The pioneering work of Lance Davis on regional bank loan rates in the United States from 1870 to 1914 generated several attempts to explain the observed regional interest rate differentials and their subsequent narrowing by 1914. This article reports on a more direct test of the hypothesis that barriers to capital mobility were due to monopoly power on the part of local bankers. Tests using data on individual banks and local markets for one state, Wisconsin, suggest that local competitive conditions did not exert a significant influence on bank lending performance. This may be the result of relatively free entry into Wisconsin banking during the period.

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.

The daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France, are examined here. Based on the comments of pioneer manufacturers, historians have been led to believe that early industrial work was irregular and unpredictable. The Montgolfiers as well complained of undependable workers. Yet their own output registers reveal a pattern of regular productivity unaided by advanced machinery or steam power.

In a long list of publications since 1923 Harold Innis with industry and insight set a pattern for the study and interpretation of Canadian economic history. The University of Toronto, the Dominion Government, and Canadian learned societies in their various fashions paid tribute to the high quality of this achievement. His career, moreover, was a refutation of his own generalization, perhaps playfully formulated, that no Canadian scholar could secure recognition in the United States. He was a charter member of the Committee on Research in Economic History, the second president of the Economic History Association, and at the time of his death president of the American Economic Association.

One of the most important problems in the study of economic development is the role of technological change in the growth process. My dissertation is an analysis of some of the major variables which influenced the timing of the invention, adoption, and diffusion of the compound marine steam engine. The problem was divided into three parts: (1) all those variables pertaining directly to the invention of the engine, and the very first effects on the cost structure of the steamship industry; (2) the role of the compound marine steam engine in the growth of the German merchant fleet, 1872–1887, with special emphasis on the diffusion of the invention and its productivity effects; and (3) the effect of the compound steam engine on the sailing ship component of the German merchant fleet.