Taken as a whole the half century from 1835 to 1885 was a periodof substantial economic growth in the United States. The population increased nearly fourfold, or at an annual rate in the neighborhood of 2½ to 2½ per cent per year. Estimates of the national income show a figure at the end of the period six- or sevenfold as large as that at the beginning, the equivalent of an average growdi rate of about 3½ to 4 per cent per year. A crude available estimate of national wealth suggests about a tenfold change, or an annual growth averaging close to 5 per cent. These growth rates for income and wealth do not need to be adjusted downward for price changes, because the available wholesale price indexes suggest that in the middle of the 1880's the price level was a little lower than in the middle of the 1830's. The figures are not to be taken as first class statistical data. They merely indicate the apparent order of magnitude of the degree of growth.

Original and useful ideas are infrequent in both economics and history. Most of us have to make do by appropriating from others and repackaging. But this book develops an idea that is both novel and ingenious. The author deserves much praise. The idea is to extract information on time use in Industrial Revolution England from witness statements in criminal trials. His central conclusion is that average hours of work for male workers increased by 30 percent between the 1750s and 1800, and by 20 percent between the 1750s and 1830. Indeed, his estimate of 3,500 hours per male worker in 1800 is the all-time high for England. Thus Voth finds evidence that the Industrious Revolution posited by Jan de Vries did accompany the Industrial Revolution. He concludes that even the meager productivity growth reported by Nick Crafts is still too high, since some increase in output was due to increased labor inputs. This reviewer has doubts, explained below, whether he has large enough samples of the appropriate types of workers to convincingly assert this central finding. But his method is correct in principle, and if extra data can be secured they will tell us a lot.

The activities of the General Managers' Association of Chicago in the great strike of the American Railway Union in 1894 are well known, but the earlier history of this association has remained obscure. Even the most scholarly writers on the Pullman strike have accepted statements made in testimony before the United States Strike Commission that this association first participated in a labor conflict in 1893. As a matter of fact, it originated in a strike, and early in its career it set precedents for many of its exploits a few years later.

In the last two decades or so a new field of teaching and research, business history, has made its appearance. Like other fields of interdisciplinary origin it remains ill defined, and its literature exhibits the many points of view of its devotees, among whom are to be found historians, economists, students of administration, corporate officers, public relations men, and free-lance writers in search of drama. Consequently, we find wide variations in both analytical quality and historical accuracy and balance among the works. Very few of the studies approach the ideal of blending detailed historical investigation, meaningful analysis, and effective presentation, yet many nonetheless have marked interest. In this paper I shall endeavor, not to note in a comprehensive manner the many works, but rather to comment on how some of them have illuminated certain aspects of economic history, economics, and administration.

Private savings–often through employer-based pension plans–account for a larger proportion of retirement incomes in Britain than elsewhere. The strength of employer–based pension plans in Britain can be traced to a variety of factors; their early development and security are emphasized. The pattern of spread, with heavy concentration initially in bureaucratic firms, suggests that old-age saving entered the employment relationship around 1900 because large-scale bureaucracies needed conditional, lifetime payment systems. By the 1930s, the other main intermediaries for old-age saving, specializing in private provision on an individual basis, had moved into the market for collective, employer-based pension plans.

The point of departure of this dissertation is the observation that, over the entire period for which statistics are available, regional differences in income per capita in Canada have remained unchanged. Five commonly recognized regions of the country are considered: the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairie Provinces, and British Columbia. Official statistical series show that the relative levels of income per capita in the five regions have been about the same in recent years as in the late 1920's, when the series begins. In a world of continuous change there may be no single expected trend of regional income differentials, but convergence does seem to be a common pattern among the industrially advanced nations of the world.2 The Canadian experience is sufficiently interesting to call for further examination. The dissertation summarized here begins this examination in two ways: estimates of regional per capita income are made for some years prior to the beginning of the official series and a preliminary examination of some important factors influencing regional income differences is begun.

Any attempt to analyze fully this comprehensive and extremely complex subject would require at least a book, not a short paper. Businessmen in the American petroleum industry came face to face with governmental institutions in the United States on every plane from townships, counties, towns, and cities to states and the Federal authority. Since petroleum products entered into American trade with practically every national entity on the globe, producers, manufacturers, and marketers of oil were vitally affected by foreign legislation and administration of the laws in the various lands. No scholar has ventured as yet to investigate fully and evaluate carefully the historical relationship between government and oilmen on a local or state level, much less on a national or world-wide basis. This paper can only show the breadth of the subject and the size of the task presented to the historian.

When it is the custom of the day to put its questions in terms of dimension and proportion, it is hardly necessary to argue that measurement can contribute to their solution. With that granted, our attention can be devoted to the problems that arise when attempting measurement. We could list these formally, but it may be more instructive to let the problems crop up in the course of a brief review of some recent work on trends in government activity during the past half century, and also to note possible applications to this field of some ideas developing in other work in economic statistics.

Many writers treating the late colonial period have touched uponthe subject of economic fluctuations, but no agreement is found as to the duration, intensity, and amplitude of these alterations of good and bad times. Nor has any investigation as yet assembled all the available data necessary to an understanding of this phenomenon. Since agriculture constituted an important aspect of the colonial economy, some light may be shed upon these economic vicissitudes by an examination of Northern agricultural conditions in the two decades preceding the Revolution.

In studies of the late medieval economy, the dominant position of the textile industry has long been recognized. Since the opening decades of this century however, scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively toward the luxury industries of silk and fine woolens, which involved a complex financial and commercial structure geared to the satisfaction of the needs and desires of a wealthy and select clientele. Relatively neglected is that branch of the textile industry devoted to the production of low-priced cotton cloth for popular consumption. This neglect is all the more surprising in view of a rich if somewhat dispersed documentation attesting to the importance of this industry in numerous towns of Northern Italy. The large-scale production of cotton cloth posed problems of financing and organization not unlike those of silk and wool and gave rise to similar entrepreneurial forms. At the same time a study of the organization of cotton manufacture provides a number of unique insights into aspects of economic organization in Northern Italy. In the period covered by this paper, the cotton manufacturing centers of this area formed a single production zone characterized by a high degree of economic interdependence and a marked tendency toward the standardization of products.

One of the most colorful episodes in American business history is the development of the Texas oil industry. From the 1956 movie Giant to the 1978–1991 television series Dallas the Texas oil boom has fascinated millions of people. Among economic historians and economists, the industry has been the basis for studies of firm behavior, regulation, collective action, and regional economic development.