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.

“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.”

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.”

During the course of U.S. economic development, the institutions used to organize agricultural labor have undergone interesting and sometimes puzzling transformations. The transitions from wage contracting to tenancy observed in the post-bellum South and in nineteenth-century Iowa have been studied extensively.2 This paper evaluates the relatively neglected transition from wage labor to tenancy that occurred in the California fruit orchards during the period 1900–1910.3 Before 1903 Chinese and Japanese orchard workers were organized via the padrone system of wage labor, but in an abrupt series of events there ensued a shift into tenancy so dramatic that by 1909 contemporary observers noted that virtually all orchards were under tenant control. The fact that the new tenants were recent Japanese immigrants prompted investigations by the Immigration Commission as well as other agencies so that this particular shift into tenancy is documented in greater detail than those occurring in the South and in Iowa.

Britain's acquisiton of Lagos has already attracted considerable historical research, but it is examined here from a new perspective and with the help of unused sources. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the episode itself is reinterpreted to give prominence to changing property rights as both a cause and a consequence of annexation. Second, it is argued that the Lagos case can be placed in a broader framework of imperial expansion in which institutional change formed the centerpiece of a nineteenth-century development drive. Third, it is suggested that the study of African history might benefit from assigning higher priority to the analysis of property rights other than those embodied in slave-holding.

This multiple regression study of male and female wages in the clothing and textile industries finds that the standardized pay gap has changed against women from 1910 to 1970. The cross-section study of wages in 1909-1910 finds a very small residual in favor of men; but when the English-speaking variable is interpreted as screening many able women (but not men) from manufacturing, the residual shifts to one slightly favoring women. The cross-section study of pay in substantially the same industry group during 1969 finds very substantial residuals in favor of men after standardizing earnings. Hypotheses suggested for explaining these contrary findings include a decline in women's investment in human capital relative to that of men, and changing government and union tax and benefit patterns that discriminate against female investment in human capital.

The discovery of vast oil fields in Texas after 1901 encouraged competition in an industry previously dominated by Standard Oil of New Jersey. The manner in which the state of Texas enforced its antitrust and corporation laws hastened the growth of several major new oil companies, most notably Gulf Oil and The Texas Company, by constraining the activities of Standard in the new fields. In so doing, these Texas laws shaped the transition from near monopoly to near oligopoly in the oil industry. Such beneficial results of state laws were, however, largely accidental, since weaknesses in the government's capacity to monitor changes in the burgeoning industry undermined its ability to define and implement systematic regulatory policies. Problems of adjustment that accompanied government's early efforts to regulate market structure in oil have continued to hamper subsequent efforts to regulate other aspects of the industry's operations.

Popular wisdom asserts, and life-cycle theories of human capital investment seem to imply, that older scientists are slower to accept new theories than are younger scientists. When this view is tested with evidence on the acceptance of cliometrics, however, the year-of-birth variable, although statistically significant, explains less than 10 percent of the variance in acceptance.

In a recent paper in this Journal, James Millar and Susan Linz seek “to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.” They argue that Soviet direct estimates of non-human war cost (capital loss plus direct war outlays plus wartime loss of national income), made by a postwar Extraordinary Commission, imply a cost per employed member of the 1940 population of 7.4 years' earnings. Their own indirect approximation of war cost—based on a construct which incorporates estimates of prewar and wartime propensities to consume and invest, a 30 percent capital loss claimed by the Soviets, and an assumed capital-output ratio of 3—is 3.9 years' earnings. After hypothesizing various values for their parameters, they conclude that “[t]he popular Soviet claim that World War II cost ‘two Five-Year Plans’ is, therefore, above the upper limit [6.0 years' earnings] of the range of the total war cost estimates calculated using Soviet national income data.”2 The implication is that their results cast significant doubt on “the reasonableness” of Soviet claims of war cost. This paper will demonstrate that if the Soviet direct estimate of war cost is properly expressed in Sovietmeasured 1940 consumption years, Millar-Linz's perceived divergence between the Soviet direct and their indirect estimate of war cost disappears.

Susan Linz and I are fascinated, if somewhat puzzled, by Edward Saraydar's comments on our research note “The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People” (this Journal, 38 [Dec. 1978]). His comment demonstrates what we ourselves discovered: that there are many ways to measure war costs. We are pleased to note that Saraydar apparently accepts the fundamental conception that we presented of the cost of the war to the population. We are also pleased to see that, despite his criticisms, the range we presented for the cost of the war (that is, 3.2 to 7.4 years' earnings of the 1940 Soviet labor force) stands up quite well as lower and upper bounds.