In The writing of economic history at present there is a tendency tofocus attention on the quantity of material goods and of people. This is not because economists seriously maintain that the chief end of man is to produce a maximum population, each member of which has at his disposal a maximum amount of material things. I do not think many economists or economic historians hold such a materialistic belief-why then would they choose to be professors ? We merely write as if we did, or at least we too often write so that we can be thus misinterpreted; and we are the more likely to be thus misinterpreted because the great political powers of the present, the United States and the Soviet Union, using different ideologies, each extols, paradoxically, its material productivity as proof of the force and validity of its ideals.

In The concept view of many economists the just price is a nebulous concept invented by pious monks who knew nothing of business or economics and were blissfully unaware of market mechanisms. It is true that certain writers, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have done their best to accredit this fairy tale and to propagate the notion that the just price, instead of being set by the allegedly blind and unconscionable forces of the market, was determined by criteria of fairness without regard to the elements of supply and demand or at least with the purpose of eliminating the evils of unrestrained competition.

Applications of the staple approach by the late Harold Innis d by others influenced by Innis have produced many studies which, taken together, provide a remarkably coherent, plausible, and apparently consistent account of Canada's economic growth and history. In this paper I distinguish between the staple theory as a theory of economic development and as an economic interpretation of history and argue that the staple theory of Canada's economic development breaks down after 1820. In the conclusion I suggest an alternative, complementary approach to the study of the country's economic growth.

The Economic History Association is an interdisciplinary organization of widely varying interests. The Association has several times considered the relationships between Economic Theory and Economic History, but it has paid little attention to that between the applied field of Business Administration and Economic History. It is appropriate to do so now because significant special interests have arisen within and around Economic History in recent years which have been of particular interest to students of Business Administration. I refer to the studies in Business History, Entrepreneurial History, Economic Development, and Innovation. Like Economic History, Business Administration is interdisciplinary, at least in part, and relies considerably, though at the applied level, on the same fundamental social sciences that interest economic historians. Also we have seen an outpouring of histories of individual enterprises, as American business, once more proud of its accomplishments and increasingly conscious of the value of public relations, has sat for its portrait. At the same time, in the field of Business Administration there has been a growing recognition of the importance of the long-range view in appraising administration, and of the use of the social sciences to improve its quality. It therefore is time to attempt some integration of these strands of thought.

During the last twenty years Business History has become one of Economic History's most important subdivisions. This has been partly, but certainly not altogether, the result of prosperity. With highlevel employment and income the general attitude toward the businessman has changed. He is no longer popularly regarded as the personification of viliainy. In the “new Business History” he has fared very well indeed. He has not been restored to a place among the saints, but he certainly is back among the choir boys. There are two points of view on this whole development. One is to condemn the new Business History as a sinister plot on the part of Big Business to bamboozle the American public. The other is to regard the new Business History as the most promising of the three major developments that have taken place in Economic History during the last thirty years.

There is now a rough consensus of opinion among English economic historians about the broad chronology of English population history. According to this chronology there were three main phases of rapid growth. The first occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was brought to an end by a marked fall in population in the fourteenth century. The second phase occupied most of the sixteenth century and the early seventeendi, after which there was some slowing down in the later seventeenth century and possibly an absolute check in the 1720's and 1730's. And finally tliere was the sustained cumulative increase that started in the later eighteenth century.

In 1928 Hans Proesler, whom we shall meet in the course of this study, assumed the presidency, that is, became the Rector, of what can 1928 Hans Proesler, whom we shall meet in the course of thisbe described as the Niirnberg school of economics (Hochschule für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften). The address he delivered on that occasion can properly serve as the starting point for my own presentation, for it dealt with German economic history, its development and problems. In his talk Proesler pointed out that it was the eighteenth-century enlightenment that opened the road to economic history by assigning to studies pointing in this direction a niche in the lecture hall of general cultural history. In Germany such men as Justus Möser, Gottfried Herder, and some members of the then-famous Göttingen school of historians, Schlözer, Gatterer, Heeren, von Anton, and Fischer, are considered by the historian of economic and social history as having stood at the cradle. Although German Romanticism had done much for historiography in general, its role for economic history was very limited. Romanticist historians were not primarily interested in things economic, although in the frame of legal and constitutional history on the one hand, and in connection with classical studies on the other, scholars of that period and the decades following made contributions to this field of knowledge. I might mention Savigny, Eich-horn, Waitz, Böckh, Otfried Müller, Mommsen; and a few minor figures, such as Hüllmann and Hannssen, even devoted themselves to special problems in the area, that is, financial and agrarian history, respectively. Georg von Below, the renowned German historian, treating Proesler's topic a few years before the latter, emphasized the contribution of the Prussian archivist, Georg Wilhelm von Raumer (1806-1856). Not only did the latter take an interest in matters economic but his ideas even tended toward what we would today call a materialistic interpretation of history.

Revolutionary developments in transport have been an essential feature of the rapiddevelopments in transportgrowth of the past two centuries. Reduction in the cost of carriage has enabled specialization and division of labor on a national and international basis to replace the relatively self-sufficient economies that predominated in the western world two centuries ago. The striking role of the railroad in the nineteenth century is well known. However, it was water transport in which the bulk shipment of commodities began, and it was the development of ocean shipping that was an integral aspect of die growing economic interdependence of the western world, the opening up of the undeveloped continents, and the promotion of the settlement of the “empty lands.” The declining cost of ocean transportation was a process of widening the resource base of the western world. The agriculture of new countries was stimulated (and that of old countries at least temporarily depressed), the specter of famine as a result of crop failure reduced, and the raw materials were provided for industrialization. In short, the radical decline in ocean freight rates was an important part of the redirection of the resources of the western world in the course of the vast development of die past two centuries.

The opening of the Suez Canal took place in a century crowded revolutionary changes in the shipping world. In sharp contrast to the slow pace of change and development in the preceding era, major changes occurred in almost every sector of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. While many of the new departures can be explained, at least in part, by the application of the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to shipping, the opening of Suez went far to accelerate and give direction to these changes. The canal significantly altered shipbuilding techniques and practices and contributed to the precipitous decline in the importance of the sailing ship as a major world carrier. Suez helped to bring about die realignment and relative decline of the European entrepot trade. And the new channel led to significant shifts in the patterns of Eastern and Australasian trade.