This article analyzes aspects of secular urban growth in two systems of cities in the mid-Atlantic states. One system centers on New York City; the other on Philadelphia. The author finds that the growth oi New York's hinterland was an important factor in explaining that system's relatively rapid expansion through the War of 1812. In subsequent years, this situation changed; basing his analysis on cross-sectional data, the author shows that relatively simple patterns of development gave way to complex situations shaped by the differential impacts of transportation, manufacturing, and commerce on these two urban systems.

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.

Louis XIV created the Council of Trade on June 29, 1700, to advise the controller general and the secretary of the marine on economic matters. The Council was to examine

… all propositions and memoranda sent it, together with such matters and difficulties which may there arise concerning external and internal trade by land and by sea, as well as factories and manufactories, in order that His Majesty may take appropriate action on the reports which the said Council of Trade will make to him of its deliberations.

The possession of a few copper cents [in 1862] meant that the owner could ride [the street car] rather than walk…. It meant that he could buy a postage stamp without an altercation with the clerk, or a cigar without receiving in change a handful of the dealer's own manufactured currency.

The history of European trade is replete with cases of aggressive and restrictive commercial policies. These policies were part of the permanent nature of economic relationships among European nations from feudalism onward. Keynes' golden age passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace exaggerates the extent to which prewar Europe was a free trade zone.

Spain ascended to dazzling heights in world affairs during the sixteenth century, thrust there by her political, military, and economic might. Until the seventeenth century began, her position seemed unassailable. Then, with agonizing helplessness, she slipped into a humiliating cycle of decline which persisted until only a shell of her greatness remained one hundred years later. Viewing Spain in such depths of misery, few observers could have guessed that her melancholy drift had ended when Charles II (1665–1700) died and Philip V (1700–1746) succeeded him in 1700. Yet as the Austrian lineage thus came to an end and the Bourbon dynasty began, Spain entered a new epoch marked by the unusually enlightened participation of government in Spanish economic affairs.

IN recent years much has been said and written about milk as the most nearly perfect of all modern foods, but it is important to realize that it is also the most venerable of human nutriments. Its use began long before recorded history, and it has continued throughout the ages to be a staple part of the human diet. Man's making friends with the lactating animals, such as the cow and the goat, was a significant step in the advancement of human nutrition and therefore of civilization as well. Butter and cheese proved to be important ways of preserving the food values of milk, and their invention, though probably accidental in both instances, was an important contribution to human nutrition. In the long history of dairying, custom and accidental discovery have probably been more important than conscious experimentation and innovation.

Focusing on a religious commune known as the Shakers and utilizing the information recorded in the enumeration schedules of the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture censuses, this article estimates the productivities of Shaker enterprises and compares them with those of other producers randomly selected from the same data source. The results provide support to the contention that communes need not always suffer from reduced productivity. Shaker farms and shops generally performed just as productively as their neighbors; when differences did exist between their productivities, there are good reasons to attribute them to factors other than the organizational form.

Newly estimated national accounting data for the Arab community are utilized to provide a comparative economic profile of the Arab and Jewish sectors in mandatory Palestine's dual economy. It is shown that the Arab economy grew substantially, but at a much slower rate than the Jewish economy. Productivity advance, however, seems to have made a significantly larger relative contribution to Arab growth. General and specific dualistic features of Arab-Jewish trade and their growth promoting effects are also explored, suggesting that the political conflict between the two communities played only a minor role in shaping their economic interrelationship and performance.

The story is told that Dean Donham of the Harvard Business School once asked Professor Schumpeter, after a lecture on the entrepreneur—Schumpeter's plumed knight of economic development–what was the most important single factor in accounting for the success of the businessman. Quick as a shot came the answer: “Good health.” For purposes of this inquiry into certain aspects of American social structure and American values which seem to have been of decisive importance in contributing to American economic growth, certain variables–like the health of the businessman and the endowment of the country with respect to natural resources –will not be considered.

The analysis of labor and capital productivity in the New England cotton textile industry has been extensive in recent years. The well-preserved records of the early textile firms have provided the basis for major studies by Layer, McGouldrick, Davis and Stettler, Zevin, David, and Williamson. Although these studies vary in approach and focus, they are alike in using measures of labor input that are primarily based on data for mill operatives. The labor productivity indices thus constructed have indicated increasing labor productivity prior to the Civil War. These estimates not only have substantially revised traditional historians' often implied beliefs of falling labor productivity due to declining labor quality in this period, but also have led to a variety of explanations of the relationship between labor productivity, capital productivity, and technological innovation.

I use unique city-month level disaggregated data, from public employment offices, to estimate the matching functions for the 1920s and the early 1930s. The results show that the public labor exchange was slack, a relative deficiency of job vacancies, in the 1920s and it became slacker during the Great Depression. However, the findings show that there was no deterioration of the matching efficiency in the early 1930s. The outcome of a deficiency of labor demand during the 1930s implies that there was a need for effective government policies to implement the new job-creation programs.

It is now five hundred years since the Byzantine empire was brought to an end by the Ottoman Turks, Scholars today quite justly reject Gibbon's assumption that the Byzantine empire was, throughput its entire existence, in a state of decline. They have come to rank it, instead, as one of the great empires in history. And this for good reasons. It endured for over a thousand years. Down to about the middle of the eleventh century it was the center of civilization in Christendom. It preserved the thought and literature of antiquity; it developed new forms of art; it held back the barbarians. It produced great statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats as well as reformers and renowned scholars. Its missionaries, aided by its diplomats and sometimes by its armies, spread the gospel among the pagan tribes, especially the Slavs, which dwelt along its frontiers and beyond. As a Czech historian has put it, Byzantium “molded the undisciplined tribes of Serbs, Bulgars, Russians, Croats even, and made nations out of them; it gave to them its religion and institutions, taught their princes how to govern, transmitted to them the very principles of civilization—writing and literature.” Byzantium was a great power and a great civilizing force.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Dutch bankers channeled investors’ funds to sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean, Surinam in particular. Agency problems between plantation owners, bankers, and investors led to an arrangement called negotiaties. Bankers oversaw plantations’ cash flows and placed mortgage debt with investors. We demonstrate how this securitization arrangement worked using market-wide data and detailed records from banker F. W. Hudig. During the boom, debt contracts and their securitization were an effective solution for planters, bankers, and investors. However, the market crashed after an oversupply of credit. This led to inefficient restructuring due to debt overhang.

We study the role of denominational competition in the expansion of higher education in the nineteenth-century United States. We document that nearly all colleges established in this period were affiliated with a Christian denomination. Empirical analysis reveals a robust positive relationship between the denominational fragmentation of the county and the number of colleges established. We take several steps to rule out competing explanations and also highlight the causal channel by utilizing two historical case studies. We conclude by estimating a model of school choice and showing that students exhibited strong preferences to attend same-denominational colleges in terms of willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-travel. Therefore, we argue that religious diversity softened the extent of tuition competition between institutions and precipitated an “excess” entry of schools.

This article examines the relationship between collective action and the size of worker and employer groups in the United States. It proposes and tests a theory of union formation and strikes. Using a new county-by-industry level dataset containing the location of unions, the location of strikes, average establishment size, and the number of establishments around the turn of the twentieth century, I find that unions were more likely to form and strikes were more likely to occur in counties with intermediate-sized worker groups and large employer groups.