Although historians have described the role of Stephen Girard in the founding of the second Bank of the United States simply as that of a heavy investor in its stock, careful examination of the Girard papers and other recently discovered documents shows the usual account to be entirely inadequate. Actually Girard was one of the moving spirits of the Bank from the time of its inception in the minds of a small group of American financiers until the period of its mismanagement in 1818. Then, as chairman of the stockholders, he was largely influential in effecting the replacement of the reckless and incompetent Jones leadership with the sounder administrations of Langdon Cheves and Nicholas Biddle. Girard was a most important influence in the Bank's early history. He purchased a large amount of stock, contributed to the working out of the mechanics of operation, aided in obtaining specie from Baring Brothers & Company, London, helped determine the form and content of the charter, did yeoman service in the political battle preceding its founding, and struggled mightily, although in vain, to prevent the Bank's becoming a political football in an orgy of speculation.

How long did it take for early rapid capitalist transformations to benefit the majority of the population? This essay examines three presumed success cases, concluding that rapid capitalist development took at least five decades to benefit the majority. A neglected political force for success was the effectiveness of local public and quasi-public institutions in creating wide networks of transportation and other public investments responsive to changing market requirements. Economists today should pay close attention to distributional benefits and local government effectiveness before urging western brands of capitalism on countries where failures to benefit the majority threaten severe political instability.

This workshop addressed a question of concern to medieval economic history for over a generation. Frederic C. Lane called for a theory of consumption, and Carlo Cipolla and Robert Lopez have encouraged a more thorough investigation of the role of demand. Because demand is sometimes understood in terms of needs and of taste, it is often subsumed under the heading of social history, which characterizes and describes, while economic analysis has centered on studies of supply, with their more precise and quantifiable parameters.Will the largely descriptive tools at our disposal help us to understand how demand affected the early-modern economy? The workshop considered demand for goods and services and demand for money. The first three papers addressed the Mediterranean south, and the last three focused upon Europe north of the Alps.

This study presents three sets of data dealing with Federal Government revenues, expenditures, and financing for the period 1861–1875. These extend and augment the author's previous estimates covering the years through 1860. The first set presents expenditures classified by major function, annual, by fiscal year ending June 30. The second set consists of annual estimates of Federal revenue and expenditures on a money-flow basis comparable to the national income accounts. The two sets differ slightly in totals because of differing degrees of netting.

The works of Labrousse and Chabert on income fluctuations in pre-and post-revolutionary France have already been subjected to abundant criticism by Professor Landes in the November 1950 issue of THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY. The present note results from an attempt at resolving in a constructive way certain of the contradictions observed between Labrousse's inferences and his data. The argument, originally developed on the basis of observations in the decade immediately preceding the French Revolution, was extended to cover the thirty years (1815-1845) following the fall of Napoleon's empire. After a short review of Labrousse's “grain crop” interpretation of French economic cycles, it is shown that (1) his computations of feudal revenues do not agree with his description of their cyclical pattern and (2) grain revenue figures are only consistent with an elastic demand for bread over a certain range. This squarely contradicts the inelasticity assumption which underlies both Labrousse's theory and Landes' criticism of it. The treatment of eighteenth-century bread demand as price-inelastic had already wide currency among contemporary economists, and does not seem to have been seriously challenged ever since. An inductive analysis supported by scattered pieces of empirical evidence is then developed, with the conclusion that demand for bread (and grain) should indeed be elastic over the relevant region. The last section represents an extension of this interpretation to crop and price data in the post-Napoleonic period.