole of England and Wales, using parish-, registration-district-, and county-level data; they are also able to address associated historiographical issues with a decisiveness that convincingly settles many an important debate.

Tamara Whited's carefully researched study of the conflicts over reforestation and changing land use in the alpine départments of Savoie and the Ariège represents a welcome addition to a growing, but still relatively undeveloped, literature on the history of the environment in modern France. While much of the work focusing on forests has tended to trace the evolution of state management practices, Whited examines local, grassroots responses to government policy, and the political, social, and ecological assumptions that were imbedded in struggles between the state and the French peasantry. Whited pays subtle attention to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in responses to environmental change at both the national and local levels. She shows, for example, that antagonisms between peasants and state officials were not always immutable. Peasants sometimes adopted the state's language to press their claims, and forest officials sometimes repudiated aspects of state policy. The breadth of this study—which spans a period from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—reveals, in a larger sense, the changing and often conflicting ways in which the natural world was used, managed, and imagined in a specific historical context.

To some it may come as a surprise that the Netherlands have a nineteenth-century economic and social history. This book therefore certainly fills a gap: it summarizes adequately the debates and results of Dutch historical research over the last decades. Michael Wintle's thorough knowledge of Dutch historiography enables him to make these results available to an international readership. Especially for those interested in why European countries developed along different paths, this book will be a gold mine. Its aim is more ambitious than simply to summarize, though. Wintle tries to demonstrate that the most important features of twentieth-century Dutch society had their roots in the “long” nineteenth century. After a transition period a set of characteristics of Dutch society were established, characteristics that would dominate Dutch history through most of the twentieth century.

Jane Whittle's fine book makes a distinctive contribution in a number of ways. First of all, it is a detailed account of the land market of a single manor—Hevingham Bishops, in Norfolk—supplemented by a study of the surviving records of a number of other adjacent manors, which spans the normal divide between the later middle ages and the sixteenth century. Secondly, it is a study of labor and employment in Norfolk, notably in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Thirdly, it is a formidable and well-researched critique of Robert Brenner's thesis. As one might expect of a book based on a doctoral thesis, much of the exposition is detailed, sometimes over-detailed, but the less-committed will find that it is a virtue of the book that it contains good summaries of the evidence presented and the case argued. Despite the apparent narrowness of the book, based largely on a single manor and certainly a single county, this is not a work to be overlooked. It is an impressive and mature debut, which will serve to bring one of the most able of the younger generation of early modern economic and social historians to a wider readership.