The early commercial relations between the United States and South America in the years preceding the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine have until quite recently received but scant attention. This neglect may in part be attributed to the historian's concern with the political implications of the revolutionary movements in Spanish. America and their bearing upon our foreign policies. In part, also, it may be ascribed to the paucity of materials (either published or in manuscript); information on commercial affairs transmitted by American special agents and consuls in the ports of Latin America was generally fragmentary and incomplete. Yet even a tardy examination of our trade relations with Chile in the years 1817-1820 may be of value, especially since the materials available for this study present a picture of the volume, the variety, and the difficulties of our trade that is unique in the annals of our early relations with South America.

Within the sweep of Canada's economic progress, I should liketo devote special attention to one period—from about 1900 to the outbreak of World War I—as die period of most rapid growth in the history of Canada since die union of the separate provinces under Confederation in 1867, with die possible exception of die war-stimulated 1940's. I propose to point out certain parallels between that remarkable expansionary period and a much earlier one. I shall also attempt to isolate die important factors responsible for the upsurge of growdi after 1900.

Roger Ransom takes exception on three counts to my published study of the burden of the Navigation Acts, questioning (1) the counterfactual proposition I employed, (2) my estimate of the relative burden, and (3) the likelihood of differing regional impacts of the Acts. I shall briefly take up each of these in turn.

Cross-section data on expenditure patterns and time-series data on nominal national income and the characteristics of the consuming population are combined to yield aggregate expenditure and household budget share estimates for Canadians from 1870 to 1914. Recently developed econometric techniques are used to produce the new time series. Unlike older estimates that give relatively stable budget shares, the new series break at 1900. This finding has significant implications for the debate over Canadian real income changes in the period, a debate prolonged by problems of converting nominal into real income and of estimating real consumption directly.

For many years a relatively small number dominated the private sector of the American of the American economy. Most of the nation's goods and a substantial part of its services are produced and distributed by very large corporations. Of late, most Americans seem unconcerned about this fact. They regard big business with equanimity, even approval, and as Richard Hofstadter points out, antitrust has become “one of the faded passions of American reform.”

The power of the Medici as a banking house, and their weakness also, become clearer when we examine the source of their funds. The main problem is whether the Medici bank operated mainly with the money invested by the partners or whether most of the operating capital was supplied from outside sources. It would be easy to settle this question if some balance sheets of the Medici bank were still available. As none have come down to us, another method of approach has to be used.

This paper attempts to answer three questions. How much did agricultural research contribute to agricultural growth in British India? Was its limited impact due to too little investment or inefficient allocation of research resources? Could more research have led to a “Green Revolution” in foodgrain production? Available data indicate that the impact of research was small and that more should have been invested in research. The evidence suggests, however, that larger investments in foodgrain research would not have resulted in a Green Revolution in British India.

The paper will show how the Marxian concept of class can be applied to the processes of slavery in the American antebellum South. The use of the notion of classes, and particularly the reconceptualized concepts of fundamental and subsumed class processes, provides an alternative to the received non-Marxian categories of plantation capitalism and planter hegemony. These concepts are developed and applied to Southern class conflicts over both state banking and national monetary policy. Competition among various classes is shown to have had significant influences on the nature of these conflicts.

What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nördlingen (1579–1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites enriched themselves substantially, increasing inequality. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit the Thirty-Years’ War as a shock to elites’ potential for enrichment from public office. Officials manipulated this crisis to enrich themselves further.

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curve and the NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment), and so ingrained was this orthodoxy that most policymakers accepted it. Is the NAIRU dead?

The Russell Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation believed that the 1990s required a closer examination to see what we could learn from this seemingly unusual period. They asked Robert Solow and Alan Krueger to assemble the set of topics and authors that resulted in this volume. The book is divided into four parts.

Constantine J. Spiliotes makes a substantial new contribution to the literature on presidential decision making. Spiliotes seeks to bring together two largely separate literatures: presidential studies and rational choice theory. This is a formidable task: Economists and rational-choice political scientists typically view traditional presidential studies as excessively anecdotal for the purpose of establishing generally applicable theories, and presidential-studies scholars typically view rational-choice models as excessively abstract and parsimonious for the purpose of understanding the complexities of the presidency.

Adolf Hitler's position in the economic life of his days has been the object of ardent discussions from his early beginnings down to the present time. The Marxist and leftist view which sees in the Führer one of the most outstanding servants of German monopoly capitalism has been contested not only by Hitler's own followers but, to an even greater extent, by the spokesmen and legal representatives of the German industrial circles, who wished to disclaim any responsibility for the disastrous events of that period. A scientific investigation of this problem is the more imperative, since die preponderant role played by socioeconomic factors in the rise of the Führer is quite obvious. A leader of an insignificant little group who distinguished himself from the many antiproletarian dictator candidates of his time mainly by his qualities as a demagogue, rooted in his neurotic reaction to the experience of social decline, Hitler in 1923 suffered a complete political fiasco, because his following was too small. While times of full employment and economic boom were unfavorable for his party, his movement benefited greatly from periods of depression, such as die one that followed the stabilization of the mark in 1923, and especially from the big depression after 1929. This depression not only caused the ruined masses of the German middle class to follow a leader who knew how to fight his social decline by donning a field-grey uniform but it also made some big German producers more eager than before to listen to a man who seemed to be conquering a disaster that had been caused, to a large extent, by their own rationalization policy.

Italian sources have so far furnished the principal materials for the study of medieval business history in the Mediterranean area. Florence, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, it seems fair to say, were the cradles of important commercial institutions. For their merchant guilds, sea loan contracts, and various forms of business organization, other Mediterranean towns were largely in debt to the Italian cities. In Catalonia, a region that experienced a remarkable expansion of overseas trade during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the borrowing and adaptation of Italian institutions were continuous. But in Barcelona, the presumptive birthplace of the Llibre del consolat de mar, the early development of deposit banking and marine insurance law was a product of Catalan initiative. It is highly possible that the rich historical archives of Barcelona will also yield important data for the study of early life-insurance and annuity practices.

As Tirthankar Roy explains in his preface, this book “aims to be no more than an updated and shorter version of the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II” (henceforth CEHI), one that will provide an accessible textbook on the economic history of colonial India for the compulsory course in the subject in most Indian universities. In this task he has been successful. Instead of ploughing through the detailed chapters of the otherwise indispensable CEHI, students—and their teachers—now have a useful educational aid which summarizes the latest research by economic historians of India.

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource price leads the owner to prefer communal harvesting, which simplifies monitoring against theft. I support this framework with evidence from colonial court records. “Palm cutting always cause palaver.”