Private property in the industry of the Third Reich is often considered a mere nominal provision without much substance. However, that is not correct, because firms, despite the rationing and licensing activities of the state, still had ample scope to devise their own production and investment profiles. Even regarding war-related projects, freedom of contract was generally respected; instead of using power, the state offered firms a number of contract options to choose from. There were several motives behind this attitude of the regime, among them the conviction that private property provided important incentives for increasing efficiency.

We trace the development of human capital in today's Senegal, Gambia, and Western Mali between 1770 and 1900. European trade, slavery, and early colonialism were linked to human capital formation, but this connection appears to have been heterogeneous. The contact with the Atlantic slave trade increased regional divergence, as the coast of Senegambia developed more quickly than inner areas. This pattern was affected by French early colonialism and by the reaction of different West African populations to the economic incentives provided by foreign demand for agricultural products. The peanut trade since the mid-nineteenth century further amplified regional economic inequalities.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 offers an illuminating case study of the political economy of preferential trading relationships between large and small countries. The limited-term reciprocity treaty of 1876 between Hawaii and the United States generated problematic strategic dynamics, as the normal operation of the treaty gradually worsened Hawaii’s bargaining position. This allowed the United States to extract better terms when the treaty expired in 1883 and to act opportunistically in 1890 with the passage of the McKinley Tariff. The political economy of the treaty contributed significantly to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

If we are successfully to relate our work with the main body of Economic History, we must be able to show the fundamental relationship between quantitative analysis and more conventional methods of economic historians. The historian reconstructs events of the past, and with them attempts to understand the institutions and modes of behavior associated with those events. He seeks to construct a consistent story revealing the fundamental nature and meaning to us of the past, thus creating insight into the past and understanding of it—something considerably beyond a mere account of what probably happened. However, this story must be based upon, and be consistent with, the reconstructed events of the past, “what probably happened.”

“It is impossible to say definitely what percentage of the movement of slaves to the lower South was comprised in the domestic slave trade.…”

L. C. GrayGray, History, p. 658.

Between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves moved from the exporting areas to the importing areas of the United States South.Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics, p. 47. Gutman and Sutch (“Slave Family,” p. 99) estimate “more than a million slaves entered the interstate migration between 1790 and 1860.” For other estimates of the net migration of slaves (or blacks) within the United States, see Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 61–67; Bancroft, Slave-Trading, pp. 382–406 and sources therein; Lang, Effects, pp. 57–72; Sutch, “Breeding,” pp. 178–80; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, pp. 159–64; and Tadman, Speculators, pp. 237–47. These slaves either moved with their owners as whole plantations or were bought by interregional traders and shipped to the lower South. Until recent years historians had no way of estimating the share of sales in the interregional movement of slaves. Consequently, most of the early quantitative estimates of the interregional slave trade were vague or deliberately imprecise.According to Weld (Slavery, p. 13), “perhaps four-fifths or more” of the slaves were transported through the interregional slave trade. For the period 1820 to 1850, Collins (Domestic Slave Trade, p. 62) estimated that less than two-fifths of the migrants were carried south through the trade. According to Phillips (“Racial Problems, p. 223),” The conjecture of about 25,000 per year which has often been made for the interstate slave trade is probably as just an approximation as can be had.…” Bancroft (Slave-Trading, p. 398) “supposes that” the slave trade accounted for 70 percent of the slave exports. Stampp (peculiar Institution, p. 239) suggests that the slave trade accounted for “perhaps a majority” of the slave exports. According to Miller (“Note,” p. 182), “Estimates indicate that from two-fifths to one-half of these [slaves] may have been sold by their owners and moved by slave-traders to newer regions. Presumption lies in favor of the lower estimate,…”

It May have been the ingrained pessimism of Bentham and McCulloch that provoked Carlyle to dub economics the dismal science. It surely must have been economists' concern over price theory, which they regarded and still regard as the central core of economics, that made the name stick. Studies of the role of prices in history are no less tedious and technical than price theory, and in hands no more skillful than mine they can be even more dreary. But this is not the worst of my worries. The evidence that I shall sketch supports the pessimistic hypothesis that during certain germinal periods price and wage behavior of the type that is now taking a distressing percentage of real income from all of us who live on our salaries has proved beneficial to society in the long run and that the type of price and wage behavior which would benefit most of us in the short run has had serious disadvantages. Yet I have the inner satisfaction of appearing to be objective in my thinking and fearless in airing my conclusions in a gathering of some of the worst aggrieved.

By The end of the sixteenth century, the tendency in the OttomanEmpire toward the expansion of timariote properties or military fiefs is reversed, and quasi-private properties begin again to acquire ascendancy in the Balkans. To understand die process of reversal, one must bear in mind the separation of die properties administered by die timariote into two distinct categories, die raya-čiftlik and the hassa-čiftlik The raya-čiftlik was die property over which die peasant tenant had rights of usufruct. The hassa-čiftlik was the private farm or “proprietary nucleus” of the timariote. Slowly the timariote expands his hassa-čiftlik at die expense of die raya-čiftlik. This is possible because certain peasants become indebted to timariotes, others sell dieir right of usufruct, some leave no legal heirs behind them, and others abandon dieir lands to escape plague or famine or to avoid a census, die collection of taxes, or armies on die march.

