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.

This article examines the evolution of the Russian government's policies between 1861 and 1917 in the sphere of rural credit, especially the extent to which social and cultural factors and ministerial politics impinged on the choice of banks and their development. Discussions concerned measures for economic change that could take place within the traditional and legal framework of the village community. The Ministry of Interior supported a classbased estate bank. The Ministry of Finance opted for the cooperative credit association which was to foster rural pacification and agricultural development by mobilizing peasant collective habits and private initiative that favored cooperative organizations.

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.

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.

A new study of labor in France in the earlier nineteenth century seems justified for two reasons. First, a change in the point of view is desirable. Labor in that period has been treated as a movement related to political factors and to socialistic and other doctrines. I feel that it should be studied now in the light of the changes wrought in the lives of the French people by the advent of large-scale industry with its factories, machinery, and concentration of capital. It is important to realize that much of the unemployment from which French laborers suffered in this period was due to those recurrent crises in industry and trade which we now study as parts of the business cycle. We have been taught wrongly to believe that while England suffered from these crises early in the nineteenth century France was virtually exempt until 1857. Secondly, the study of French labor needs revision in the light of new evidence and of a reappraisal of some of the familiar evidence.

Among the national unions that grew up in the decade after the Civil War none made so great an impression on the public mind during its career as the Knights of St. Crispin. Like all transitional movements, die order combined nostalgia for the past with a daring experimentalism in confronting the cordwainers' problems. Previous histories have neglected its forward-looking aspect, perhaps because the harking back to what was lost was eloquently set forth in publications, while the experiments are found in the practices of local unions, little understood even by those who made them. Only in the perspective of time can we see how much more significant were the actions of the rank and file than the speeches and editorials of tradition-bound leaders.

The September 1966 issue of this Journal contains a study by Professor Irwin Feller on the rate of adoption of the Draper Automatic Loom in the New England cotton textile industry. I have no quarrel with his central conclusions concerning the economic rationality of the New England cotton manufacturers. I do, however, have some comments on his analysis of the relative costs of producing cloth on plain (power) as opposed to automatic looms.