The Second Bank of the United States, a public bank chartered by the Congress in the early part of 1816, was the pre-eminent banking institution of its period. Its historical prominence, however, is derived primarily from the emphasis that has been placed on its role in the Bank War—a major political controversy of the nineteenth century. Certainly, the legacy of that struggle, that is, its impact on American political and economic institutions, transcends the importance of the operations undertaken by the BUS in the more normal years that preceded the Bank War. Nevertheless, because of the extent of its influence on the American economy during its tenure, the economic character of BUS operations during its earlier years also deserves the attention of the economic historian. By the close of the 1820's, its operations touched virtually every aspect of the nation's economic life—ranging from its role as the largest single issuer of bank notes to the development of financial arrangements that played an instrumental role in the conduct of interregional and international trade. In addition, the Second Bank carried out under the provisions of its charter a variety of quasi-governmental functions— including the imposition of a uniform national currency. In the course of its emergence in the 1820's, then, the Second Bank forged a set of institutional arrangements that had an important impact on the nation's economic activity throughout the remaining years of its tenure.

The story of the post-bellum reorganization of southern agriculture has been told many times, and the main features of the transition from slave to free labor are well known. Throughout the cotton economy the initial experiments with wage labor gave way to share-rent tenancy; later fixed-rent tenancy became common as well. That these changes resulted from an adjustment process in which both landlords and laborers increasingly recognized different contractual arrangements as mutually beneficial seems clearly established. The existing literature is deficient, however, by failing to account for the continuing diversity of contractual arrangements in southern agriculture. By 1880 the organizational variety that would persist for more than a half century could be clearly discerned: some farms were cultivated by their owners, often with the assistance of wives and children; others by hired workers receiving a fixed wage; some by tenants paying a stipulated amount of products (standing rent) or money (cash rent) for the use of the land; still others by tenants paying a definite share of the crops as rent. The “mix” of these arrangements varied widely from place to place, even within a given state, and changes occurred over time. How can one explain the proportions in which these various arrangements were employed and account for differences over time and space? In particular, what determined the proportion of the farms rented? Of the rented farms, what determined the proportion rented under share contracts? Did the farmer's race influence the form of the rental contract he obtained? This article attempts to answer these questions with reference to the Georgia cotton belt in the late nineteenth century.

As part of a general inquiry into the economic growth of die United Kingdom, an attempt is being made to estimate long-term trends in output of individual industries over as long a period of time as the data allow. Throughout the eighteenth century wool was the major English manufacturing industry. It is the purpose of this article to consider the evidence of contemporary estimates of the value of the woolen manufacture, with a view to using them as a basis for an assessment of the broad trends in its output over this crucial period of Britain's industrial history.

Bank distress peaked in New York City, at the center of the United States money market, in July and August 1931, when the banking crisis peaked in Germany and before Britain abandoned the gold standard. This article tests competing theories about the causes of New York's banking crisis. The cause appears to have been intensified regulatory scrutiny, which was a delayed reaction to the failure of the Bank of United States, rather than the exposure of money center banks to events overseas.

Perhaps no single element involved with the rapid assumption of economic power by the federal government was more important than the passage of the income tax, the means by which the increasing role of government was financed. We explain the political and economic interests that came together to successfully pass the income tax, and we provide extensive empirical evidence regarding the determinants of the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

This article presents annual slave export figures for western Guinea, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Congo North, Angola, and southeast Africa. The sum of exports from these regions yields exports from Africa as a whole. The series are derived from imports into the Americas and thus include estimates of the African origin of slave imports into Cuba, Brazil, and the French Caribbean, estimates of slave mortality on the transatlantic crossing, and slaves captured by the British navy. Exports from some individual African points of embarkation are also included.