This paper examines the behavior of the postal savings system in the Depression. It is shown that because the system was created with an inflexible structure it was unable to carry out its prescribed function when economic conditions changed in the Depression. Instead, the system evolved from a small-scale government program designed for the low-income saver into a financial force capable of causing problems for the savings and loan industry, the housing market, and even the banking system.

Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico fought with de-industrialization in the century before the 1870s. Yet, Mexican manufacturing defended itself better than did the rest of the poor periphery. Why Mexican exceptionalism? This article decomposes the sources of de-industrialization into productivity events abroad, globalization forces connecting Mexico to those markets, and domestic forces. It uses a neo-Ricardian model to implement the decomposition, advocates a price dual approach, and develops a new price and wage data base. Mexican exceptionalism was due to weaker Dutch disease effects, better wage competitiveness, and the policy autonomy to foster industry.

The impact of protection on economic growth has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection as the ratio of custom revenues to import value, which biases results if demand for imports is not perfectly inelastic. In this article, we show that the measure of protection matters. We estimate the James Anderson and Peter Neary (2005) Trade Restrictiveness Index for Italy from unification to the Great Depression. We suggest a different interpretation of some key moments of Italian trade policy and we show that the aggregate welfare losses were small in the long run and mostly related to protection on sugar in the 1880s and 1890s. We document that using different measures of protection affects results of the causal relation between trade policy on economic growth in Italy and in the United States. Accordingly, we argue that a systematic re-estimating of protection in the economic history of trade policy is needed.

Ongoing research on British overseas trade does not support supply-side explanations of British industrialization. Contrary to widely publicized views, the share of British industrial exports in alternative measures of industrial output rose almost continuously throughout the period 1723 to 1851. This finding rests on the official values of British domestic exports, and it is confirmed by new annual estimates of Britain's domestic export, and it is confirmed by new annual estimates of Britain's domestic export values at current an constant prices form 1772 to 1821. Further research on prices, and on Britain's strikingly underutilized trade records, may lead to a more balanced perception of supply and demand forces during the Industrial Revolution.

This article examines the workers' standard of living in the cotton textile industry of Northwest England from 1806 to 1850. Hedonic earnings regressions using 1835 data suggest that power-loom weavers required substantial compensation for the high rents and poor sanitation of urban locations. Adjusting earnings in the factory sector for the impact of urbanization cuts growth in living standards by 10 percent, or up to one-quarter of gains realized by 1850. Inclusion of those employed in the handloom sector implies that any improvements in the living standards of all workers in the industry appeared only during the 1840s.

Scholars interested in modern industrial economies have for years devoted substantial attention to the growth and performance of large-scale organizations. Many of their studies have been the intellectual heirs of Max Weber's brilliant analysis of bureaucracy, for it is the bureaucratic structure of authority which most often characterizes such organizations in the modern period. Economists, historians, and sociologists are all in debt to Weber for the basic ideas which have made the analysis of large-scale organizations so fruitful.

Having labored for many years in the fields of slavey research, I have learned to appreciate the challenges and complexities of the subject. My work has led me to change my assumptions and opinions on several questions, and the comment by Philip Coelho and Robert McGuire requires me to revisit my thoughts on explanations for the remarkable catch-up growth of American slaves.

This paper describes two contrary developments in corporate finance during the Great Depression. In 1930s downswings the top one percent of firms acquired unusually high rations of liquid assets to receipts, thus withdrawing funds from the spending stream. Smaller firms, however, were forced into highly illiquid positions (by postwar standards) by episodes of monetary restriction in 1931 and 1937. It is argued that both developments made the Depression more severe. A structural change is found after 1945 in the financial behavior of large firms. This is attributed to a new cyclical pattern of price change and lower business uncertainty during postwar recessions.

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

The development of new machinery in nineteenth-century American canning followed two paths. Automative, labor-saving devices were developed to replace labor in unskilled tasks while deskilling, human-capital-saving machinery was designed to make craft labor more replaceable. Cannery operators appear to have focused on deskilling machinery as the key to greater managerial control over production. Craft workers through organizational power and pressing for higher wages seem to have stimulated the early and sustained search for deskilling machinery. Because human-capital-saving machinery allowed wage cuts, they could be adopted prior to their being used as labor-saving devices.

Governments frequently establish institutions to govern the transition in property rights when they acquire territory or experience radical changes in political regimes. By examining a specific example—the United States' acquisition of California from Mexico in 1848, this article investigates general questions about these institutions and institutional choice. The article fmds that the specific institution that Congress chose for California best balanced the interests of the federal government, American owners of land grants, and American squatters and settlers. Further, despite the lobbying, litigation, and delay associated with the institution, the institution was more efficient than prior institutions.

The paper traces the development of Keynes's views of free trade and protection and their relationship to British economic policy from 1922 to 1946.

“Is there anything that a tariff could do which an earthquake could not do better?”