Economists who have studied the evolution of trade transactions between the two world wars have often stressed the existence of an obvious paradox: despite the disturbances brought about by the war period, the territorial changes, the monetary difficulties and the crises, international trade as a whole and particularly from a structural point of view, had a tendency, after a few years of complete disruption, to return to a pre-war pattern of evolution. Trade flows were returning to a distribution very similar to the one prevailing in 1913, and changes were occurring in the same direction as those of the 1896–1913 period. Certain countries endured great difficulties in the readaptation process, especially the United Kingdom, whose “structural crises” have often been cited. But the very changes that were sources of anxiety for English rulers were less a result of the transformation or the acceleration of pre-war tendencies than of their continuity.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.

The connections between financial development and economic growth are drawing increased attention on many fronts. This dissertation studies ways in which the American financial system functioned to aid in the accumulation and mobilization of capital in the second half of the nineteenth century. The evolution of the banking system, by far the dominant nineteenth-century financial intermediary, is emphasized, but the role of Federal government finance is of scarcely less importance. The interrelated actions of the banks and the Treasury did much to set the tone in various financial markets during most of the period. While considerable study has been devoted to these actions and their short-run effects, much less has been written about their long-run implications. A major contention of the work is that financial strains caused by the Civil War and the various responses to these strains were accompanied by significant changes in the banking system—in its structure, the types of assets in which it dealt, and in its relations with the Treasury—all of which increased its potential for satisfying the demands placed upon it by a rapidly expanding economy. These changes helped to make capital, which may well have been the relatively scarce factor in the antebellum era, more abundant in the postwar Gilded Age, and they therefore abetted the rapid industrialization of those decades.

While credit supply growth is associated with exacerbating financial crises, its impact on long-run growth is unclear. Market access similarly has ambiguous economic effects over time. Using regional variation in bond payments to samurai and the introduction of railways in nineteenth century Japan, we find that together they are associated with persistent redistributive effects between regions and sectors. Areas with higher bond value and railway access experienced tertiary sector growth and primary sector shrinkage, with analogous results in sectoral labor shares. This interaction between credit supply and market access facilitated structural transformation but had little long-run net growth impact.

The role of technology shocks as a driver of the Great Depression is the topic of our own earlier work and the paper by Watanabe in this issue. While the two studies differ in their data and assumptions, they complement each other and strengthen the conclusion of both papers: technology shocks were not the driving force of the Great Depression.

Although in the last two decades there have been literally hundreds of studies of postwar minimum wage legislation, there have been but a handful of studies of the first federal minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), and no studies of the state laws that preceded it.1 My dissertation attempts to bridge this gap by examining the political economy and effects of early American minimum wage legislation.

Before 1920, the year in which railroad consolidation received Congressional sanction, three periods in the history of rail development the time of the Civil War the chief purpose of consolidation seems to have been to unite short connecting lines to form through routes between important terminals, usually with the approval and assistance of state legislatures. A good example was the chartering of the New York Central Railroad in 1853 by the New York legislature following the amalgamation of ten companies operating short lines in a chain of roads between Albany and Buffalo, New York. A second stage of consolidation developed from the unparalleled construction and intense intercompany competition that followed the Civil War when railroads felt the need of large systems both to offer effective service over widening geographic areas and to offset the disastrous effect of competition upon an industry of expensive, fixed, and specialized capital. It was during this period that the major eastern trunk and western transcontinental systems were formed. State laws designed to prevent the combination of competing lines were widely circumvented, or made inoperative, and the prohibition of pooling in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and of trade (and traffic) associations in the Sherman Act of 1890 gave new impetus to the use of consolidation as a means of escaping the enervating effects of competition. In the years following the Panic of 1893, when one fourth of the country's rail mileage passed into the hands of receivers, the use by the railroads of several new legal devices, including the interlocking directorate, the holding company, and the community of interest, not only counteracted antimonopoly legislation but produced a third and still more impressive phase of consolidation.

It is graceless, perhaps, to begin by quarrelling with the program committee in my initial remarks, but I must plead that the assignment itself—to propose an agenda for early modern economic history—provides a mandate for such seemingly uncouth behavior. The controversial issue, of course, is the periodization of economic history into the traditional Middle Ages (pre-1500) and the Early Modern Period (post-1500). The division has never been sharp in political or intellectual history, but it is even less meaningful in economic history—there is no single, dramatic, economic event, no ninety-five theses, to establish a break—and the intellectual consequences of the division at 1500 have often been pernicious. When specialists of the early modern period assert nascent capitalism, medievalists point to thirteenth century Italy. When early modernists lay their claims to discovery and colonization, medievalists point first to the early eastern Mediterranean colonies of the Italian city-states and then to the Atlantic explorations of Spain and Portugal, begun in the fourteenth century. If rapid early modern economic growth is the issue, the medievalist will again cry foul and recall that growth was, at least in part, merely the inevitable recovery from the economic collapse of the later middle ages.

The subject I should like to discuss grows directly out of the theme of the meetings as a whole. They have been concerned with the American West as an Underdeveloped Region, and the title was intended to suggest the analogy between the United States of an earlier period and the so-called underdeveloped nations of the present day. To many it would suggest a contrast in policy. These other nations are now in many cases striving to achieve economic development by national planning and deliberate measures of governmental policy. On the other hand the United States achieved its massive economic development without over-all economic planning, without five-year plans or explicit national targets of input and output, and—it is sometimes believed—without the adoption of policies deliberately intended to promote development.

In his essay J. E. Inikori argues that the British slavers “had freedom to carry as many slaves per ship as possible” to foreign colonies after 1788.1 He takes issue with my argument in Econocide that the British regulatory acts applied equally to those in the British direct trade to foreign colonies.2 In support of this he cites instances of British slave ships that undoubtedly loaded far more than the allowed slaves per ton in 1803.

This paper is concerned with two questions: What was iron and steel used for in the course of the late nineteenth century? And how were the uses of iron and steel affected by changes in the methods of production of iron and steel? The first question asks what was the composition of the iron and steel industry's output, that is, what products were being produced. The second question asks if the changes in this composition were caused by changes in the supply schedules of the industry.

Assessing the role of government in economic development in situations where public and private sectors coexist is extremely difficult. The nature of modern government is so complex and its activities are so broad, that a clear statement of “influence” or “impact” on a national economy becomes almost impossible. Interpretations of Japanese economic history illustrate these problems vividly. Few scholars have dealt with the issue explicitly, and those that have seem unable to reach clear conclusions.