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.

The history of coffee is a tale of romance and complexity, sometimes bitter, sometimes enlightened. Mark Pendergrast weaves this tale with the art of a master storyteller. From its legendary discovery in the ancient land of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), coffee became a source of stimulus for new ideas, work, and social controversy. Traded throughout the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, the curious beverage was brought to the hands of Pope Clement VIII by priests who wanted to ban it. He tasted and replied: “Why, this Satan's drink is so delicious,… it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it” (p. 8). So the Western European romance with it began. By the eighteenth century, coffeehouses provided an egalitarian meeting place and a social context for emerging liberal institutions and the American and French Revolutions.

This study investigates the impact of malaria eradication programs on Black-white economic disparities in the early 1900s U.S. South. Malaria eradication was widespread and improved health across races. Yet, only white men experienced economic benefits. Using matched census records, we find that increased exposure to the program was associated with higher schooling attainment and income for whites but not for Blacks. Blacks exposed to malaria eradication were more likely to be farm laborers, and both Blacks and whites were more likely to migrate out of state. Our findings suggest that malaria eradication, a broadly applied intervention, widened racial gaps.

How do different local policies in a federal system affect local land values, production, and sorting? We study the question exploiting a large historical policy change: U.S. Alcohol Prohibition in the early twentieth century. Comparing same- state early and late adopters of county dry laws in a difference-in-differences design, we find that early Prohibition adoption increased population and farm real estate values. Moreover, we find strong effects on farm productivity consistent with increased investment due to a land price channel. In equilibrium, the policy change disproportionately attracted immigrants and African-Americans.

Movies might appropriately be the defining genre for the twentieth century. There were no movies before the twentieth century. Knowing what movies were made and seen by whom over time, and which messages and symbols were conveyed tells us a great deal about the American Century and about how people saw capitalists and capitalism. We argue that American movie culture evolved at a time when the debate about wealth and poverty and structural change was transforming the economy, and when most people could not explain or understand the revolutionary changes underway. We also suggest that who made the movies and how they made them mattered: a majority of the early movies were made by immigrant groups, such as Jews, and that mattered to how the movies perceived the outsiders and the insiders and how they portrayed capitalism and capitalists.

The loss to the English economy caused by decreased migration resulting from relief payments to agricultural laborers is estimated. I conclude that, at worst, the Poor Law had a small negative impact on national product. If poor relief and wages were substitutes, the Poor Law may have had a positive impact on capital formation and economic growth.

I examine the change in prices of foreign sovereign dollar bonds over several weeks in 1930 that marked major legislative progress for the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. If the market was preoccupied by anticipated debt-repayment problems arising from the tariffs, this should be visible in the cross-countty pattern of bond prices. The bond price data are compared to indicators of country sensitivity to the tariffs and debt service. A significant relationship is found for bond price changes in June 1930, but the size of the effect is very small. Analysis at the regional and individual country level reveals some puzzling cases.

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline.

How were unskilled workers selected and hired in preindustrial labor markets? We exploit records from the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral, London (1672–1748), to analyze the hiring and employment histories of over 1,000 general building laborers, the benchmark category of “unskilled” workers in long-run wage series. Despite volatile demand, St Paul’s created a stable workforce by rewarding the tenure of long-standing workers. More senior workers received more days of work each month, preference when jobs were scarce, and the opportunity to earn additional income. We find the cathedral’s strategy consistent with reducing hiring frictions and turnover costs.

Our conference today on comparative economic history is in some clanger of rushing into the wide-open spaces of ambiguity, for the term is new, and to agree too quickly on its meaning and implications may not even be desirable. In order to avoid engaging in a mere game of definitions, this paper will deal first with three general types of comparison in relation to their bearing on problems of evidence. It will then review some of the chief uses to which these types of comparison have been put in building up our body of knowledge about Western economic history. The survey will close with particular reference to our own preindustrial stages of economic growth, when western Europe was, in our uncomplimentary phrase, an underdeveloped or backward area.

A radical shift in the industrial composition of investment and final demand played an important role in delaying a complete recovery from the trough of 1932. Under the conditions of technological discovery prevailing in the 1930s, this shift in the composition of demand made full employment virtually impossible to achieve as recovery from the crash got under way. A complete recovery required a mass of interrelated new techniques and human and physical capital which, in the timid financial environment prevailing after 1929 (and given the uncertainties of the New Deal), could not be organized on the necessary scale by private investment markets. These findings pose a new agenda for research on the political economy of the New Deal and on the economic history of the post-World War II era.