Sectors of the English economy recognized as technological leaders have records of accelerated patent activity soon after 1760. But the patent record also reveals considerable inventive activity during the same period in industries not normally associated with advancing technology. It is therefore unlikely that there was a “leading technological sector.” The widespread increase in patenting is consistent with macroeconomic causes of accelerated invention.

The opening of the Suez Canal took place in a century crowded revolutionary changes in the shipping world. In sharp contrast to the slow pace of change and development in the preceding era, major changes occurred in almost every sector of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. While many of the new departures can be explained, at least in part, by the application of the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to shipping, the opening of Suez went far to accelerate and give direction to these changes. The canal significantly altered shipbuilding techniques and practices and contributed to the precipitous decline in the importance of the sailing ship as a major world carrier. Suez helped to bring about die realignment and relative decline of the European entrepot trade. And the new channel led to significant shifts in the patterns of Eastern and Australasian trade.

Historians of the period have generally played down the debasement of France's coinage to increase crown revenues during the Hundred Years' War or treated it as a last resort and an inept one. Based on archival data and an analytical framework drawn from the modern literature on inflation tax, this article supports challengers of that view, showing that debasement was an effective instrument of public finance.

We use a new trade dataset showing that nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom comparable to other parts of the “global periphery.” A sharp rise in export prices in the five decades before the scramble (1835–1885) was followed by an equally impressive decline during the colonial era. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior.

The first formal meeting of the Economic History Association after This death should not close without appropriate tribute to our initial president and the first real American economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. More than most members of the Association, I feel his loss, since in one capacity or another I had the good fortune to be associated with him for almost thirty-five years. And I am the more appropriate agent to render our common tribute, since, more than others, I am indebted to him. I realize that, without his instruction, encouragement, and stimulation, I should not be standing here as a successor to him in office.

Throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century cane sugar was produced on plantations, most frequently with either slave labor or, after slavery was ended, with contract laborers brought in from other low-income countries. This paper details the diverse sources and recipients of nineteenth-century contract labor movements, relating them to political and economic factors. Shifts in the ethnic composition of the plantation labor force are indicated. Late nineteenth- century transitions in the nature of sugar production are noted, and questions raised about their implications for the study of the relations between institutional and technological changes.

This article re-examines the secular improvement in human heights in France. Adult heights reflect consumption as children, so the distribution of resources between children and adults, determined primarily within households, should have influenced heights. The intrahousehold distribution of resources was influenced by the level of income and by the calorie demands of working adults. Results show that the early decline of marital fertility in France was accompanied by a small but significant increase in expenditures on child quality as measured by heights. Reductions in mortality, independent of the level of food intake, also contributed to improved heights.

This article examines a government-sponsored cartel that fixed domestic crude oil prices in interstate markets from 1933 through 1972. Although the cartel raised and stabilized nominal oil prices beyond earlier private efforts, it also resulted in politically driven constraints on price, output levels, and cartel rent distribution. Political factors molded quota assignments, diverted production from low- to high-cost producers, and raised production costs. Political pressures prevented Texas from acting as a residual or swing producer. Instead, the interstate oil cartel members maintained nominal prices and spread the political costs of output adjustments.

The commonly accepted chronology for comparative productivity levels, based on GDP data, does not apply to the manufacturing sector, which shows evidence of a much greater degree of stationarity of comparative labor productivity performance among the major industrialized countries of Britain, Germany, and the United States. These results for manufacturing suggest that convergence of GDP per worker must have occurred through trends in other sectors and through compositional effects of structural change. The persistent, large labor productivity gap between the United States and Europe cannot be explained simply by differences in capital per worker, but is related to technological choice.

Expropriation of private property by government is seldom found on the list of policies which have influenced the course of economic development in American history. To be sure, the once-vigorous myth of antebellum laisser-faire has been discarded; and it is no longer taken as a startling proposition that governmental interventions to promote and regulate the economy occurred regularly throughout the nineteenth century. But for two reasons, I think, expropriation as an instrument of conscious resource allocation has failed to receive from historians the attention it deserves.

Various states in the Holy Roman Empire prepared for the Thirty Years' War by creating new mints and debasing the subsidiary coinage. The process spread through Gresham's Law: bad money was taken by debasing states to their neighbors and exchanged for good. The neighbor typically defended itself by debasing its own coin. The resulting hyperinflation was terminated early in the war by an agreement to return to the Imperial Augsburg Ordinance of 1559. The Kipper- und Wipperzeit, as the period is called, illuminates the geographic spread of financial crises, German hypennflations of this century, and current proposals for “free banking.”

During the nineteenth century, under free labor market contracting, apprenticeship persisted in Britain but declined in the United States. This article argues that apprenticeship endured in Britain because of its efficiency advantages and because of customs, inherited from the guilds, that favored training certification for entry into skilled jobs. By contrast, within the United States guild traditions were weaker, occupational certification was seldom required, and, as a result, indenture obligations were hard to enforce. Understandably, U.S. employers refrained from making training investments in potentially mobile apprentices.

The money stock in France from 1493 to 1680 has not been well understood. Changes in the money stock have usually been represented by moving sums of annual mint output. Mint output, however, included large amounts of recoinage, resulting in double-counting. A model of mint output is estimated to determine the amount of recoinage. The money stock estimates are also improved by incorporating a constant rate of loss of coins.

We study the initial expansion of public schooling across Brazilian states (1889–1930) and develop an alternative explanation of how colonial institutions may affect the provision of public goods in the long run. We find that states that exported commodities undergoing international booms, between 1889 and 1930, had significantly larger export tax revenues and could spend more on education, while other states lagged behind. Yet, such positive effect of commodity booms on education expenditures was muted in states that either had more slaves before abolition or cultivated cotton during colonial times.

This article explores the operation of the international capital market between Amsterdam and London in the early eighteenth century and concludes that both markets were efficient and well integrated from 1723 on.

Analysis of the spatial pattern of prices and output in the manuscript returns of the French agricultural census of 1852 indicates that the availability of market outlets was probably the dominant factor determining the rise in agricultural productivity prior to the mid-nineteenth century and that agricultural supply was probably price elastic. The belief that the period of the industrial revolution was one of inelastic agricultural supply is shown to rest on a misinterpretation of the extant data on agricultural prices.

Nineteenth-century Italy experienced the long swings in migration, capital flows, and construction characteristic of the international Kuznets cycle, but in an unusual combination: its external migration swing may have resembled Britain's, but its capital flows and construction swing resembled America's. Construction in Italy was finance-sensitive rather than population-sensitive, and reacted primarily to exogenous shifts in the supply of foreign capital. The Italian experience suggests that changes in perceived risk altered the relative supply of capital in Britain and abroad and thereby induced the opposite swings in construction and the swing in migration.

Manufacturing contributed almost all—83 percent—of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48 percent of PNE TFP growth. Yet the overall growth of the residual between 1929 and 1941 was the highest of any comparable period in the twentieth century. This resulted from the combination of a still potent manufacturing contribution with advances in transportation, public utilities, and distribution, fueled in part by investments in public infrastructure.

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers.