The paper examines the thesis, popular among Russian Marxists, that Russian serfdom had become unprofitable for the serfowners before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Four theoretical models are constructed in order to determine the effects on serfdom of population growth, rise in grain prices, certain restrictions on the serfs' labor obligations, and the replacement of labor services with money payments. Prices of serfs for the several regions and provinces are estimated by regression.With the exception of Lithuania, neither the theoreticalnor the empirical results confirm the Marxist hypothesis.

Output per farm worker in the northern United States and Britain in the early nineteenth century was many times that inEastern Europe or in medieval England and wages were correspondingly higher. Technical progress explains little of the high American and British productivity in the early nineteenth century, nor, in the American case, does abundant land per worker. Instead, most of the difference derived from more intense labor in America and Britain.

The decline in U.S. fertility rates, beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century, is examined within a general model of fertility determination. The ability of land availability measures to explain the variation in components of the crude birth rate is tested using a pooled regression technique. A set of crude birth rate predictions for rural areas of 23 northern states during the period 1760–1870 is produced and compared with other estimates. It is concluded that the availability of land was a critical factor in determining the demand for children and, ultimately, the fertility rate, across states and over time.

This study focuses primarily on the movements of people and capital between a number of selected European and overseas countries during a phase of mass migration. The data indicate that the international movements of people, capital, and goods were extremely fluid, were adaptable, and took place under highly diverse conditions of population change and economic growth. A number of uniformities emerge, including for example a close relationship between international borrowing, high growth rates, and large flows of immigrants. These and a variety of other general patterns are examined as aspects of the massive demographic shifts of this period.

We examine the extent and correlates of part-year manufacturing during the late nineteenth century using unpublished data from the manuscripts of the 1870 and 1880 censuses of manufactures. These are the earliest comprehensive estimates available on this topic. Although the typical manufacturing plant operated full-time, part-year operation was not uncommon. Indeed, the likelihood of part-year operation varied across industries and location and with plant characteristics, and workers in such plants received higher monthly wages than those in firms that operated year-round, compensating them for the loss of work and possible inconvenience.

Matching 2,777 R&D firms in surveys conducted by the National Research Council between 1921 and 1938 with U.S. patents reveals that 59 percent of all firms and 88 percent of publicly traded firms patented. These shares are much higher than those observed for modern R&D firms. Industry, firm size and the location of R&D facilities relative to major cities are shown to be important determinants of the propensity to patent. The effect of these factors remained constant across the 1920s and the Depression years suggesting that the tradeoff between patent disclosure and secrecy did not change over time.

Using a novel data set on 2,483 British privateering cruises, we show that state-licensed raiding of commercial vessels was a popular and flourishing business among merchants that took a serious toll on enemy trade from 1689 to 1815. Why, then, did privateering merchants gradually turn away from these profitable endeavors? We show that the expansion of overseas trade increased the opportunity costs for merchants and resulted in the decline of privateering. Our findings document that the decline of privateering had as much to do with an expanding maritime economy as with the rising naval power of the British state.

The comparative method will accomplish great things. … The historical specialist asks for a method which is a technical instrument, generally used, easily manageable and capable of giving positive results. The comparative method is precisely such an instrument. … I believe that this method can and must penetrate monographic studies. Marc Bloch

The Reciprocity Treaty between the British North American Provinces (Canada) and the United States was ratified in February 1855 and terminated in March 1866. It provided for free trade in all natural products, free access for United States fisheries to the Atlantic coastal waters of British North America, and access to the St. Lawrence River for American vessels under the same tolls as native vessels.

The traditional view of cotton mechanization, first advanced by rural sociologists in the 1920s, is that southern agrarian institutions impeded progress. Recently their view has been questioned. New studies attribute much of the southern lag to factors like small-scale production, cheap labor, the cotton crop, and environment. I contribute to the debate by emphasizing how the structure of the southern economy encouraged landlords to use annual labor contracts that hindered attempts to mechanize. I present evidence that supports the traditional view and suggest how the incentive structure of annual labor contracts delayed invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

We investigate determinants of slave family discounts in the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families unrelated to scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. We posit that because family members voluntarily cared for each other, sellers sometimes found it advantageous to keep families together (when families included needy or dependent members). Evidence from ship manifests carrying slaves for sale in New Orleans provides direct evidence for selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts. Children likely to have been shipped with their mothers are 1 to 2 inches shorter than other children.

