The purpose of this paper is to serve as a point of departure for discussion of the relationship of regional differentiation and growth to general economic development. In addition to touching on methodological problems, I hope to establish two specific points: (a) that the needs of economic history call for particular perspectives in delimiting regions, and (b) that study of regional interaction can provide insights in an understanding of national economic development.

Any historian feels free to shift, enlarge, or contract his spatial or temporal field of attention, but the building of formal conceptions of time and space as flexible is something else. Fernand Braudel's recent book contains many revisions of judgment concerning the economic history of the centuries it treats, and also a way of handling space and time that gives the volume theoretical as well as historical interest. In his title, “the Mediterranean” refers to the region as well as to the sea. His “Mediterranean world” includes various outside areas, some remote, that have been related to the region by the activities of man in society. Peripheral mountains and deserts, for example, are considered in much detail, and four historic corridors (he calls them isthmuses) to northern waters are formally discussed. His “Epoch of Philip II” is in the first third of the book hardly a temporal “home port”; it is touched more frequently in Part II and is much used in the final section.

In this article we investigate the nature of long-term fluctuations (commonly called long-swings or Kuznets cycles) in the general level of activity of the American economy over the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. We conclude that a stable socio-economic structure of long-term economic change was in existence over this entire period. This structure defines a concurrence of relationships between certain economic and demographic variables which in combination determined the dynamic pattern by which economic growth proceeded. Our findings should be of interest to the economic historian studying the general process of economic growth in a capitalist economy.

On December 11, 1847, the Journal des chemins de fer, founded and edited in Paris since 1842 by an Englishman, declared that the French rentes had fallen as much as if the government was about to be overthrown. The King, who was ill in body at the time, yet perfectly comfortable in mind, recovered, but on February 24, 1848, he and his government fell in a revolution that was as sudden and dramatic as it was triumphant. Among its leaders were Socialists, like Louis Blanc, who controlled a considerable body of workingmen, some of whom belonged to the building trades and the domestic industries of the capital, while others had been brought to Paris some years before to work on the fortifications. They were moved first to the barricades; then, after being victorious there, to the national workshops organized by Louis Blanc, now a member of the provisional government, who had proclaimed on behalf of the workingmen the “right to work,” as the most important organ of the workingmen, L'Atelier, had proclaimed the limitation of hours, the right to organize, and a minimum wage. These demands seem reasonable to us now, but they were thought dangerous then, not only by a majority of the provisional government, but also by the majority of the new legislature and of the French people.

This dissertation is essentially three distinct writings: the first a statement of hypotheses and findings; the second a bibliography, wherein the content of each source is annotated by an original numeric code system; and the third, an index to the bibliography—the index being entirely computer-produced according to a modified Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) data processing technique.