Control of livestock disease had large spillover effects on human health. By 1900 the United States was a leader in livestock disease control, thanks to the efforts of the Bureau of Animal Industry. Its first chief, Daniel Salmon, established a model that would be copied around the world in campaigns against human and animal diseases. For the most part, the Progressive Era regulations to advance livestock health and food safety were spectacular successes. The bureau's main blunder was its failure to deal effectively with trichinosis, which was far more widespread than generally believed.

Economics, like geology, is an historical science. Geology has made incredible advances by accepting it is an historical, rather than a laboratory science. Economic historians can help economics make similar advances by adopting the research strategies of modern geology. Intensely empirical and global in their range, today's geologists focus on the historical remains of shocking, usually catastrophic, events in the earth's past. Already empirical and global, economic historians have ample shocks to study whether their specialty is population, technology, or institutions. A few examples of the possibilities should stimulate us to reinvigorate our parent disciplines of economics and history.

Recent studies into technological change in the American economy have stressed the importance of economic conditions that operate through the market mechanism on both the direction of the inventive activity which has generally provided the basis for this change and on the rate at which newly developed techniques are commercially adopted. Schmookler has argued the former point persuasively in several articles, while North, for the latter, has asserted that “productivity changes stemming from technological innovations are, in part at least, a nearly automatic response to successful expansion of industries in an acquisitive society under competitive market conditions.” With respect to American agriculture in the nineteenth century, our knowledge of the level of investment which incorporated new production techniques, and of the effects these techniques had on productivity and output has been greatly enhanced by the recent work of Kendrick, Gallman, and Towne and Rasmussen. Our account of inventive activity in agriculture, however, is still limited to mentioning and tracing through the effects of some of the more famous inventions in this field and to fragmentary patent citations. Accessibility to patent statistics since 1837 now makes possible a fuller treatment of agricultural inventions. In Part II of this paper I present a description of the level and composition of agricultural inventions between 1837–1890. In Part III, I attempt to test the importance of certain market conditions as determinants of this inventive activity.

Leland H. Jenks and Thomas C. Cochran have suggested that the actions and motivations of modern businessmen be studied through the examination of “sanctions,” the latter defining “social sanction” as “a label for certain types of opinion or attitudes” involving judgments on what is worthy of praise and blame and of social penalties and rewards. When speaking of sanctions, we deal, he says, with a “general concept that stresses the stabilizing function of adages, admonitions, social ceremonies, traditional practices, and other such devices for protecting society from unpredictable behavior.” I believe this concept is a good tool for comparing two cultures of the same period or the same culture at two different periods, for showing the possibilities of, say, the Point Four Program, or for explaining otherwise inexplicable differences in the rate of capitalistic development. But considerable theoretical deliberation and many empirical studies are needed before it can be forged into a tool that can be widely used for research in entrepreneurship. This discussion is concerned with some considerations in connection with the application of the concept to the study of American businessmen and the freedom of enterprise in the nineteenth century.

Most historical generalizations must be approached with a wary eye; Kliuchevskii's dictum that “the history of Russia is the history of a country in the process of colonization” is no exception. Taken unjudiciously this dictum grievously compresses time, focuses attention on only a single historical dynamic, lends to the historical process a pre-ordained character which is indeed usually absent. The historian's critical apparatus is dulled, and the delicate nuance and important variant are neglected. Moscow, it has been argued, was a chosen town to lead the southward and eastward expansion of the Great Russian people because of her physical location on the edge of the Valdai hills giving her control of the crucial waterways of European Russia. (Why not, for the same reasons, Vladimir or Rostov, Suzdal or even Uglich?) Muscovite expansion forms the central thread of Russian history, determining the economic and political structure of the state. It was the expansion which fixed and defined the necessity of the “service state,” which in turn subjugated all classes and groups to the all powerful tsardom. (Why not the reverse—the “service state” defining the expansion—and why did not an independent merchant class come to control the expansion, and the towns and politics of Muscovy?) To pursue the argument to a logical conclusion, die modern audioritarian state in Russia (bodi Soviet and Tsarist) is essentially a continuation of old Muscovy. As the latter expanded and colonized, so must the former. (The role of the Party and the Marxist dialectic, by this line of argument, has no fundamental historical significance.)

The major contrast between preindustrial and modern economies is that the latter enjoy regular and rapid growth, whereas income per capita tends to stagnate in the former. Analysis of the organization of exchange in early Christian Ireland shows that the exchange and therefore the production of material wealth was so thoroughly integrated into securing and exercising power, as well as into establishing and maintaining family and social ties, that any improvements in technology which might have led to economic growth would inevitably have generated prohibitive social costs.

