This article examines the effects of the Victorian Factory and Shops Act, the first minimum wage law in Australia. The Act differed from modern minimum wage laws in that it established Special Boards, which set trade-specific minimum wage schedules. We use trade-level data on average wages and employment by gender and age to examine the effects of minimum wages. Although the minimum wages were binding, we find that the effects on employment were modest, at best. We speculate that this was because the Special Boards, which were comprised of industry insiders, closely matched the labor market for their trades.

In the half-century before 1914 international capital movements Played a significant role in the development of the world economy. This paper—which is a prelude to a more comprehensive study—focuses upon the British experience. We will first present new annual series on British foreign capital issues for the period 1865–1894. Our analysis of their behavior is centered about the following questions. First, how did the volume of British foreign investment fluctuate during the latter part of the nineteenth century? Were there long swings in these capital movements? Second, how did the geographic distribution of British foreign investment change over time? Was there an increasing tendency to invest within the British Empire? How was the total volume of investment apportioned between the tropics and the temperate regions of recent settlement? Third, how was British foreign investment allocated among economic sectors? Did the industrial composition vary significantly among countries, continents, and climatic-ethnic regions? Finally, what types of enterprises were nourished by British capital? How did the shares vary among government, private and mixed—government and private—undertakings? We believe that our time series provide more reliable answers to these questions than do previously available data.

It is my purpose in this paper to sketch briefly one heretofore ignored facet in American economic history: the influence of British capital, knowledge, and livestock in the growth, development, and eventual decline of the Western range-cattle industry during that colorful, though all too frequently disastrous, period between the American Civil War and the end of the century. Although the locale of this story would seem to confine its interest and importance largely to the West, it was, in fact, an incident of profound national and international importance. It filled the press of the United States with glowing descriptions of great baronial estates teeming with hundreds of thousands of head of cattle; it brought about long articles of analysis, praise, sharp criticism, and denunciation in the British press; it resulted in an internationalbattle of words involving at least three American secretaries of agriculture, presidents of the Board of Trade, ministers of agriculture, and chancellors of the exchequer. There were rude questions in the House of Commons and pointed inquiries in Lords. There were even letters to The Times!

William H. Dean, Jr. argued the development of a commercial agglomeration at any site is a function of three interrelated variables: trade routes, position, and nodality. Industrial agglomerations follow commercial ones. Dean's theory is discussed and applied to Chicago's growth before the Great Fire of 1871. The initial development of Chicago's transportation infrastructure is described. Data for the balance of receipts and shipments of selected items and growth rates for receipts and shipments from 1854 to 1871 are presented.

The factors responsible for the South Carolina Low Country's rapid economic rise in the eigthteenth century and for the area's subsequent lapse into stagnation and decline are described and analyzed. The conclusion is that the rise and fall of the Low Country grew out of the white settlers' early economic commitment to the production of plantation staples with bound labor. The Low Country was locked into a pattern of economic development that required a high demand for low country staples. When demand for low country staples abated, the area faced economic ruin.

It is argued in this article that the labor market disequilibrium produced by the American Civil War was substantially eliminated through the process of interregional migration of population over the interval 1870–1920. This migration caused the system of regional labor markets to converge toward a “steady-state” equilibrium. It is estimated that the efficiencies introduced by this migration process explain 6 percent of per capita income levels in 1920.

My article on Prussian public finance in the December 1966 issue of this Journal contained some errors of calculation which partially affect the arguments I advanced there and which provide an excellent object lesson in the hasty use of quantitative evidence. After unaccountably converting current prices into constant ones by multiplication instead of division, I rushed the results off to the editors without checking them.

Industry and commerce developed rapidly in China during the last three centuries before Christ, as they did also in the Mediterranean world. Contemporary Hellenistic and Roman businessmen made extensive use of slave labor, and slavery gradually developed an industrial character. Nothing comparable occurred in China. Private and government slavery had a marked growth under the Han empire, but the use of slaves for industrial purposes—even commercial farming— did not become an important characteristic of the Chinese institution. This fact raises questions concerning the “style” of ancient Chinese slavery, and concerning the economic organization of which it was a part.

Historians have taken it for granted that the Revolutionary, debt was fairly well concentrated before it was funded in 1790, but they have not been able to support this view with concrete evidence. Most of the people living at the time thought the same thing but were likewise unable to prove it. The truth could not be known until Hamilton's funding operation assembled the securities that made up the debt. Under the act of 1790 a new federal loan was instituted. Various kinds of securities representing unpaid claims against the government were taken as subscriptions and the possessors given new federal stock. As nearly all the old securities came in, the government had full information about the transfer and ownership of the Revolutionary debt. The details, however, were not made public. Later, a succession of fires in the treasury destroyed nearly all the central records. Documents now existing, though voluminous, are scattered, incomplete, and hard to interpret. Historians have not made much use of them. For this reason, the ownership of the debt, which was a question in 1790, is a question still.

Since the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay, historians have implicitly recognized the significance of community characteristics on levels of economic opportunity. Nevertheless, even though the last two decades have witnessed the publication of a number of occupational mobility studies of a wide variety of communities, the nature of the community under examination has been largely overlooked. Thus, while the authors of these studies have frequently found different levels of mobility, the practical necessity of focusing on one community in these undertakings has precluded any systematic attempt either to explain variances among communities or to measure precisely the impact of community characteristics on levels of opportunity.