This study suggests that the militaristic orientation of the Meiji government and the wars fought against China and Russia contributed significantly to technological development in Meiji Japan (1868–1911). The roles played by the arsenals and the government-owned shipyards and factories in adopting and disseminating foreign technology are described to demonstrate their importance in the rapid Meiji industrialization. The article suggests that it is necessary to reexamine the view, primarily based on macro-economic analysis, that Meiji militarism was basically detrimental to economic growth in Japan.

This article evaluates criticisms by Sarah G. Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Tine De Moor of our view of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), and explains why their claims are incorrect. We elaborate our arguments concerning the institutional sources of economic growth, explore the relationship between women's position and the EMP, analyze the two-way links between demographic and economic behavior, and explicate aspects of our empirical analysis that these scholars find puzzling. The causes of European economic growth, we reiterate, are not to be found in the EMP but rather must be sought in the wider framework of nonfamilial institutions.

There are times when researchers must struggle through the weeds and pass up the easier roads chosen by Crane's wayfarer. Such a time has come for research on the growth and structure of the English economy before and during the Industrial Revolution. Our rational preference for the easier roads has caused us to apply increasing amounts of our abundant analytical cleverness to an endowment of empirical raw materials that has grown relatively slowly. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to historical research as well as to other activities, and the relatively generous inputs of analysis have lowered their marginal returns and created a condition of raw material scarcity. The returns to hacking through the archival weeds for new raw materials now seem high.

The external growth of a sample of large German enterprises for the 1880–1913 period is here investigated. External growth, defined as acquisition of existing firms and measured by the reported value of their assets, is found to have accounted for no more than one-fifth of average overall enterprise growth in the period. An examination of individual examples, however, reveals that external growth was frequently decisive for the growth of survivor enterprises and, in some sectors, a significant contributor to concentration. Some quantitative tests suggest that financial factors, and particularly stock prices, significantly influenced external growth. The paper concludes by comparing German with British and American findings.

The Midwest made the transition from primary to secondary activity before 1880 by developing a large diversified industrial sector to serve burgeoning midwestern demand for manufactures. Because the Midwest had industrialized, its firms were able to compete with eastern producers in multiregional and national markets after 1880, when the transportation and communication systems were fully integrated. Supporting evidence is drawn from a national set of 327 urban-industrial counties, with a focus on the Midwest.

We examine the dynamic relationships between relief spending and local private labor markets using a panel data set of relief, private employment, and private earnings. Positive shocks to relief during the First New Deal were followed by increased private employment and earnings, consistent with demand stimulus in that period. On the other hand, increases in work relief spending during the Second New Deal were followed by decreased employment and increased earnings, consistent with crowding out. The timing of spending is consistent with claims that the Roosevelt administration used relief spending to sway elections.

Most explanations of trends in women's work emphasize women's role in childbearing, along with technological and organizational changes in production. The explanations neglect an important factor: the need to control sexuality in order to secure demographic order. Segregated employment enabled almost all family members to work, while discouraging heterosexual intimacy. Nineteenth-century attitudes illustrate the anxiety felt when unrelated men and women worked together. The argument is tested by correlating regional variation in illegitimacy, as a measure of failed social control, with variation in sex segregation.

There is at present no series of crop yields available for early modern England. This paper describes a method for calculating estimates of grain yields in bushels per acre using data derived from English probate inventories. Results are presented of 10-year average yields for wheat, rye, barley, oats, and peas for the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk during 1587–98, 1628–40, and 1660–1735. These results are compared with other yield figures for the periods before and after these dates, and used to revise existing estimates of the progress of productivity changes.

This article explores differences between the cotton industries in England and America in the early nineteenth century. I show that the two countries produced almost entirely different products: the Enlish made fine fabrics; the Americans, coarse. The cause of this disjunction is found in the American tariff policy, whichwas influenced by the Massachusetts cotton manufacturers. Since coarse spinning promoted vertical integration, the American product structure favored integration. This argument reveals that the variables analyzed were jointly determined, since the Massachusetts firms with the political clout to affect the tariff were vertically integrated.

The greater flexibility associated with workers being able to choose the time and circumstance of their work allowed cottage manufacture to compete with technically more productive manufactories by rendering it more effective at harnessing a part time or offpeak workforce whose opportunity cost was low. Not only did this mean that cottage manufacture was better suited to the employment of women and children, who preferred flexibility in their hours and place of work, but also that the greater seasonality of labor supply in England led that economy to rely more on cottage manufacturing than did the United States during early industrialization.

