The lending portfolio of a London banker is analyzed to better understand the relationship between public and private finance during England's Financial Revolution. The Glorious Revolution's political settlement appears to have reduced the risk premium on sovereign debt; but it seems to have raised, not lowered, rates on private debt. Two explanations for these higher private rates are suggested. During the war years 1690–1697, the government's improved capacity to borrow seems to have “crowded out” private borrowing. After peace was restored and the government's borrowing retrenched, the new political regime seems to have stimulated demand for loanable funds.

Based on data from probate inventories we construct and analyze an annual time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. Comparison of South Carolina slave prices with those in other parts of the Western Hemisphere and the relationship between slave prices and slave imports indicate that while the long-run supply of slaves was highly elastic, over periods of one to two decades the supply curve was upward sloping. Comparison of our slave price series with an index of agricultural export prices indicates that labor productivity growth in agriculture was modest over the eighteenth century.

It has often been argued that parliamentary enclosure decisively increased the wage dependence of English agricultural laborers, primarily by extinguishing their rights to keep cows on common land. Yet the extent to which laborers had in fact enjoyed common pasture rights has never been demonstrated. This article fills that gap, by documenting the extent of laborers' common rights for ten settlements in the south and east Midlands. It finds that most laborers in these villages did not have common rights prior to enclosure and cannot, therefore, have been proletarianized by their loss.

This article analyzes the revolutionary impact the tractor had on rural America and examines the economic, technological, and institutional factors governing the machine's diffusion. Our simultaneous-equation regression model helps decipher the complex relationship between farm scale and diffusion. In addition, analyzing diffusion as a capital replacement problem reveals that the shift to the new technology was far more rapid than what has generally been thought and provides a new perspective on the long co-existence of both horses and tractors on farms.

This article investigates the influence of health on the growth paths of ten industrialized countries over the course of 100 to 125 years. Changes in health increased their pace of growth by 30 to 40 percent, altering permanently the slope of their growth paths. This finding is robust across five measures of long-term health and it remains largely unchanged when “controlled” for investment in physical capital. Health-related variables correlate positively with years of schooling. However, schooling variables by themselves do not replicate the results obtained from health-related measures. Health improvements thus do not merely follow economic progress.

This article tests the claim that public water companies provided black communities with better service than did private water companies. It draws from three sources: typhoid fever rates in 1911 and 1921, waterborne disease rates in 14 North Carolina towns between 1889 and 1908, and investment patterns in cities with public and private water companies. A study of New Orleans, which municipalized its water system in 1908, complements the evidence that public ownership reduced white disease rates only slightly, but reduced black disease rates sharply. These surprising results have implications for contemporary policy debates and for understanding American history.

Recent research has suggested that the U.S. cotton-textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection throughout the antebellum period. We reaffirm Taussig's earlier judgment that the U.S. cotton-textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the early 1830s. American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were imperfect substitutes for one another. Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could easily have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.

Doug Irwin and Peter Temin offer a welcome study of the tariff and American industrialization. Although largely overlooked, the tariff significantly influences our interpretation of early American industrialization. If the tariff had no substantial effect, as Irwin and Temin argue, we view early American industrialization quite differently than if the tariff induced industrialization by diverting trade to otherwise noncompetitive firms within a customs union, as I believe. Although I welcome attention to the tariff, I feel that Irwin and Temin's argument rests on a misconception of the British cotton industry and of the nature of potential competition between American and British cloth in the absence of protection.

The long awaited publication of volumes II and III of the Cambridge Economic History of the United States (hereafter CEHUS) is a landmark in the historiography of the U.S. economy (volume I, on the colonial economy, appeared in 1996). A decade in the making, and appearing after the untimely death of one of its editors, Robert Gallman, these volumes will without doubt be accessed and accessed frequently as reference works in the twenty-first century. Not since 1972, when, under the editorial leadership of Lance Davis, Richard Easterlin, and William Parker, Harper and Row published American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States has a comparable multi-author work been attempted. In the event, ten of the original 12 contributors to that work are here for a return engagement.

The Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to announce the recipients of its prizes for outstanding articles in early American economic history published during the year 2000. There were numerous distinguished nominations for this year's award, and we are most fortunate to be able to make these awards of outstanding scholarship. Please join us in recognizing the following: David Cowen, “The First Bank of the United States and the Securities Market Crash of 1792,” Journal of Economic History 60, no. 4 (December, 2000): 1041–6; and Robert Martello, “Paul Revere's Last Ride: The Road to Rolling Copper,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Summer, 2000): 219–39. The winners will be recognized at the annual awards banquet of the Economic History Association in September 2001 in Philadelphia.

Books on disasters will never go out of fashion, and overarching syntheses of the really major catastrophes of human history are a publisher's dream. John Aberth offers his own rather idiosyncratic synthesis of what is generally termed the “crisis” of the later Middle Ages. This was a period that included a major famine (1315–1322) and other significant, though somewhat more localized, shortages. There were seemingly interminable wars, the Hundred Years War being the most famous, in which the long intervals of truce, with unpaid troops harrying the land, were worse than the formal campaigns. And there was plague: first the Black Death of 1347–1351, and then revisitations of pestilence (plague, presumably, but other devastating diseases as well) in nearly every generation for the next three hundred years.

What drove the entrepreneurs of early modern Europe? Short-run profit maximization, long-run business continuity, or aspirations of upward social mobility? Such questions increasingly attract the attention of a younger generation of economic historians focusing on the period before the Industrial Revolution. Leos Müller's study, which was defended as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, is a highly interesting specimen of this new trend in economic–historical research. One suspects that it was intended as a sequel to Kurt Samuelsson's De stora köpmanshusen i Stockholm 1730–1815 (Stockholm: Esselte, 1951), which considered the community of Stockholm merchants but lacked an analytical framework. The book now under review, by contrast, is exemplary in applying an explicit theoretical framework, relying on original primary materials, and stressing themes above individuals or events. This all makes for a systematic connection between empirical findings and theory. At the same time, however, it also provides illustrations of the bottlenecks and difficulties that the enterprising economic historian may come across.

Unlike other components of the Renaissance Venetian economy, such as maritime trade, shipbuilding, glassmaking, and the woolen industry, the silk industry has been largely neglected by historians: a somewhat puzzling neglect, for that industry was viewed by contemporaries as a major player in the economy, enjoyed an enviable international reputation, and employed at its peak a highly skilled labor force of several thousands. In this richly textured, exhaustive study covering three centuries and based on a prodigious amount of archival research, Luca Molà has filled a large gap and has thus greatly expanded our knowledge of a multifaceted Renaissance economy.

Although scholars have written many good corporate histories, few of these have been good books. History at its best requires an analytical clarity seldom found in traditional corporate history, where all too often the comprehensive coverage of a company's operations over a long period of time overwhelms the narrative focus. James Bamberg's new volume on the history of British Petroleum (BP) is an exception to the rule. Organized around a common theme, and covering a relatively short and cohesive era in which BP studied played a significant role in world history, it is at once an excellent corporate history and a good book.

In 1857 Alexander Herzen boasted to Giuseppe Mazzini that Russia's annexation of the Amur river region in the late 1850s signaled “one of civilization's most important steps forward” (p. 2). With a foothold in the Far East, Herzen claimed, Russia appeared poised to capitalize on the Pacific as the “Mediterranean of the future” (p. 144). From the 1840s educated Russians celebrated the Amur river, the essential artery linking Russia through Siberia to its Pacific destiny, as a “Russian Mississippi” and the key to Russia's role as a maritime power and a civilizing force in Asia. By 1865, however, this “Amur euphoria” had abruptly dissipated. Dreams of the rebirth of a prosperous and, by some accounts, “free” Russia on the Siberian Mississippi faded as suddenly as they had appeared.

