Almost without exception interpretations of the remarkable growth of the German economy before the First World War stress the role of the German banking system, in general, and that of the universal or Kreditbank, in particular. The most subtle and penetrating view of this question is that developed in Alexander Gerschenkron's essays, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective” and “Prerequisites of Modern Industrialization.” According to this view, “backward” countries which experience successful industrializations do so by making institutional “substitutions” which enable them to compensate for or even to turn to their advantage their initial deficiencies of productive factors. The institution which is “substituted” in Germany to perform this function is the Kreditbank. This interpretation places special emphasis on the growth-inducing character of these banks, but is also open to the possibility that an industrialization led by such institutions might have entailed certain costs. In fact, Professor Gerschenkron explicitly invites help in assessing these costs in commenting: “it would be a fruitful undertaking in research to explore and perhaps to measure and compare the difficulties, the strains, and the cost which were involved in the various processes of substitution ….” Thanks to the work of Ekkehard Eistert, who has constructed a reliable set of statistics on the German banking system in this era, it is now possible to attempt such a “fruitful undertaking.” Making use of these data, an econometric model has been constructed to test the hypothesis that the manner in which the Kreditbanken allocated credit contributed to the growth of German non-agricultural output. Our findings strongly suggest that the credit allocation policy of these banks was inhibiting rather than stimulating the German economy in the period for which data are available and that previous interpretations are in need of serious revision. It appears that, in Gerschenkron's terms, the “cost” of bank-led industrialization was far greater than anyone has previously suggested.

Whether anthropometric-mortality risk relationships as found in present day populations also characterized past populations is disputed. This article finds U-shaped body mass index (BMI)-mortality risk relationships among nineteenth-century men that were similar to such relationships as found in twentieth-century men. No relationship between height and mortality could be detected. This article infers from the socioeconomic homogeneity of the sample that the BMI-mortality risk relationship, although apparently invariant with respect to time, is driven by noneconomic factors.

I study the mobility and economic outcomes of European immigrants and their children in nineteenth-century Argentina, the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration. I use new data linking males across censuses and passenger lists of arrivals to Buenos Aires. First-generation immigrants experienced faster occupational upgrading than natives. Occupational mobility was substantial relative to Europe; immigrants holding unskilled occupations upon arrival experienced high rates of occupational upgrading. Second-generation immigrants outperformed the sons of natives in terms of literacy, occupational status and access to property, and experienced higher rates of intergenerational mobility out of unskilled occupations.

The French economy has been criticized for a lack of integration of women in business and for the prevalence of inefficient family firms. A sample drawn from patent and exhibition records is used to examine the role of women in enterprise and invention in France. Middle-class women were extensively engaged in entrepreneurship and innovation, and the empirical analysis indicates that their commercial efforts were significantly enhanced by association with family firms. Such formerly invisible achievements suggest a more productive role for family-based enterprises, as a means of incorporating relatively disadvantaged groups into the market economy as managers and entrepreneurs.

Economists and historians have raked over the economic experience of Europe like a family ransacking the town dump for a diamond ring inadvertently dropped into the trash. Now and then they run hurriedly over the whole field. Most of the time they are digging deep in one corner or rushing anxiously from one spot to another, picking up the objects they find there, examining them closely and then discarding them. The results are a junk collector's delight. But they do not necessarily include any diamonds.

Per capita agricultural output sharply declined in the “Confederate States” between 1860 and 1880. This article asserts that the decline in agricultural output was partially the result of increased disease (hookworm) brought about by substandard living conditions suffered by the Southern population during the Civil War. Skeletal remains and mortality data, ubiquitous hookworm symptoms among the Southern population, and regression analysis support this hypothesis. The econometric results strongly suggest that emancipation and increased hookworm infection were responsible for the income decline while an increase in the percentage of sharecropping tenancy arrangements increased southern productivity.

Study of ante-bellum economic development of the United States has been hampered by an acute shortage of reliable statistical data. Studies of the early capital markets are no exception to this general rule. For the years after 1856, Frederick Macaulay's excellent study provides sufficient quantitative basis for general research; but, in the earlier years, only Bigelow's single unsupported interest series provides the economic historian with statistical information on the condition of the credit market.

The new sectoral estimates of industrial production in 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911 are regionally allocated using census labor-force data. The regional aggregates suggest that the “industrial triangle” emerged over these decades out of a traditional surplus-recycling economy. The concomitant change in the industrial rankings argues against attributing the regions' different paths to their different initial conditions; surprisingly, too, overall growth does not seem closely tied to industrial development. The disaggregated estimates suggest in turn that the industrial structure of the various regions remained relatively similar, as if comparative advantages were generically industrial rather than sector-specific.

