My object in this article is to use the historical evidence of one man's life to raise questions concerning the way we have come to understand our technological history. Inventors and mechanicians have long occupied a prominent place in American history. However, the bases for selecting and certifying these national heroes have resulted in a curious record of achievement and considerable distortion in our understanding of the development of American manufacturing technology. The principal historical perspective that enshrined the names of Evans, Whitney, Perkins, etc. has been first, the emphasis on originality of invention or “dramatic newness,” and, secondly, the attempt by historians to confine mechanical genius or creativity within national boundaries—Slater and DuPont, of course, being the exceptions to this generalization. Thus we speak quite naturally of American inventors, British inventors, and so on.

This paper reviews the output of journal publications by the twenty five leading economic history programs during the past fifteen years. At present, there are no formal ratings of the quality of economic history programs at the various academic institutions, but journal publications can serve as a partial indicator of quality. The Roose-Andersen ratings graduate programs provide separate rankings of economics and history programs, but this information may not be appropriate in evaluating economic history programs, and the ratings have not been updated since 1969. Journal publications are certainly not the only measure of quality academic institutions, but journals are regarded as the standard outlet for disseminating new research findings and expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Those institutions that have concentrated their publication efforts on books, textbooks, monographs, working papers, and other nonjournal forms of publication will of course be underrepresented by the procedures followed in this paper.

The literature of American economic history is replete with discussions of the crucial role of the ferrous industries in nineteenth-century economic development. Analysis of the internal wage structure in the industry, however, has been somewhat neglected in the historical treatment.

This article discusses the Russian private banking houses between 1870 and 1914. The author concludes that these enterprises played an important, and largely unregulated, role in the Russian credit system prior to 1914. Their conflicts with the Ministry of Finance testify to the growing influence of business circles in Russian life shortly before the war.

Agrarian reform has become a major subject of political discussion in Latin America. Its preeminence is due to developments within Latin America, to the late President John F. Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress which he sponsored; and to the Castro regime in Cuba. In this paper we shall discuss the background of the problem throughout the area, and then look in some detail at the four major agrarian reform efforts which have been undertaken so far: those of Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba.

In A society operating completely on the principles of economic individualism, each adult person would be expected to make provision for his own needs and for those of his dependents. He would have to earn enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter, as well as develop the necessary frugality to lay by enough to care for himself and dependents during periods of illness and unemployment. He would likewise be expected to make provision for old age and for funeral expenses. The duties of an adult person in society would be looked upon as being not only economic but also moral in nature, requiring the constant making of choices in expenditure, not merely of what goods to buy but of the spacing of expenditures over long periods of time. If a person met with economic reverses and could not provide, he showed himself to be incapable of dealing with the problems of a responsible adult and ought not to look to others to get him out of his predicament. His condition would be considered to result from lack of the moral qualities required of a person who had taken upon himself the responsibilities of adult life.

The recent contribution by Knauerhase in this Journal raises some important issues regarding productivity change in ocean shipping in the late nineteenth century. The study is limited to the German fleet for the period from 1871 to 1887, but the findings do bear on the decline of freight rates after 1870. The traditional argument, which is now less in vogue, is that steam played the significant role in the last half of the nineteenth century and was the main source of advancing productivity. The novelty and importance of the findings by Knauerhase is that they support this hypothesis. The evidence given by Graham, on the other hand, points to the 1870's as a period when the sailing vessel underwent significant productivity change and experienced revived growth. This position has been buttressed by North, who argues that sail dominated the long-haul routes where most of the goods were carried and where the reduction in freight rates was most dramatic.

From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting that the drive for bigger markets was supported by a large cross section of the population. Considerable community spirit animated the movement, indicating that New Yorkers used the social capital of the community to reach their entrepreneurial aspirations.

Vote trading among lawmakers (logrolling) can enable political rent-seeking but is difficult to identify. To achieve identification, we explore the rules governing voting for railway projects in the U.K. Parliament during the Railway Mania of the 1840s. Parliamentary rules barred MPs from voting directly for their interests. Even so, they could trade votes to ensure their interests prevailed. We find that logrolling was significant, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the railway bills approved. We also quantify a negative externality to society from logrolling ranging from 1/3 to 1 percent of contemporary GDP.

External revenues blunt investments in fiscal capacity. But how do external revenues affect investments in legal capacity? In a simple model of state capacity investment, external revenues should be positively correlated with investments in legal capacity. But this implication could flip if fiscal capacity lowers the cost of legal capacity investments. I test the model by looking at Haiti in 1942 when U.S. mobilization caused a negative shock to external revenues. Contrary to the basic model, the shock led to an increase in legal capacity. This puzzle is explained by institutions that tied fiscal and legal capacity investments.

The discussion of the rationalization wave in German industry (1924–1929) still lacks proper industry-level estimates of the rate of technological progress. To close part of this gap, this article investigates total factor productivity (TFP) growth in hard coal mining over the extended period 1913–1938. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is applied to a sample of firms from the Ruhr coal district. TFP grew positively overall and specifically from 1924–1929. Surprisingly, however, TFP growth was even faster from 1933–1938, suggesting that the Nazi economy heavily capitalized on the Weimar rationalization movement, the effects of which are usually not traced beyond 1932.

“Let those who will consult the spirit rappers to bring forth its ghost.”

Such was Professor Shannon's firm caveat as he laid Frederick Jackson Turner's safety-valve doctrine to rest after a post mortem performed with some gusto. The warning seems to have had the effect intended. Although Turner's frontier concept continues to influence the work of American historians and not a few economists the labor-safety-valve doctrine seems generally to have been accepted as dead and buried. We have little taste for ghosts or spirit rapping, but we would like to argue that die safety-valve doctrine, even if suffering from neglect, retains more than a spark of vitality.

In the June 1977 issue of this Journal, Lewis R. Jones criticized my analysis of the diffusion of mechanical reaping and mowing machinery. Jones attempts to revive the threshold argument popularized by Paul David. In doing so Jones either confuses or ignores the main points I raised while concentrating on a peripheral issue of little significance.

I raised three major issues. First, and of least importance, I revised the values of some of the parameters David used to estimate the threshold acreage. Jones correctly notes that I erred by reporting that the revised threshold was more than twice as large as that previously estimated; the correct calculation is about 93 percent, as Jones notes. If I were to write the paper again, I would correct this mistake. Nonetheless, my major conclusions on this issue are unaltered. Revising two of the parameters used to calculate the threshold acreage so that they better conform with the actual historical situation generates a threshold about twice as large as that previously estimated. I felt this discrepancy was sufficient to cast reasonable doubt on previous estimates, and I noted that similar revisions could be made of most of the parameters and variables used for such estimations (p. 333). Anyone who doubts this assertion should see Robert Ankli's excellent work on the subject.

This article analyzes the growth and distribution of agricultural tenancy in Iowa from 1850 to 1900. For the period before 1880 (when the published censuses did not record land-tenure data), it estimates tenancy rates based on a twelvecounty sample. It analyzes several explanations of the causes of tenancy and concludes that it was a natural outgrowth of a normally operating market system rather than a sign of economic malfunction. The article argues that the widening margin between current rates of return to land and mortgage interest rates explains much of the growth in tenancy. It also finds that regional specialization in farming largely explains the spatial distribution of tenancy by 1900.

European technology, both practical and managerial arts, had an impact on the well-established cotton and handicraft textile industries of the Western Sudan during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule. But French efforts to shape cotton production for export did not always have the intended results. Indigenous historical processes as well as French colonial policy account for the changes in these industries.