This paper uses a simple physiocratic model to examine forms of economic organization prevailing in Ghana before it was incorporated into the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. It is divided into three parts. The first analyzes the village subsistence economy and suggests that the egalitarian nature of the land-tenure system prevented the emergence of a land-owning class and the appropriation of an economic surplus. This led to an economic structure characterized by a low level of material production and a low degree of specialization and exchange. The second part analyzes forms of economic organization associated with long distance trade: that is, the very old northern trade with other parts of Africa, and the southern coastal trade with Europe which began in the fifteenth century. It argues that foreign trade not only expanded the consumption possibilities of the society, as predicted by the theory of international trade, but also introduced a new class structure and greater income inequality, since it allowed a small group to appropriate a surplus for its own use. The third part discusses the relevance of Pre-Colonial forms to twentieth century economic development.

This paper investigates the impact of the emergence of large-scale enterprises on industrial structure in America in the mid-nineteenth century and concludes that their impact was ambiguous. In cottons and irons, average scale increased dramatically, but inequality in the size distribution of plants declined and economic concentration showed no clear trend. In other industries, changes in average scale were much smaller and inequality increased, but again there was no clear trend in concentration.

In this article we document a reversal of fortune within the Western agricultural core, showing that regions which made early transition to Neolithic agriculture are now poorer than regions that made the transition later. The finding contrasts recent influential works emphasizing the beneficial role of early transition. Using data from a large number of carbon-dated Neolithic sites throughout the Western agricultural area, we determine approximate transition dates for about 60 countries, 280 medium-sized regions, and 1,400 small regions. Our empirical analysis shows that there is a robust negative, reduced-form relationship between years since transition to agriculture and contemporary levels of income both across and within countries. Our results further indicate that the reversal had started to emerge already before the era of European colonization.

In 1587 the English Privy Council issued its first Book of Orders for the relief of dearth, a program of grain-market control that included forced delivery of private stocks to local markets in crisis periods. The policy has been described as an effective response to irrational hoarding and credited for a significant reduction in English grain-price variance. In contrast, I find support for an alternative profit maximizing model of storage. The occurrence of similar price stabilization in other European markets in the early seventeenth century is also demonstrated, suggesting English policy was not the cause.

Domestic slave traders selected taller slaves for shipment to the New Orleans market in order to increase their profits. Because traded slaves made up a large share of the slaves shipped coastwise, age/height profiles constructed from the shipping manifests are biased upwards. The extent of the bias appears to be small for adult slaves but not for children; those listed on the manifests were taller than the general population of a comparable age.

Robert Fogel and Albert Fishlow have attempted in recent studies to measure the net contribution of the railroad to American economic growth in two specific years: 1890 and 1859. Both their methods and conclusions have confused, if not dismayed, more conventional historians. This article has two objectives: The first is to provide a simplified guide to the analytical framework underlying their calculations and the second is to suggest to both old and new economic historians that the measurements employed by Fogel and Fishlow bear no direct relationship to what they claim to measure—the benefits to the nineteenth-century economy from the existence of the railroad.

This article challenges the widely held view that slave prices in Africa fell substantially and permanently after Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807. Examination of slave-price data shows that, when allowance is made for movements in prices of trade goods bartered for slaves, real slave prices fell sharply between 1807 and 1820 but that the fall was confined to West Africa. In West Central Africa prices remained steady before 1820. Thereafter, prices rose strongly in both areas, and between 1830 and 1850 prices were generally close to the levels reached between 1783 and 1807, the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

According to conventional income measures, American and British industrial workers in the late nineteenth century were two to four times as wealthy as those in developing countries today. Estimated calorie expenditure elasticities of American and British industrial workers based on the 1888 Cost of Living Survey are greater than calorie elasticity estimates for developing countries today, which suggest that yesterday's wealthy workers were hungrier than today's poor. The result is robust to numerous criticisms. The finding implies an extraordinary improvement in nutritional well-being among the poor in the last century that has not been captured by our income estimates.