This paper investigates the decline and regional differential in antebellum southern white fertility using published census materials and the 1860 population schedules. Demographic analysis is conducted with a synthetic total fertility rate that has four components: age at first birth, age at last surviving birth, surviving-child spacing, and the proportion of women who eventually have surviving children. The socioeconomic analysis employs regressions and focuses on causes of the underlying changes in the components. Family limitation appears to have been unimportant in this population. The distribution of wealth was.probably an important factor shaping the time trend and regional differential in fertility.

Differential treatment of men and women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor markets casts doubt on the common practice of adding male and female labor to create a single “labor” variable in the production function. This article shows that men and women must be disaggregated in the production function, and investigates the effects of inappropriate aggregation on the debate over the Habakkuk-Rothbarth labor scarcity hypothesis. With disaggregation, a female-using bias and an overall labor-using bias is found for the period 1850 through 1919. Technical change was male-neutral through 1900 and male-using thereafter.

Since the time of Malthus and possibly earlier the prevailing theory of the birth rate has connected births to the’ mother's age at marriage, which in turn is related to current economic and social conditions. In this manner changes in the economy are tied to changes in the birth rate and thus, even more indirectly, to changes in the rate of growth of the population.

Industrial expansion depends upon the state of the industrial arts. If we are to explain the rise of “modern industry” we must know precisely what the technological developments were in particular industries during those periods that are recognized as having been extremely important in the development of modern industrial techniques. This study, therefore, deals with the growth, structure, and technology of the French glass industry during a critical period (1640–1740).

Based on the mercantile model of urban growth, I analyze the formative development of Atlanta during the antebellum period. Located at the intersection of three railroads, Atlanta's early growth and economic structure reflected its nodal position in the transport system. Subsequent railroad construction, however, eroded its initial locational advantage, while creating the opportunity for its emergence as a regional metropolis. This transformation was delayed until after the Civil War because of the marginal political and economic position of Atlanta and the Upcountry region, as a whole, within the state.

Two events combined at the middle of the nineteenth century to draw the attention of British economists to Australia. The first was the grant of increased local autonomy through the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850 and subsequent legislation. The prospect of colonists, rather than the British Parliament, determining colonial affairs shifted the focus of economists' interest from London overseas and caused them to ponder seriously what Britain stood to gain or lose from this transfer of authority. British musings over the virtues of self-government and the value of the colonies were given a sudden impulse by a second event, the discovery of large quantities of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851.

The untimely death of Raymond de Roover in March 1972 removed one of the major figures from the field of medieval economic history. Now there has appeared a collection of eleven of de Roover's articles, one of them not previously published, to remind us of the magisterial quality of their author's contributions to our knowledge of medieval business and banking techniques and the milieu in which the medieval man of business operated.

Until very recently scholars have been able to solve certain problems of historical interpretation to their own and presumably to their reader's satisfaction by merely uttering the magic words, “laissez faire.” Thus, much of what was done and most of what was not done, some of what was good and practically all of what was evil in nineteenth-century England and America have been accounted for by a facile reference to laissez faire. During the past few years, however, several studies have cast much doubt on the validity of this catchall interpretation. Laissez faire, it seems now, is a principle more easily imposed upon nineteenth-century data than found there; and in successive investigations supposed instances of this principle have dropped away one by one.

One problem with which economic historians always contend, to which they usually give acknowledgment and with which they occasionally think they have dealt successfully, is that of the representativeness of their empirical answers. As Clapham said,

Every economic historian should, however, have acquired what might be called the statistical sense, the habit of asking in relation to any institution, policy, group or movement the questions: how large? how long? how often? how representative?

We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using international market prices for coffee and sugar for predicting labor demands, addresses potential endogeneity concerns. Our estimates suggest that without the abolition of the Cultivation System average overall mortality in Java would have been between 10 and 30 percent higher by the late 1870s.

I use newly-developed data on Africa to estimate the effects of the international slave trades (circa 1500–1850) on the institutional structures of African economies and societies (circa 1900). I find that: (1) societies in slave catchment zones adopted slavery to defend against further enslavement; (2) slave trades spread slavery and polygyny together; (3) politically centralized aristocratic slave regimes emerge in West Africa and family-based accumulations of slave wealth in East Africa. I discuss implications for literatures on long-term legacies in African political and economic development.

We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile nineteenth-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities to shed light on potential determinants: economic growth and migration are positively correlated with mobility, consistent with the patterns observed across countries.

Girls far outnumbered boys in American high schools at the turn of the century. Despite the fact that women on average spent far fewer years than men in the paid labor force, we argue that a high school education was a better investment for girls than for boys. This was because formal education offered the only opportunity for girls to obtain job-related skills, whereas it was but one of many such opportunities for boys.

The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.

Economic development and “modernization” have certain universal consequences for the structure and organization of the labor force. The history of each advanced country shows a shift of population out of agriculture and the replacement of family enterprise and particularistic employment relationships by large enterprise and wage labor. But the pace and completeness of these inevitable changes have varied widely among different countries.