This study establishes long-term trends in the purchasing power of the wages of unskilled workers and develops estimates for GDP per capita for medieval Egypt and Iraq. Wages were heavily influenced by two long-lasting demographic shocks, the Justinian Plague and the Black Death and the slow population recovery that followed. As a result, they remained above the subsistence minimum for most of the medieval era. We also argue that the environment of high wages that emerged after the Justinian Plague contributed to the Golden Age of Islam by creating demand for higher income goods.

Why Did “Uncle Remus” exhort the post-bellum South to reduce its cotton-growing in favor of corn? His complaint was prompted in the immediate sense by the low cotton prices of the early 1890's, but such comments reflected a continuing discontent over the region's abandonment of self-sufficiency in foods after the Civil War. The ratio of cotton output to com was probably at an antebellum peak in 1860, but this ratio had been easily exceeded by 1880, as Table 1 indicates. In the leading cotton states, per capita corn production and the per capita stock of hogs were only about half of what they had been twenty years earlier. Coinciding as it did with a major era of stagnation in world cotton demand, this shift into cotton is of great importance for the subsequent economic development of the South. Despite its size and significance, the shift lacks a satisfactory explanation in the historical literature.

This study provides, for the first time, an overview of the growth record of the Middle East since 1820 and inserts it into a comparative framework. GDP per capita estimates are offered for individual countries in the region for the benchmark years of 1913, 1870, and 1820. The Middle East began to participate in modern economic growth during the nineteenth century. Yet, per capita income differences with the high-income regions of the world widened considerably until World War I. In the twentieth century, the most important single factor contributing to increases in per capita incomes was oil.

This is a subject about which we know little and where, in all likelihood, our knowledge will not grow greatly.Charles IssawiIssawi, Economic History of the Middle East, p. 103.

Many distinguished foreign visitors to the United States in the 1850s commented on the advanced states of mechanization in manufacturing. But why, at the same time, were interest rates higher and the aggregate manufacturing capital stock lower in American than in Britain? We resolve this paradox by noting that British engineers were most impressed by only those industries which relied on skilled workers. Using production parameters estimated from 1849 census data, we develop a computable general equilibrium model of the American and British economies which reconciles the apparently contradictory evidence.

This paper is an attempt to examine critically the function of theory in historical research and particularly in economic history. the function of We shall take as our starting point the assertion that the historian is not interested simply in collecting facts or true statements about some segment of previous experience. He wants to find causes and to explain what happened. The purpose of this paper is to introduce some of the problems attached to the concepts of historical causality and explanation in a stochastic universe and to suggest how the analytic tools of scientific inference can be applied in economic historiography.

Why did state governments begin to regulate the food industry in the late nineteenth century? One possible explanation is that pure food regulation was the result of rent seeking on the part of traditional food producers who wanted to limit the availability of new substitutes. Another potential hypothesis is that regulation was desired because it helped solve an asymmetric information problem in the market for food products. I find the evidence to be more consistent with the latter hypothesis.

I examine the assignment of private property rights during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to five natural resources on federal lands in the Far West. Assigning property rights required adaptation from established, eastern practices. The resulting property rights and their long-term welfare effects inform over-fishing, excessive air pollution, and other natural resource and environmental problems. Allocations based on local conditions, prior use, and unconstrained by outside government mandates were most effective in both addressing the immediate threat of open-access and providing a longer-term basis for production, investment, and trade. Initial faulty property allocations and path dependencies are discussed.This is what stretched westward from the 100th meridian, this complex, misunderstood two fifths of the continental United States where men had come before law arrived and where before there were adequate maps there were warring interests, white against Indian, cattleman against sheepman and both against nester, open range notions against the use of the newly invented barbed wire, Gentile against Mormon, land rights against water rights, appropriation rights to water against riparian rights to water, legitimate small settler against speculator and land-grabber. The public domain as Powell knew it was all of these, its only unity the unity of little rain.Wallace StegnerStegner, Beyond the 100th Meridian, p. 218.

Four million blacks left the South from 1940 to 1970, doubling the northern black workforce. I exploit variation in migrant flows within skill groups over time to estimate the elasticity of substitution by race. I then use this estimate to calculate counterfactual rates of wage growth. I find that black wages in the North would have been around 7 percent higher in 1970 if not for the migrant influx, while white wages would have remained unchanged. On net, migration was an avenue for black economic advancement, but the migration created both winners and losers.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese state attempted to administer famine relief partly through a nationwide institution of local granaries. This article explores regional variations in the performance of this institution to understand the reasons for its ultimate breakdown. The evidence suggests granary storage levels were systematically lower in provinces that received more frequent central government disaster relief; and an unintended consequence of disaster relief was that it modified local incentives for self-insurance and led to an incompletely resolved moral-hazard problem. China's experience provides an instructive example of the long-term dynamics present in intergovernmental policies.