Since 1995 three volumes of essays, in each of which Richard Bonney has served as contributor or editor, have been published around the history of European fiscal systems. What new contribution or approach does this volume, the third, offer? Like its predecessors, this one fits into the “new fiscal history,” structured around the notion that fiscal systems should be studied in their broader constitutional, political, social, and economic contexts. As Bonney states in the introduction to the present volume, the point is to move beyond “teleology” (p. 12) or the tendency to compare “any fiscal system over time … with another in a sort of balance sheet” (p. 2). While not wanting to take any one country's experience as the measure for others, Bonney does identify certain broad stages through which fiscal systems have passed. His approach borrows from Joseph Schumpeter's thesis—subsequently adopted primarily by historians of Scandinavia and Germany—that early modern “countries” underwent a transition from “domain state” to “tax state,” whereby sovereigns expanded their fiscal reach beyond the medieval ideal of living from the revenues of the royal domain. In a previous volume Bonney and his collaborators revised this model of the rise of the tax state (see the introduction to Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, edited by W. M. Ormrod, Margaret Bonney, and Richard Bonney. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1999). Tax states, they argued, could falter and break down through loss of confidence or institutional paralysis, and thus did not represent the endpoint of fiscal development. Rather, it is the modern “fiscal state,” where institutions and structures allow for self-sustained growth and development, that represents the culmination of revolutionary changes. Furthermore, they held that crisis might occur within a given fiscal system and affect its shape or scope, but that only revolutionary upheaval could cause transition from one system to another. A revised model requires empirical support, and the present volume seeks to deliver it in the form of “national” case studies that are juxtaposed (in rough geographical order, from Western Europe eastward), but not compared.

Until the 1960s clothes were a barometer of social and economic status. An outfit's age, style, and method of production—bespoke, wholesale bespoke, or off-the-peg—offered a visible pronouncement on an individual's, particularly a male's, place in the social and economic order. In the decades that have followed, as style of dress has become increasingly informal and designer labels have overtaken design, this means of identification has become less reliable and the home-grown industry that provided the garments less economically viable. In Well Suited, Katrina Honeyman provides a volume that not only details the rise and demise of the Leeds men's and boys' wholesale tailored clothing industry but, in addition, compensates for the paucity of historiographical studies of “the industry that created garments from … cloth” (p. 1). As such, the work has impressive and scholarly depth; by following a thematic rather than simply chronological structure, it enables the reader to locate the micro study within a broader economic and labor-related framework that correlates with the meso and macro.

If you like a contentious book, ranging across wide swathes of history, you will enjoy this one. Although Richard Lachmann kicks a few fairly dead horses along the way, he takes on enough lively speculations and conventional wisdom to make the trip worthwhile. His subject is the changes that occurred in Europe from the end of feudalism down to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Lachmann undertakes to explain how feudalism gave way to centralized states with landlord elites; why the autonomous urban centers of the Renaissance were eclipsed by national territorial states as the foci of wealth and power; why England and France surpassed Spain and the Netherlands as commercial and imperial powers; and why none of these changes can be attributed simply to a Weberian process of greater “rationalization” of social and political life.

During the 1970s and 1980s the Irish historical profession, which was challenging nearly all the old verities of nationalist historiography, proved strangely reticent on the single event in Irish history most likely to be familiar to non-Irish readers: the Great Famine of the 1840s. That all changed in 1995, however, when the sesquicentennial observances called forth a huge outpouring of famine research. This research has shed new light on a wide range of social, political, administrative and cultural issues, but the work under review is the first full-length monograph on the Famine by an historical econometrician since Joel Mokyr's pioneering exploration of Malthusian explanation, Why Ireland Starved, appeared in 1983.

Did the Second World War create a new sense of social unity and a consensus on domestic policy in Great Britain? Through an examination of rationing and consumption controls from 1939 to 1955, Austerity in Britain presents new evidence undermining the traditional interpretation that the war stimulated social unity and a policy consensus. Making good use of Public Record Office files, the author devotes separate chapters to the evolution of rationing policy and its effect on diet and health, popular attitudes toward rationing, the gender dimensions of rationing, and the political consequences of the postwar Labour government's continuation of rationing.