Corporate groups have been very important in the economies of many developing countries, including prewar Japan, where zaibatsu controlled approximately one-third of the capital stock. Regression analysis of a new firm-level financial data set distinguishes the economic behavior of zaibatsu member firms from independent firms. The only significant difference between old-zaibatsu member firms and independent firms is that some measures of earnings of old zaibatsu were less stable. The earnings of new-zaibatsu firms were higher, faster-growing and less variable than those of independent firms. These results cast doubt on the anecdotal literature about old zaibatsu.

Much interest andthe economic progress made in Taiwan since the end of World attention have been recently focused onWar II. A major factor in Taiwan's postwar economic development is that the island already possessed a progressive and productive agricultural sector when it was returned to Chinese rule in 1945. The transformation of Taiwan's agriculture was the major accomplishment of the Japanese Colonial Administration. When Japan acquired Taiwan in 1895, its agriculture was stagnant and its peasants were engaged almost exclusively in subsistence farming. To enable Taiwan to make a contribution to Japan's efforts at industrialization, the Colonial Government was given the task of rationalizing and modernizing Taiwan's agriculture. Taiwan was to be integrated with the Japanese economy to provide a food surplus to help maintain the Japanese laborers diverted from agricultural to industrial activities. Foreign exchange that Japan would otherwise have spent on food imports would be used to finance more strategic imports. More explicitly, the Japanese had two objectives: to increase Taiwan's agricultural output and to divert the increase away from agriculture in Taiwan without committing an equivalent transfer of production value to agriculture in Taiwan.

Alexander Gerschenkron has suggested that certain characteristics of development during a country's initial period of industrialization, or “great spurt,” can be better understood if reference is made to that country's degree of relative backwardness just prior to the spurt. Referring to the European countries which began their rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, Gerschenkron stated that the greater a country's relative backwardness on the eve of its spurt (1) the more rapid was the subsequent rate of manufacturing growth, (2) the greater was the stress on bigness of the size of plant and enterprise, (3) the greater was the stress on producers’ goods as opposed to consumers’ goods, (4) the less rapid was the increase in the level of consumption, (5) the greater was the role played by special institutional factors designed to speed industrialization, and (6) the less the agricultural sector contributed to economic growth, as measured by the rate of increase in agricultural labor productivity.

We use the Soviet state and party archives to study the creation of the Soviet financial system. Although its framers intended to centralize all emission and monitoring of money and credit, in practice the system was characterized by informal mechanisms involving multiple players, soft budget constraints, and massive moral hazards. Enterprises issued “illegal” commercial credits and surrogate monies, causing liquidity growth to far outpace real economic activity. When confronted with the choice of solvency versus plan fulfillment, firms always chose the latter: credit risks were passed on to solvent enterprises, the state bank, and the state budget.

A struggle for industrialization is one of the major themes of the recent history of not only Brazil, but virtually the whole of Latin America. The historical evolution of that struggle finds a common denominator in the structural similarities of the national economies of the region. Assessment of Brazil's experience in the post-1929 period should therefore yield insights into the problems that Latin America as a whole faced during the international upheaval spawned by the financial collapse of 1929. Such an appraisal may also provide empirical assistance for the elaboration of future comparative studies. The specific analytical focus of this article is the attitude of Getúlio Vargas' government toward industrialization and planning, a theme whose re-evaluation serves, furthermore, to do justice to the enigmatic and reluctant revolutionary who governed Brazil during critical years and depression and war.

This article offers an explanation for the regional differences in the use of African and European bound labor in colonial America. The migrations of Africans and Europeans to the Americas set in motion an evolutionary process that caused regional changes in the disease ecology of the New World. Biological and epidemiological differences among populations explain the different regional labor supply choices. This article emphasizes the interactions between changing populations and disease environments. Diseases are intermediaries through which populations interact by causing illness and death. Not all populations are equally afflicted by specific diseases. Therein lies the story.