It is nearly a quarter century since H. L. Beales produced his notable article on “The Great Depression.” Since then a great deal of work has been done on that period, especially by economists and statisticians, so that it is now possible to make a fuller assessment of the changes in Britain's economic position during those years. Most of this work has been in the form of specialized articles and books covering longer periods, on such subjects as national income, investment, or terms of trade, and there appears to be a need for some attempt at synthesis, especially as the various interpretations put forward are not always in agreement and are sometimes contradictory. It would be impossible, of course, in a mere article, to settle all the theoretical problems suggested by the facts or to resolve all the divergencies of opinion, but it is worth while to draw the evidence and opinions together in an effort to get a general picture.

We construct datasets of linked census records to study internal migrants' selection and destination choices during the first decades of the “Great Migration” (1910–1930). We study both whites and blacks and intra- and inter-regional migration. While there is some evidence of positive selection, the degree of selection was small and participation in migration was widespread. Differences in background, including initial location, cannot account for racial differences in destination choices. Blacks and whites were similarly responsive to pre-existing migrant stocks from their home state, but black men were more deterred by distance, attracted to manufacturing, and responsive to labor demand.

We study the link between fiscal austerity and Nazi electoral success. Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 show that areas more affected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi Party. We also find that the localities with relatively high austerity experienced relatively high suffering (measured by mortality rates) and these areas’ electorates were more likely to vote for the Nazi Party. Our findings are robust to a range of specifications including an instrumental variable strategy and a border-pair policy discontinuity design.

According to W. W. Rostow, “the introduction of the railroad has been historically the most powerful single initiator of take-offs,” having “three major kinds of impact on economic growth during the take-off period,” namely, lowering transport costs and bringing new areas and products into the market; developing a major new export sector; and leading on to the development of modern coal, iron, and engineering industries. But though all these three can be traced in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the railways are not accorded the role of initiator in that country since, in the Rostow schema, the take-off had already occurred before the invention of the locomotive. The size of the investment in Britain's railways is such, however, that it is worth examining their impact, even if this was not so overwhelming as in some other countries.

This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thünen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and that it is in line with recent findings on a limited degree of interregional market integration in nineteenth-century Prussia.

Why is it that some countries adopted growth enhancing institutions earlier than others during the early modern period? We address this question through a comparative study of the evolution of French and Ottoman fiscal institutions. During the sixteenth century, both countries made extensive use of tax farming to collect revenue, however, uncertain property rights caused by fiscal pressure led to different paths of institutional change in each state. In France, tax collectors successfully overcame the collective action costs of imposing constraint on the king. In the Ottoman Empire, tax collectors faced prohibitive transaction costs to organizing in a similar manner.

Throughout the Great Depression, the unemployment rates of blacks exceeded those of whites in urban areas of both North and South. Among men, this difference was largely due to racial differences in occupational status, whereas among women, unemployment rates were dramatically higher for blacks even within specific occupations. The occupational pattern of the unemployment gap suggests that labor market discrimination played a role, especially in unskilled service jobs.

The efforts of some American colonials, who complained of monetary scarcity and advocated increased government involvement in supplying paper money, were valid attempts to improve economic welfare and facilitate transactions. The potential for improvement depended crucially on the fiscal and monetary policies of colonial governments. This approach to monetary scarcity is useful for explaining variation in the real supply of money across colonies and over time. The role of fiscal and monetary policies in determining the changing value of the continental, and the consequences for real currency supply during and after the Revolution, are examined in detail.

Recent research on the standard-of-living controversy has argued that a marked improvement in the economic well-being of British workers began shortly after 1815 and continued unabated until 1850. I test that new optimism by generating a synthetic annual “standard-of-living variable” for the period 1790 to 1850. The variable is based on estimating a relation between living standards and the consumption of some key commodities for 1855 to 1900 and then using that relation to “retrocast” living standards for 1790 to 1850. The results strongly suggest that the hypothesis of no or little improvement cannot be rejected.

A Striking disparity exists between India's ranking as a railway power and its ranking by any other modern economic category, such as coal mined, iron and steel produced, power generated, value added by all manufacturing, or national income received per capita. Throughout the twentieth century India has had one of the world's five largest railway systems, but by most other modern categories India's economy has been among the world's weakest and least developed. I propose to begin by recounting the way in which India's railway system was developed under British leadership in the century after 1850; then I intend to turn to some possible connections between the special types of railway organization that Britain sponsored in India and the relative lack of development of other sectors of India's economy, particularly modern industry.