Soon after establishing political control, the British colonial administration in southern Nigeria attempted to replace the existing currencies of the country with British currency. The traditional currencies competently discharged the functions of money, however, and it required fifty years before the pre-colonial currencies, attacked by the colonial authorities and unrecognized as legal tender, gradually lost standing and proved worthless to their last holders. Theoretical implications of these developments are discussed.

Most American financial crises of the postbellum gold standard era were caused by fluctuations in the cotton harvest due to exogenous factors such as weather. The transmission channel ran through export revenues and financial markets under the pre-1914 monetary regime. A poor cotton harvest depressed export revenues and reduced international demand for American assets, which depressed American stock prices, drained deposits from money center banks and precipitated a business cycle downturn—conditions that bred financial crises. The crises caused by cotton harvests could have been prevented by an American central bank, even under gold standard constraints.

By-Employments, one may suppose, tend to ready preindustrial people for modern economic roles since they represent an incipient shift from agriculture to other occupations, spread skills useful to industrialization among the most backward and numerous part of the population, and stimulate ambition and geographical mobility. Although widespread in Western preindustrial societies, by-employments have been mainly treated there from the standpoint of the history of industry to the neglect of their effect on the habits, aptitudes, and outlook of fanners and their wives and children. This is partly due to the scattered and widely varied and changing forms of by-employments, which make it all but impossible to know what proportion of farmers practiced them and what part of their income they earned in this way.

The Great Kanto Earthquake occurred on 1 September 1923 and inflicted serious damage on Yokohama City. About 90 percent of the factories in Yokohama City were burnt down or completely destroyed. However, these manufacturing industries appear to have swiftly recovered in the aftermath of the damage. This article investigates the role of creative destruction due to the Great Kanto Earthquake. Using firm-level data on capital (horsepower of motors) before and after the earthquake, we find substantial creative destruction, that is, upgrade of machine technology and/or survival of efficient firms. We find further collaborating evidence of this at the prefecture level.

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less developed economies. The findings reveal both similarities and differences. During the industrialization era, Sweden's domestic wealth was relatively low because of low saving rates and instead foreign capital imports became important. Twentieth-century trends and levels are more similar, but in Sweden government wealth grew more important, not least through its relatively large public pension system. Overall, the findings suggest that initial conditions and economic and political institutions matter for the structure and evolution of national wealth.

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in Germany during 1300–1850, introducing a novel database. We document four alternating phases of inequality decline and growth. The Black Death (1347–1352) led to inequality decline, until about 1450. Thereafter, inequality rose steadily. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the 1627–1629 plague triggered a second phase of inequality reduction. This distinguishes Germany from other European areas where inequality grew monotonically. Inequality growth resumed from about 1700, well before the Industrial Revolution. Our findings offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present.

The essay challenges Karl Polanyi's position—that ancient Near Eastern economies knew state and temple administration but not price-making markets. It is found that the prerequisite functions of a market economy listed by Polanyi—the allocation of consumer goods, land, and labor through the supply-demand-price mechanism; risk-bearing organized as a market function; and loan markets—were all present in the ancient Near East. Although Polanyi criticized stage theories with their “predilection for continuity” he imposed his own version of continuity on history in lumping together many thousands of years under the rubric of “archaic society.” This perspective prevented him from recognizing that ancient Mesopotamia experienced lengthy and significant periods of unfettered market activity as well as periods of pervasive state regulation.

In September 1928, two eminent economists with an interest in price history met and conversed at Hanover, New Hampshire: Sir William Beveridge and Edwin F. Gay. The former was Director of the London School of Economics and the latter, Professor of Economic History at Harvard University. For some time Sir William had been conducting research in medieval English manorial records and had already amassed data on price movements of English commodities. Moreover, he seems to have shared Gay's long-held views that broader research was needed to provide carefully selected and critically handled long homogeneous series of commodity prices and wages for a number of countries.

New data are used to construct a time series of real GDP in Germany for the period 1500–1850 using an indirect output estimation technique that relies on wages, prices, and sectoral employment. Until the mid-seventeenth century, real GDP per capita moved inversely with population. The eighteenth century saw a modest rise in output per head. From the late 1810s, economic growth gradually accelerated. The results shed new light on the reversal of fortunes in early modern Europe and the transition from a Malthusian regime to modern economic growth.