This paper compares the proportion of liquid assets in the portfolios of the major banks in London, Paris, and New York during the heyday of the gold standard. Various hypotheses concerning the determinants of this proportioh are advanced and then tested using data on individual banks over a number of years. The major conclusions concern the effectiveness of the Bank of England in comparison with the systems prevailing in the other centers and the existence of national differences in the aggressiveness displayed by bank managers.

This analysis of the condition of the working classes in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century is provided in two stages. An average real wage index for 1810–1840 exhibits a marked decline as a result of the high proportion of textile workers in the labor force. Quality indicators, such as housing conditions and mortality rates, deteriorated, and working-class diets at best did not improve. The evidence examined for Glasgow suggests no improvement in the standard of living of the city's working-class population.

The technology of charcoal iron manufacture in late nineteenth-century Canada is examined in this paper. Use of a super-heated and hard-driven furnace blast contributed to a resurgence of production after 1890. A lag in the diffusion of these techniques is explained by the small size of the Canadian market. Contrasts are noted with charcoal iron smelting in several regions of the United States.

We have had a little over forty years of experience of countries we conventionally dub “satellites.” In looking at this slice of recent history two questions come to mind. Can one fit the type of relationships he finds within the Sino-Soviet bloc into the perspectives which economic history has developed in the debate on colonialism and imperialism? Has Nature made a leap and produced a new historical type, or do we have merely a new subtle change in form?

In a recent issue of this Journal, Ian Drummond took issue with my article discussing the relation of labor scarcity to British observations of American industrial efficiency in the 1850's. I tried to show that (1) the contemporary observations were not specific enough to show whether or not Americans were using the same technology as the British; (2) even if the observations showed that the Americans used the same technology as the British, it would not follow that the higher ratio of land to labor in the United States had induced a higher ratio of capital to labor; and (3) if the observations proved that the Americans used a more efficient technology than the British, the connection between this fact and the high land-labor ratio was not clear. Under (2), I tried to demonstrate that the land-labor ratio and the capital-labor ratio were separate, and that it was improper to make inferences about the latter from data about the former. In fact, if we assume that land was not used in manufacturing, the data imply that while the land-labor ratio in America was higher than in Britain, the capital-labor ratio was lower.

My two predecessors assure me that our association is too young to possess any precedents or traditions. In the matter of themes for presidential addresses the only foreshadow of a tradition seems to be the cult of variety and free choice. My own choice of subject is therefore influenced by the fact that during the past year I have been writing a biography of our first president and America's first native-born thoroughly trained economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. As I followed the career of one member of our guild in the making, comparisons with others would persist in cropping up, and the question took shape: “What are economic historians made of?”

In the last decades of the Tsarist regime the eight provinces where, according to the census of 1897, Ukrainians predominated—Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, Poltava, Chernigov, Kharkov, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav—were largely rural. Less than one seventh of the population in these provinces inhabited urban centers. The rural population, moreover, coincided closely with the Ukrainian nationality: more than nine of every ten Ukrainians lived in the country districts, and most of these were classified as peasants. Since two out of every three of the urban residents were Russians or Jews, the limited number of Ukrainians dwelling among them tended to become absorbed into industries which provided a natural milieu for “Russification.” In the cultural conflict, “Ukrainian” became synonymous with 9peasant”; and the nickname for the Ukrainian—khokhol—has the same derogatory connotation as the Russian term muzhik, which evokes a picture of a shaggily bearded, unwashed, unkempt, illiterate country bumpkin.

The September, 1971 issue of the Journal contained A. G. Ford's article, “British Investment in Argentina and Long Swings, 1880–1914.” For total U.K. overseas issues, Professor Ford used as his source, Matthew Simon, “The Pattern of New British Portfolio Foreign Investment 1865–1914,” which appeared in J. H. Adler, editor, Capital Movements and Economic Development.

Racial discord, political violence, and agrarian unrest are integral to the history of the American South from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. The economy of the region had undergone traumatic changes during the war, not the least of which were the destruction of large amounts of physical capital and the transition of the black agricultural labor force from slavery to freedom. The disruption of production during the war was followed by attempts to reorganize agriculture through a variety of institutional arrangements, including wage labor, cash renting, and widespread use of the sharecropping form of land tenure. Many of the legal and cultural manifestations of the racial prejudice which has long outlived chattel slavery made their appearance during these years. Both contemporary observers and modern historians have recognized possible connections between the economic conditions and the political or institutional developments of the period, yet certain basic characteristics of the post-bellum southern economy have never been adequately determined. Consequently, the influence of economic forces in southern society and political life has remained obscure.

In a recent paper in this Journal, James Millar and Susan Linz seek “to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.” They argue that Soviet direct estimates of non-human war cost (capital loss plus direct war outlays plus wartime loss of national income), made by a postwar Extraordinary Commission, imply a cost per employed member of the 1940 population of 7.4 years' earnings. Their own indirect approximation of war cost—based on a construct which incorporates estimates of prewar and wartime propensities to consume and invest, a 30 percent capital loss claimed by the Soviets, and an assumed capital-output ratio of 3—is 3.9 years' earnings. After hypothesizing various values for their parameters, they conclude that “[t]he popular Soviet claim that World War II cost ‘two Five-Year Plans’ is, therefore, above the upper limit [6.0 years' earnings] of the range of the total war cost estimates calculated using Soviet national income data.”2 The implication is that their results cast significant doubt on “the reasonableness” of Soviet claims of war cost. This paper will demonstrate that if the Soviet direct estimate of war cost is properly expressed in Sovietmeasured 1940 consumption years, Millar-Linz's perceived divergence between the Soviet direct and their indirect estimate of war cost disappears.

The economic impact of American public land policies in the nineteenth century can be assessed either in terms of their efficiency or equity effects, that is, their impact on national growth rates or on income distribution. Robert W. Fogel and Jack Rutner recently explored the growth question and discovered that federal land policy had a positive but minimal effect on economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the equity question is perhaps more important than the efficiency issue, a point made several years earlier by Douglass C. North.

Whatever may have been the merits of the gold standard in die nineteenth century, it has not proved a satisfactory system of exchange since 1913. The decentralization of the world financial system, the greater liquidity of the public's holdings, and the appearance of capital movements unrelated to movements of trade have rendered abortive attempts to return permanently to the gold standard. In any event, the unwillingness of governments, increasingly dependent on the favor of the lower income groups, to allow or compel the contraction of domestic credit in response to changes in international demand prevented the operation of a system that depends on such adjustments. But the gold standard of die nineteendi century cast a long shadow behind it.