The Canadian economy, already wealthy, diverse, and relatively industrial at the dawn of the twentieth century, had not yet outgrown its reliance on resource-intensive production. Empirical evidence indicates that the exploitation of Canada's natural resource endowment made direct and indirect contributions to the size and efficiency of the twentieth-century domestic economy. I conclude that the concentration of capital and labor in resource industries did not constrain the rate of change of Canadian real GNP per capita between 1900 and 1999, and it appears to have had a substantial positive impact on the level of real GNP per capita.

Corporations have been the big basic units of recent American business; in the Venetian Republic the basic units of business life were family partnerships. To be sure, since a Venetian family partnership was not an organization formed for business purposes only, it did not correspond exactly to a corporation. There were in the Venetian economy during the Later Middle Ages some enterprises which required the use of so much capital that normally several families banded together to spread the risks and for such occasions they formed joint ventures. From some points of view these joint ventures, rather than the family partnerships, corresponded in Venetian economy to the corporation in modern economy; for they were organized for strictly business purposes, they involved large capitals, and their ownership was divided into shares. But the joint ventures lacked the permanence of the modern corporation and they had quite limited objectives. They lasted only for the duration of a voyage or until a cargo had been sold. Moreover, they did not have so large capital funds as did the family partnerships which created them. Venetian business enterprise, having been fathered by the state and mothered by the family, remained subordinated to these older and stronger institutions. This fact is not surprising, for when viewed in historical perspective the modern corporation appears a parvenu of uncertain future. In most societies, at most times, it has been the great family which by its wealth, power, prestige, and presumption of permanence has been the outstanding institution in private economic enterprise.

In both northern and southern cities of the United States, African-Americans faced a web of social constraints on such activities as housing, shopping, and everyday interpersonal interactions. These constraints had implications for the labor market as well. In particular, norms against white subservience to blacks played an important role in determining the racial composition of occupations. Close attention to the operation of such social norms can add much explanatory power to conventional economic analyses of discrimination based on human capital and taste for discrimination.

Britain's acquisiton of Lagos has already attracted considerable historical research, but it is examined here from a new perspective and with the help of unused sources. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the episode itself is reinterpreted to give prominence to changing property rights as both a cause and a consequence of annexation. Second, it is argued that the Lagos case can be placed in a broader framework of imperial expansion in which institutional change formed the centerpiece of a nineteenth-century development drive. Third, it is suggested that the study of African history might benefit from assigning higher priority to the analysis of property rights other than those embodied in slave-holding.

Recent revisionist treatments of nineteenth-century French economic growth are examined and reveal that the pattern of economic growth in France was indeed substantially different from the unusual pattern in Great Britain. Labor productivity in French industry was probably lower than in Britain, contrary to the claims of O'Brien and Keyder, and neither growth of per capita income nor the level of income in France in 1910 was remarkable. The article thus supports a position between that of early writers and that of the recent revisionists.

In 1878 the liberal parties lost enough votes to lose the majority in the parliament which they had defended in the general election just one year before. In this article, the questions of where the voters came from and why the voting changed so crucially within one year are reexamined. The analysis uses a new set of data and makes use of King's algorithm, a tool provided by modern political science. The main finding of this article is that the change towards protectionism was not caused by new, but by floating voters from the agricultural sector.

Scholars still disagree about why unions in different countries are radical or conservative. The differences between unions in France and America can be traced to the different requirements for success in strikes before 1914. In France radical unions could win large-scale strikes by involving state officials. In contrast, American unions, facing a more hostile government, avoided state intervention and learned to win strikes by providing financial support to small groups of critically positioned workers. The divergence between American and French union strategy reflected the greater success of American capitalists in winning state support against labor.

Economists have emphasized supply-side learning when explaining long-term trends in racial income differences. This article demonstrates that learning also occurred on the demand side. Estimation of a state-dependence model of the sequence of racial employment outcomes of firms in Cincinnati, Ohio, during World War I shows that the introduction of black workers into a previously all-white firm generated new experiences within the firm, altering its future racial employment decisions.This suggests that more research should be done on how firms and labor markets processed information about workers and how that influenced worker opportunities.

Although debate has raged ever since Marx and Engels openly condemned British capitalism in the 1840s, little hard evidence has been brought to bear on the issue of economic inequality. This paper estimates British earnings distributions for four years in the period 1827–1901. The evidence supports the view of increasing inequality up to mid-century and a leveling thereafter. Coupled with newly available evidence on British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wealth and income distribution, these estimates equip us to search for explanations. A strategy for modeling British inequality history is suggested.

Clearly, private business is but one agent for the diffusion of technology. Yet it is an important one. In the normal pursuit of business, technological knowledge and skills pass over political boundaries and private enterprise takes part in the international diffusion of technology. In this paper I want to try to delineate the means by which private companies have shared in the international diffusion of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will note briefly the “imitation lag” and then what I want to call the “absorption gap.” From generalizations, I will turn to some explicit examples and analysis. Finally, in conclusion, I want to return to my concept of the absorption gap and the role of private enterprise in bridging that gap.

