On this occasion it seems wise to take a leaf from Wassily W. Leontief's book as President of the American Economic Association. He discussed a problem of his organization. His presidential address was a plea for economists to limit their creation of models, especially those difficult of empirical testing, and to test some of those susceptible of verification. My remarks will also deal with a problem, one in the Economic History Association, how it came about, and what we might do about it.

The dictatorial Dominion of New England (1686–1689) saw the rise and fall of the first operational bank scheme in America. Both events resulted from the appointed rulers' attempts to personally profit from real estate, subject to an absolutist constitution imposed by England. The first, local ruler led a nominally private land bank. The subsequent, foreign ruler invalidated all land titles and thus killed the bank. This unusual case study exemplifies an extension of Mancur Olson's model of stationary and roving bandits, and demonstrates how economic development can be affected in different ways by different types of dictators.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.

Ann Capling's book deals with Australia's role in the design of the global trade system, from the post-1945 negotiations over the (aborted) International Trade Organization (ITO), up to the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. She draws primarily on Australian sources, such as memoranda, reminiscences, and interviews with Australian participants in the negotiation process. The story has not been told before in such detail, and the book will become a standard work on how Australia conducted its international economic diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century.

This paper examines the international role of sterling during the Bretton Woods era and argues that it was not a competitor to the U.S. dollar. I construct a novel dataset to measure the reserve role of sterling in Europe and sterling area countries. The postwar reserve role of sterling was limited to the sterling area and was artificial as this area was built as a captive market. I document how British authorities imposed exchange controls, commercial threats, and economic sanctions on sterling area countries to compel them to keep their foreign exchange reserves in sterling.

This paper uses Japanese village censuses, 1637–1872, to measure inequality in landownership. Surprisingly, inequality was low and stable, unlike in Europe, where it was high and increasing. To explain this, I study inter-generational land transmissions. I find that Japanese households without sons adopted male heirs, thereby keeping lands in the family. In contrast, elite English male lines failed 20–30 percent of the time as adoptions were uncommon, leading to a highly unequal redistribution of their lands. Finally, the institutional differences in adoption had roots in fourth-century church policy, and this may partially explain why Europe was more unequal by 1800.