In this article I develop a taxonomy of financial practices based on whether financial activity is intended to fund new capital investment or to create new financial structures to accommodate planned changes in the structure of an industry's existing capital stock. The taxonomy is then applied to the financial development of the U.S. sugar-refining industry between 1875 and 1905. The taxonomy provides an explanation of the rise of the large, widely held industrial corporation in the United States that is more consistent with the historical record than are the conventional “financial strain” or “asset liquidation” hypotheses.

Much labor has been spent upon the history of the cultivated and occupied lands of the medieval English village and the social life of its inhabitants, and as a result a fairly clear framework has been constructed into which alterations and additions may be fitted where necessary. This statement is not true of the great background of all early village life, of the activities concerned with the waste or unoccupied land lying outside fields and even village bounds, and either lying idle, or else used for pasture, estovers, and hunting. Modern students have been negligent of this side of the medieval countryside, being more engaged with the human interests of the village; and little allowance has been made for changes and developments occurring within decades or even centuries. The great history of common rights, an extremely important subject, has yet to be written. This paper has a few suggestions to make which might sometime be useful in a study of a very large field.

This dissertation is a study of the Jamaican sugar economy and slave society on the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade.This dissertation was completed in the Department of History at the university of Minnesota (December 1999), under the direction of Professor Russell R. Menard. Published work based on this dissertation can be found in Ryden, “Does Decline” and “‘One of the Fertilest pleasentest Spotts.‘” Its most significant finding focuses on the “Decline Thesis,” as laid out by Eric Williams more than 50 years ago in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery, according to Williams, was doomed to failure because it encouraged planter absenteeism and plantation mismanagement, resulting in the tendency to overproduce. Thus, planters were increasingly saddled with steadily rising input costs while facing falling revenue. Williams explained that the first cracks in the sugar economy appeared with the loss of the North American colonies. From this point on, the British West Indian planters saw a fall in their profits. This late-eighteenth-century decline of the slave mode of production culminated in Parliament abolishing the slave trade in an attempt to cut production levels and thereby revive West Indian fortunes.Williams, Capitalism.

Bankruptcy law is the bacteria of the market economy. When a company dies, bankruptcy law figures out how to break down what remains, bring the productive parts back to life, and dispose of the rest. Some consider the market economy a jungle; bankruptcy law simply helps clear the jungle floor.

With the word information on nearly everyone's lips, it seems an opportune time for historians to finally join the bandwagon and bless this new factor of production that apparently is giving rise to a “new economy.” (And they had better do so fast, before the darkening clouds of recession rain on the parade.) In this book, experts drawn from history departments and business schools take a look back at how we got to the present, and more than that, the unique role that information has played in economics, business, politics, and culture in the United States.