This study estimates agency’s impact on sugar plantation productivity using a unique early nineteenth-century panel data set from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Results of fixed effects models, combined with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of potential endogeneity of the agency variable, provide no evidence that estates managed by agents were less productive than those managed by their owners. We discuss the results in the context of the historical and recent, revisionary, interpretations of agency, and the emergence of managerial hierarchies in the Atlantic economy.

The scarcity of quantitative evidence on economic growth in the nineteenth century is a strong incentive for the use of representative indicators, instead of compound indexes or supplemented by them. Consumption series of coal, iron, and cotton are prominent candidates to serve this purpose, due to the central roles played by these materials in European industrialization. A further point in their favor is the relatively high availability and quality of mining and foreign trade statistics. The specific functions and link-ages of those three staples, however, were quite different, and thus their growth paths represent different aspects and processes. For the overall modernizing transformation of an economy, coal consumption evidently suggests itself as the best single indicator, at least until the end of the century. Its growth reflects the increasing output of industry, transportation, and even agriculture, inasmuch as they relied on coal for heat and/or for motive power. This means that coal stands for a broad cross-section of the economy, and furthermore, for a growing one. The substitution of mineral fuel for wood or charcoal and of steam for water power was not only the most general component of industrialization, in the wider sense of the term. It also was a prerequisite for the growth potential of firms and industries in many instances, among them such strategic sectors as iron and steel or overland transportation. Similarly, the introduction of steam engines was a characteristic of the innovating firm in agriculture and in land reclamation. On these grounds one would expect the growth of coal consumption to represent the pace of transition to modern economic growth, rather than the growth of industrial product only.

Examination of approximately a score of U.S. economic history texts indicates that the hypothesis of a change in the structure of consumer preferences in favor of durable goods in the twentieth century, and thereby in the product structure of consumption, has strongly influenced economic historians. By implication, the alleged structural change is unique to the twentieth century. This impression relies upon the treatment of durables expenditures by almost all of that minority of textbook writers who address themselves to the general topic of consumption.

The Archives du Rhone at Lyon contain a unique collection of eighteenth-century business records—partnership agreements, merchandise inventories, financial statements, and depositions concerning a variety of commercial houses. Working in these papers, one begins to acquire a clear and detailed idea of the character of French business enterprise, of how business was organized and carried on and commercial capital mobilized at the end of the old regime.

My thesis examines the process of industrialization in nineteenthcentury New England before the Civil War. I have attempted to achieve three principal objectives: first, the purely descriptive task of beginning to fill our present vacuum of detailed information on the American economy before 1840; second, to test the specific hypothesis that New England and perhaps other American regions would exhibit concentrated spurts of industrial output similar to those which characterized the emergence of modern economies in nineteenth-century Europe; third, to construct an explanation of the forces which determined the particular course of development which was observed.

Isaac bronson was a highly successful financier of the Jacksonian era who was also one of the period's most original and influential banking theorists. Bronson accumulated his very considerable fortune in New York primarily by judicious personal money-lending operations on long-term bonds and mortgages at a cautious 7 per cent annual return, supplemented by successful ventures in land speculation. In addition to wealth, he had by the 1830's acquired a weighty reputation for sober financial conservatism and was regarded as an authoritative exponent of sound banking principles. Prominent in the financial community, he had long thrown his weight as a sound banking theorist against the “wild-cat” practices of the then rampant state banks. As controlling stockholder of the Bridgeport Bank for almost thirty years, and as president for much of that time, he prided himself on its successful weathering of the financial storms of the period.”

The spring-wheat region, stretching from central Minnesota across the X Dakotas and into Montana, has been the seat of much unrest owing to its unbalanced development from 1870 to 1920. It was colonized by seekers of the proverbial “free home” and fabulous profits to be had by raising wheat. As a result many farmers assumed burdensome economic ties and fell victims to over-optimism. Their difficulties were due to a variety of complex factors, some within and others outside their control; yet, one trend stood out noticeably: the grain growers persisted in a ruinous, anarchistic form competition, whereas among the merchants and their powerful allies competition was closely regulated.

The work of converting the undeveloped forest resources of the Lake States into usable forms absorbed the energies of thousands of individual entrepreneurs. Their combined activity was scarcely able to meet the insatiable demand from the growing number of settlements that dotted the Midwestern prairies and from villages throughout the nation that were growing into towns or mushrooming into major cities. A universal building material was indispensable during a time of rapid economic expansion. Moreover, in the prevailing Age of Wood, white pine lumber, of the finest quality and incredibly low in price, was fortuitously available in abundance.