This article examines the role of creditor protection in the development of the U.K. corporate bond market. This market grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century it experienced a reversal, albeit with a short-lived post-1945 renaissance. Such was the extent of the reversal that the market from the 1970s onwards was smaller than it had been in 1870. We find that law does not explain the variation in the size of this market over time. Alternatively, our evidence suggests that inflation and taxation policies were major drivers of this market in the post-1945 era.

The Spanish Monarchy pursued a rational policy of price discrimination among its Castilian currencies while financing its early-seventeenth-century wars. Large-denomination gold and silver coins circulated internationally, forcing the Monarchy to act more competitively and not seek additional short-run revenue. In contrast, petty coinage was a local monopoly. The Monarchy raised seigniorage rates and issued large quantities, generating large revenues. The nominal petty money stock grew rapidly, then fluctuated. The real petty money stock grew, then varied little as petty currency depreciation dampened nominal changes.

Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of trade. The establishment of a foreign diplomatic network that lowered beachhead costs and enabled the entry of new products was an essential fact of the trade boom. Interestingly, the expansion in trade in certain sectors did not translate into faster productivity growth. We offer some explanations.

The central fact of the demographic history of early North America is rapid growth. Both Canada and the white population of the English colonies experienced increases of 2½ percent per year during the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century rates, beginning from a low base and more influenced by immigration, were even higher. In contrast, the expansion of population in early modern Europe rarely exceeded 1 percent per annum over an extended period. Since Franklin and Malthus, interpretations of early American demography have centered on the high fertility associated with near universal marriage for women at a low average age. The extremely youthful population, high dependency ratio, and one of the largest mean census family sizes ever recorded all follow from the high level of fertility.

This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was not sufficient for their success. The Danish legal system, which we compare to that of other countries, was also of crucial importance, along with the way in which rules were monitored and enforced. Of particular interest is the Danish cooperatives’ use of contracts, which we explore with evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources.

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success.

This article presents tests of the role of money in the price revolution (1525–1618). The hypothesis is that American specie drove European prices, and that the mechanism was the quantity theory of money buttressed by the specie-flow mechanism. Specie entered Spain, increasing Spanish prices, and then spread over Western Europe as a result of the Spanish balance-of-payments deficit, enlarging European monetary bases and price levels. Empirical verification is achieved through Granger-causality tests.

The gold money of the Byzantine Empire “is accepted everywhere from end to end of the earth. It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it.” These boastful words of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a contemporary of Justinian die Great, are a typical expression of die pride of die Greek nation. Cosmas was a monk who tried to demonstrate from the Scriptures that the earth was flat, but in his youth he had been an adventurous merchant and traveler, and well he knew where the true primacy of his nation lay. While die armies of Justinian had not marched as far as those of Trajan, and his law was not enforced in all die countries which had obeyed Theodosius, the monetary empire of New Rome was even greater than that of Old Rome. The gold nomisma (or bezant, as die Westerners later called it) was as peerless as die sovereign whose effigy it bore. Procopius, another contemporary of Justinian die Great, stated: “It is not right for die Persian king or for any odier sovereign in die whole barbarian world to imprint his own likeness on a gold stater, and that, too, though he has gold in his own kingdom; for they are unable to tender such a coin to those widi whom they transact business.”

The American workers' quest for an eight-hour day finally came to an end around 1919. I argue that the most important factors behind the rapid decline in manufacturing hours in the decade before 1919 include the rapid expansion of the economy, which increased wages and drew new participants into the manufacturing sector; the reduction of immigration during the war; the growth in organized labor's strength; federal and state legislation that mandated reduced work weeks; and the electrification of the manufacturing sector.

The passage of the National Banking Acts stabilized the existing financial system and encouraged the entry of 729 banks between 1863 and 1866. These new banks concentrated in the area that would eventually become the Manufacturing Belt. Using a new bank census, the article shows that these changes to the financial system were a major determinant of the geographic distribution of manufacturing and the nation's sudden capital deepening. The entry not only resulted in more manufacturing capital and output at the county level, but also more steam engines and value added at the establishment level.

This article aims to determine what changes occurred in Britain's control over its Latin American investments between 1865 and 1913. This is done by examining trends in the direct-portfolio composition of total investment and of private investment, as well as that of each industrial grouping. A major finding is the rise of British private portfolio investment. Differences in the capital market instruments used in each type of investment are analyzed as is the nationality of those controlling private portfolio investment. Finally, there is an assessment of major factors associated with the rise of the private portfolio component of investment.