The 1933 Ukrainian famine killed as many as 2.6 million people out of a population of 32 million. Historians offer three main explanations: weather, economic policies, genocide. This paper documents that (1) available data do not support weather as the main explanation: 1931 and 1932 weather predicts harvest roughly equal to the 1924–1929 average; weather explains up to 8.1 percent of excess deaths. (2) Policies (collectivization of agriculture and the lack of favored industries) significantly increased famine mortality; collectivization explains up to 52 percent of excess deaths. (3) There is some evidence that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.

When the Spaniards conquered the New World, they resorted to a form of native labor organization called the encomienda. The encomienda differed from slavery in that the Crown imposed inheritance, trading, and relocation restrictions on encomenderos. Such restrictions cost the Crown revenue by providing incentives for colonists to deplete more quickly the stock of native labor and by keeping native labour in areas of low-revenue productivity. This loss of revenue makes the Crown's Preference for the encomienda curious. The Crown opted for the encomienda, however, to secure its rule and to satisfy an ideological bias against slavery.

The unemployment relief programs introduced by the federal government in the 1930s were the largest single factor in the growth of the federal budget over the decade. We develop a model that enables us to estimate the effects of the relief programs on private employment. Cross-sectional data bearing on the operation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration rejects the hypothesis that the federal relief programs reduced private employment. Individuals did respond to the incentives of relief benefits, but only by moving between relief and non-relief unemployment.

This paper investigates the organization of southern agricultural enterprise in 1910, with special regard for the interrelations of race, land tenure conditions, and the allocation of resources. After surveying the distribution of farmers and land among the major racial and tenure classes, I seek to answer two main questions. First, what determined the distribution of farm rental contracts between share-rent and fixed-rent forms, and did the tenant's race influence the form of rental contract he obtained? Second, what effect did the race of the farmers and the form of their land tenure have on the determination of farm size? A concluding section raises some further questions and briefly explores the difficult problem of discovering the effects of racism on the southern economy.

This article analyzes President Herbert Hoover's role in causing wage rigidity during the onset of the Great Depression, through two conferences in which he encouraged business leaders to maintain high wages. New data on the set of firms and trade associations attending these conferences provides evidence that Hoover's conferences delayed the cuts in hourly wages at a small number of large firms, although this result may have been due to characteristics of the particular industries the firms represented. In a cross-section of industries, there is no evidence that industry representation at the December conference affected the timing of wage cuts.

I investigate health as determined by nonsurvival in manuscript schedules of families matched in successive censuses. Losses were systematically greater for infants of the unskilled and of residents in large cities; for young children who lived on the frontier or had more young siblings; and for women who lived on the frontier or in the South. The findings have implications for fertility studies based on child-woman ratios, estimation of interregional migration, generality of regional mortality studies, slave-white differences in health, the modern rise of population, and wealth estimation from probate records.

The rapid decline of German emigration before World War I constitutes a puzzle that traditional explanations have difficulty in solving. The article shows that the social legislation implemented by Bismarck during the 1880s—the most developed at the time—played a key role in this process. Indeed, candidates for migration considered not only the gap between “direct wages” (labor earnings) in the United States and Germany, but also the differential in “indirect wages,” that is, social benefits. In that way, Bismarck's insurance system partly offset low wage rates in Germany and furthered the fall of the emigration rate.

O sprecht! warum zogt ihr von dannen?
Das Neckartal hat Wein und Korn;
Der Schwarzwald steht voll finstrer Tannen,
Im Spessart klingt des Ålplers Horn.
Wie wird es in den fremden Wäldern
Euch nach der Heimatberge Grün,
Nach Deutschlands gelben Weizenfeldern,
Nach seinen Rebenhügeln ziehn!
Ferdinand Freiligrath1

We investigate secular changes in the distribution of personal expenditure in Italy. To this end we present a new data set, consisting of 4,370 family-level budgets scattered over the years 1881–1961. Our methodology is innovative for this kind of study. Italy's secular trend proves to have been egalitarian, and to have accelerated in periods of fast output growth. Sectoral, residential, and demographic changes associated with “modern economic growth” account for a minor part of the observed changes in expenditure distribution, suggesting that other factors, such as wage differentials, play a dominant role in explaining the dynamics of inequality.

Population pressure has been identified as a major force behind the transition from traditional property rights in land to exclusive, transferable property rights. This article examines the case of Hawaii where the transition to private property in land occurred while its population was rapidly declining. That transition was driven by new market opportunities and considerations of public finance.The shift in comparative advantage to sugar production increased the rents associated with private land rights, while declining tax revenues prompted the king and his government to pursue property rights reform to gain additional revenues.

Europeans stopped using servitude to finance passage to America sometime in the early nineteenth century, but exactly when and why immigrant servitude disappeared is a mystery. Hypotheses abound, but no consensus has emerged nor have scholars tested hypotheses. In this study, quantitative evidence for the final sixty years of immigrant servitude establishes when and why it disappeared. Servitude did not end because of insufficient demand, legal restrictions, or declines in passage fares. It ended because superior methods of financing migration developed. Chance historical events, however, determined the exact timing of the end.