This article presents new estimates of the Italian utilities industries' production from 1861 to 1913. The improvements over the currently available series include the restriction of the electricity series to the production of the electric utilities, the extrapolation of the gas production series to 1861, and the calculation of production series for the water supply industry. These new estimates suggest that the existing aggregate production series significantly overstates the utilities' growth rate. The existing utilities series for other countries do not incorporate separate estimates for the water supply industry, and also appear to overstate the industryapos;s growth rate.

Although we still live in the shadow of the years between the First and the Second World Wars, already it seems quite clear that future historians of economic thought will regard John Maynard Keynes as the outstanding economist of this turbulent period. As one writer has recently said, “The rapid and widespread adoption of the Keynesian theory by contemporary economists, particularly by those who at first were highly critical, will probably be recorded in the future history of economic thought as an extraordinary happening.” Book after book by leading economists acknowledges a heavy debt to the stimulating thought of Lord Keynes. The younger generation of economists, especially those whose thinking matured during the great depression of the thirties, have been particularly influenced by him.

The transition from sailing ship to steamship is analyzed for European immigrants arriving at New York City. Based on information taken from the U.S. Passenger Lists, new estimates of the timing and length of the transition are provided. Though the accepted model suggests the changeover from sail to steam could occur in only a few years, it actually took about 15 years in the Europe to New York immigrant trade. The slow transition is found to be due to slow construction of new steamships given uncertainty concerning immigrant volume and new steamship technology.

The most important change in nineteenth century emigrant transportation was that from sail to steam.

Gunter MoltmannMoltmann, “Steamship Transport,” p. 311.

…the transition from sail to steam in the transatlantic immigrant trade was an event of enormous significance for the history of immigration.

Maldwyn Allen JonesJones, American Immigration, p. 157.

American and European economists who work in the least developed countries of Africa, Asia, or the Middle East sometimes come away with the feeling of having learned more than they imparted. Nor is this surprising: the minds of economists are often more receptive to development than are the exotic economies in which they now work. In considering problems of underdevelopment and processes of development we learn—inadvertently, as it were—new things about conventional fields of economics and about the developed economies of Europe and America. These feedbacks have been particularly valuable to economic historians who have given us fresh insights into European, Russian, Japanese, and American development as a direct consequence of the present concern with developing the backward countries. Economic history is now wedded to economic development.

From the days of the confederation through the nineteenth century, the frontier land speculator was a familiar figure in the United States. Perambulating foreigners recorded the activities of this gentleman, and land speculation was discussed in both Congress and in the editorial columns of Western newspapers. Many twentieth-century students of America's political and economic development have dealt in one way or another with frontier land speculation. They have depicted the land speculator at times as a sinister figure, corroding the morals of national or state legislators as the lawmakers endeavored to formulate land policy. Writers have sketched the antagonism between speculator and “actual settler.” Nor have they ignored the effect which the speculator had upon the social and economic development of the region in which he operated. Such commentators have contributed to a literature that has its share of colorful characters and even displays the occasional symbol: star-crossed Robert Morris entering debtors'

Although they had recourse to both the perfectly partible and the perfectly impartible systems of inheritance, nineteenth-century Ontarion farmers commonly employed a unique English-Canadian variation on the perfectly impartible pattern. They devised their estates upon one, or occasionally two of their children, binding them to pay out of their inheritance or other resources the provisions for remaining survivors made in the will. The purpose of this system was to allow land rich and money poor agrarians to pass on their principal asset intact, and it reflects their belief that favorable man/land ratios were the essence of security and prosperity. At the same time, the system made the principal heir the instrument of the deceased parent's desire to treat all of his surviving dependents more or less equally in terms of the value of their inheritances. The system guaranteed that those who inherited land would acquire sufficient land to pursue time tested agricultural methods, but it promoted severe demographic and social dislocations.

An important tenet of the Chicago School of antitrust asserts that the Sherman Act's framers sought to foster consumer welfare. This article challenges that interpretation by re-examining the legislative history. That history suggests that a consumer-welfare standard did not survive the legislative process and that, if anything, Congress focused on the behavior of producers.