Shipping tonnages have been frequently used as a basis for inquiries covering a wide and increasing range of topics in economic history. For example, industry studies, descriptions of shipping routes and trade flows, colonial balance of payments estimates, and an analysis of the sources of productivity change in shipping have all been based–at least in part–on tonnage figures. A major problem in using tonnages as a means of historical quantification is that the term “ton” (either a shipping ton or a commodity ton) has varied substantially over time. This is especially true for the Colonial Period, when it was defined differently depending on its usage or the agent or the country reporting it. Fortunately, several recent research efforts have greatly improved our understanding of the meaning and limitations of historical tonnages.

After 1865 Southerners found their communities generally in a state of economic chaos. This was particularly true of the mercantile system. Before the war numerous small towns and villages were in the process of development, and the more localized system of merchandising was reaching out into the general trade. The merchants of the new stores were rapidly cutting into the virtually monopolistic control previously exercised by the system of cotton factorage on which the larger planters depended for supplies, for with the establishment of local stores, cotton planters looked more and more to their home merchants. During the four years of war these local stores were practically forced out of business by a lack of stock. The end of the war brought to the merchant a complete economic revolution. He was now to engage in a system of storekeeping which was unique in every respect except the name. Southern general stores became country stores whether they existed in the country or not, for the bulk of their trade was that of ”country” supply.

Antebellum judges played crucial roles in resolving conflicts between slaveowners and common-carrier owners. Because courts could easily quantify the value of a slave's life, they were quicker to compensate slaveowners for slaves injured or killed by a common carrier than to award damages to an injured free person or his estate. Yet judges also had to craft rules governing the behavior of the slave property itself. By the 1860s, Southern courts had established law that encouraged parties with legal standing to act efficiently. Strikingly, tort doctrines developed in slave cases foreshadowed the evolution of law for free accident victims.

The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.

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.

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.

This study, based on primary sources, shows that the army's role in the wartime mobilization of the industry was fundamental and extensive. It determined aircraft prices and labor exemptions, regulated the industry's supply of credit and raw materials, limited patent rights, and ultimately interfered in management-labor relationships. Its policies resulted in the industry's expansion and concentration and in above average real wages for the industry's labor force. The article concludes that while the mobilization of the aircraft industry was successful, military regulation of the German war economy in World War I was generally inefficient.

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.