Torn between divergent disciples, economic history needs to prove its usefulness as well as its scholarly virtuosity. Innovations in method and data have carried the field forward, but perhaps not fulfilled the claims of their champions. To economics in particular, economic history contributes a richer sense of space and time, and the importance of demographic factors. Three vignettes attempt to illustrate that useful economic history can result from confrontations of past and present that improve our understanding of both. Finally, emerging developments in the underlying fields may herald a more central future role for our discipline.

The study of the economic history of modern China is underdeveloped. There is urgent need for original work both in ascertaining facts and in interpretations. Though investigations into the various phases of the Chinese economy had been made by the Chinese Maritime Customs since the 1860's, and by interested contemporary observers such as Morse and Wagel, statistical surveys on a large scale were not systematically conducted with any degree of reliability until the 1930's. They represented the efforts of the government, academic institutions, and individual scholars. A comprehensive survey on agriculture was made by John L. Buck and the National Agricultural Research Bureau of the National Government. An industrial census of Chinese-owned factories was planned and carried out by D. K. Lieu for the National Resources Commission of the National Government. Mining statistics were collected by government agencies under the direction of Ting Weng-chiang and Weng Wen-hao. Railway statistics have been published (since 1915) and a monumental collection of some 37 huge volumes on transportation and communications was compiled by the Ministry of Communications. The Nankai Institute of Economics—with which professors Franklin Ho, Fang Hsien-ting (H. D. Fong), C. M. Li and many others were associated—made significant contributions in the study of prices, terms of trade, modern industries, and handicrafts. Banking statistics were collected by various institutions, especially the Bank of China. The most comprehensive work on foreign investment was done by C. F. Remer and later by the Japanese East Asian Research Institute. The Japanese Manchuria Railway provided a great deal of economic information on Manchuria after the latter was taken by Japan in 1931. A few sample studies were made both by research institutions and by the government on the characteristics of the Chinese population.

This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5 percent.

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinson's narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,” to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

The 1965 Immigration Act represented a radical shift in U.S. policy, which has been credited with dramatically expanding the volume and changing the composition of immigration. Its passing has often been described as the result of political machinations negotiated within Congress without regard to public opinion. We show that congressional voting was consistent with public opinion on abolishing the country-of-origin quotas but not with the desire to limit the volume of immigration. While the former initially reflected attitudes toward civil rights, the latter is consistent with contemporary expectations that the expansion in numbers would be modest.

What was the impact of urban political structure on preindustrial wealth inequality? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher inequality in a panel of early-modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that macro-relationship, I construct a unique individual-level panel dataset on personal wealth and political office-holding in the city-state of Nördlingen (1579–1700). I employ a difference-in-differences setting to show that political elites enriched themselves substantially, increasing inequality. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit the Thirty-Years’ War as a shock to elites’ potential for enrichment from public office. Officials manipulated this crisis to enrich themselves further.

During the century which culminated in the First World War, Great Britain was the principal source of capital supply for countries that drew upon foreign resources. Until 1940 her claims as creditor remained substantially greater than those of any other nation. Investments grossing from forty to fifty billion dollars have been made in the course of her virtually continuous process of capital outlay abroad. The outstanding total in 1914 amounted to twenty billion dollars, yielding an annual income of about one billion, which was nearly one tenth of the national income of the United Kingdom. This was the result of a process of accumulation which reached its greatest intensity during the periods 1868–1875, 1884–1893, and 1905–1912, when annual public issues of foreign and colonial securities averaged 6 or 7 per cent of those outstanding. During the latter period, at least, more than half of all British investment of new capital was being made abroad.