Historically, the forms of modern economic life were first extended to new areas from the small zone of Western Europe where they developed by two major means: the direct action of individuals and economic organizations from that zone, and the measures of innovating rulers intent upon modernizing the economic life of their countries. In Russia the outside action came first, beginning with the Chancellor expedition in the sixteenth century and expanding gradually over the subsequent century and a half. Only from the early eighteenth century did the monarch's initiative become the primary factor in economic innovation, but the combination of Muscovite autocratic power and the formidable will of Peter the Great made it from the beginning an irresistible force for change. By the late eighteenth century a new force was evident—the entrepreneurial initiative of Russian tradesmen and manufacturers. The prime movers of Russian economic modernization during the following century were now assembled.

The dissertation is a study of the service industries in the United States during the period 1839 through 1899. The primary purpose of the study is to provide three series relating to the quantitative development of the sector. These series—value-added, gainful workers, and capital stock—provide benchmark estimates at decade intervals centered on census years. Series are presented for the aggregate sector; the major components, final and intermediate services; and eight industries. These eight industries, defined as the service sector, are trade, transportation and public utilities, finance and insurance, professional services, personal services, government, education, and the independent hand trades.

During the nineteenth century the export of bulk commodities from West Africa expanded at the expense of slave exports. Research has focused on the political implications of the expansion of so-called “legitimate trade” rather than on its economic character. In the interests of an economic approach, new terminology and a conceptual framework are proposed, and then applied to a historical problem—the levels of competition prevailing in the African trader networks serving the coastal ports. The conclusions of this study are related to the issue of the historical origins of African underdevelopment.

Governments often respond to crisis situations with radical economic policies. The Shipping Act of 1916 created a government-owned shipping company. This significant departure from prior policy arose in the atmosphere of crisis surrounding the war in Europe. The Wilson Administration was able to use political institutions to its advantage and ensure that alternative, more moderate proposals would not be considered by the legislature. Initially thwarted by a filibuster, the administration was forced to compromise in order to maintain party loyalty and pass the bill in 1916.

As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily upon small, local investors who preferred safety to innovation. As a result, southern manufacturing firms were hampered in their flexibility, and southern industrial structure was skewed toward mature industries with little developmental potential.

The paper focuses on the development in Australia of minimum wage-setting and its relationship to unemployment. A variety of industrial tribunals embarked on a course of wage-setting early in the twentieth century as part of their task of reducing industrial conflict. In varying degree, the tribunals kept in mind what was thought of as wage justice for workers with low bargaining power. By 1921 a standard minimum wage for unskilled men had emerged and formed the basis of the wage system. It was a wage which had a strong welfare basis. Other wages more closely reflected the market. During the 1920s unemployment was not high but was concentrated on less-capable unskilled men. The limited evidence available points to the wage structure as the main cause.

The economic distress and the new concern with social problems in England in the 1840's, which underlay the reformulations of political economy in that decade, had also an extensive and significant reflection in imaginative literature. While the novel with a thesis, even a social thesis, was nothing new, it was only in the forties that English literature began to deal on a major scale with the social problems raised by the industrial revolution. One can sense in the novels of this decade an increased urgency and pressure, a more daring and direct attack. This emphasis is so marked that one critic has attempted a correlation between literature and socialism, and has sought to find in the novels of Dickens the same type of social observation and emotional reaction that prompted the analyses of Karl Marx. While such a thesis goes too far and is almost certainly invalid, one can nevertheless find in these novels a historical meaning of a different sort, more complex, but also more interesting and suggestive to the historian.

On the whole we don't treat old people well in this country, but old scholars probably fare better than most. We let them use our libraries and come to our annual meetings. Occasionally we have them chair a session on some not-too-current topic. We refer to them in footnotes and we thank them in prefaces. We donét, in other words, completely depersonalize them, cut them off from our lives and banish them from our ceremonies, as happens too often with other people of advanced age.

The pioneers' trek across the land has long been taken as a central element in American social history. But that redistribution of resources has been no less vital in fueling the advance of productivity, in supporting the varying pattern of final outputs. Because migration both caused, and was a consequence of, these massive changes there has long been an interest in measuring the scope and detail of population redistribution.

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.

The purpose of this note is to examine the method by which N. S. B. Gras establishes his thesis concerning the evolution of the English grain markets. According to his book, grain, markets evolved through several distinct stages, culminating in the “metropolitan market.” Although the influence of the London market by the sixteenth century can be demonstrated without reference to the existence of the early stages, it is nevertheless they that constitute the essential novelty of Mr. Gras's approach and, presumably, the main contribution of the book to the study of economic history. It will be contended below that the existence of certain of these early stages is at least doubtful and that, in any case, their economic significance is either negligible or not provable.

A persistent problem in American economic history is the explanation of the failure of the South to mechanize cotton production. Summarily, the following argues that the failure to mechanize was due to a southern economic structure which operated to reduce the effectiveness of the factors in society conducive to invention and innovation.

Nineteenth-century romanticism and the hardships of capitalist individualism have caused scholars to emphasize collectivistic social and economic institutions i n the Middle Ages. Carried to extremes by the English socialists, this attitude tended to ignore or even to deny the competitive aspects of medieval production. Church authorities and guild ordinances were often cited in support of the thesis that the era was noncompetitive. Even Sombart was able to see in the medieval craftsman and tradesman a petit bourgeois who typically held to the morals prescribed by church authorities.

Perhaps the most important methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence, often have markedly different interpretations of a particular historical event. Why, for example, in a world in which there is almost unquestioned belief, even by Marxist historians, that industrialization is the grand remedy for the economic and social ills of poor and underdeveloped countries, do some historians, and especially the Marxists, still argue about the goods or ills bestowed on the worker by the first great experiment in industrialization, the industrial revolution in England? The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the “moral risk” involved in the transformation of life by industrialization.1The historians, however, while concerned also with this possible moral risk, are not all certain that the industrial revolution in England before 1850 did cause the average standard of living of the worker to rise. This uncertainty might be resolved by finding out what actually happened, but in the meantime interpretations differ, and have differed, on the basis of some evidence, of much confusion, and of differing value judgments. It is the specific aim of this article to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them.

When arrayed in time series, the rates of signature literacy of free persons in colonial Perquimans County, North Carolina, exhibit the ∪-shaped pattern found in the records of many other new communities of early America. In Perquimans, the pattern was due to coincident movements in the literacy rates of immigrants and natives of the county. The initial drop was associated with pronounced political and social disorder; the rise, with improved political stability and with demographic and economic growth.