Following Waterloo, managing French public finances represented a daunting task as the country had lost a substantial part of its population and territory and had to pay huge amounts as reparations to the victors. Despite this, in just ten years, France managed to issue substantial amounts of debt with a spread, compared to the British consol, falling from more than 400 to 100 basis points. We argue that the Duke of Wellington was key in creating an environment in which Baring had an incentive to lend to France and all actors had an incentive to see French debts reimbursed.

The Japanese occupy a unique place in the history of America's immigrants. They were denied the privilege of naturalization (until 1952), forbidden to purchase or lease farm land (in California, 1913–1956), driven from their homes by the wartime evacuation and confined in concentration camps (1942–1945). Yet the Japanese are now one of the most successful of all ethnic groups in America. The narrative of this remarkable experience has been written often and well, and detailed studies of its political, legal, and social aspects have been made. Economic historians, however, have done relatively little to analyze and learn from the Japanese-American experience.

A downward trend in British coal-mining productivity was reversed between the world wars. Declining productivity before 1914 was accompanied by wide regional differences, especially at the coalface. Scotland attained the best overall. productivity, while coalface productivity was highest in Durham and Northumberland. Regional differences narrowed by the 1920s but re-emerged in the 1930s, as mines in the North Midlands outpaced the productivity gains made elsewhere. Only a multifaceted interpretation can explain these distinctive patterns—over time, between regions, and at different stages of the coal-mining operation.

The paper we are presenting here is in essence an interim research report, a summary and preliminary analysis of findings based on a larger study still under way. Thus both the findings and the interpretations are subject to revision as we continue and complete our investigation.

Statistics on crop yields for the period 1268–1430 from 62 demesnes in the eastern half of Norfolk are used to demonstrate a new method of measuring arable productivity. The method takes into account seeding rates, the frequency of cropping, and the relative importance of the different crops grown, and it acknowledges the existence of different farming regions. Within eastern Norfolk two such regions are shown to have existed, which cut right across estate affiliations and had radically different productivities. The wider implications of these findings are then discussed.

The advantage of having a tightly woven thesis to present to you is that it can be used in the introductory paper as a rug to be yanked violently from under my feet. If caution leads Professor Easterbrook “to remain, at least for the time being, in the informational camp,” it is obvious that only a total absence of caution would lead me, a professor of English, to venture before the leaders in the field of economic history in the role assigned to me today.

Two series of the dollar-sterling exchange rate are presented for the 1791–1834 period, both series based on actual transactions and corrected for the component of interest in bills of exchange and for episodes of floating exchange rates. Expressed as deviations from a true parity measure and conjoined with existing data for 1835–1900, the series permit an examination of the stability of the gold points over the entire nineteenth century. The steady narrowing of metallic points, previously found for 1835–1900 and confirmed here, does not apply to the earlier period; but evidence suggests that movement to an integrated market in foreign exchange developed in the 1820s.

The State of Israel was established in the midst of a war for its survival, and its population doubled within three years by mass immigration. The Israeli governments opted for a system of far-reaching and direct intervention in the economy as a means of winning the war, meeting basic consumption needs, and sustaining a high investment ratio. The circumstances and ideological premises of this policy are discussed, and the major problems of evaluation spelled out.

We gather a new database to conduct the first historically informed study of the importance of liquidity and credit for government bonds between 1880 and 1910. We argue that colonial and sovereign debt markets were segmented owing to differences in underlying information asymmetries. The result was heterogeneous pricing of colonial and sovereign debt, and different market microstructures and clienteles, themselves influenced by political, institutional, and financial arrangements. We find that sovereign spreads mainly reflected credit risks, while colonial spreads mainly reflected liquidity risks. Liquidity premia were economically large and significant, contributing between 10 percent and 39 percent of colonial spreads. These findings help understanding why the seemingly dry subject of colonial illiquidity inspired passionate disputes and ground-breaking reforms of financial imperial institutions.

The sort of document which explicitly formulates policy is, in any field of history, rather hard to come by. That is especially true when we search for formulations of business policy and especially for medieval formulations of medieval business policy.

One need not be very conversant with modern money, credit, and banking to find in them a kinship with the land banks of the Colonial era. In a manner suggestive of our Federal Reserve System, the Colonial land banks exerted a wide influence over the economic life of the times. Indeed, the functions of the land-bank system embraced every phase of the Colonial economy. Its history to a large degree comprises the history of currency, money values, inflation, credit, public finance, and economic development in eighteenth-century America.

The standard modern model of married women's labor force participation is modified because turn-of-the-century families had the alternatives of substituting children for the mother in the labor force and of taking in paying boarders. The modified model explained 1901 participation rates quite well. Participation rates were significantly related (negatively) to the number of older children (potential workers) but not to the number of young children. In addition, the availability of jobs was more important than high wages in inducing women to seek work. Other family income, the male unemployment rate, and literacy also were significant.

In campaigning for the establishment of the National Forests in the late nineteenth century, conservationists pointed to fraud and timber theft in the Pacific Northwest. In this paper we argue that the conservationists were misdirected; that it was a costly Federal land policy that encouraged fraud and theft. In the face of restrictive land laws, fraud was necessary if lumber companies were to acquire large tracts of land to take advantage of economies of scale in logging. Since fraud used real resources, it raised the actual cost of acquiring land and thus delayed the establishment of property rights. Such delays led to theft. The paper examines the public land laws, explains their selection by claimants, and calculates the added transaction costs or rent dissipation that resulted from circumventing the law.

“Government control of cutting on all timberland, private as well as public, is still today, as it was then, the one most indispensable step toward assuring a supply of forest products for the future in the United States.”

The structural retardation hypothesis locates the source of stagnation in French agriculture primarily within agriculture — inthe economic, political, and sociological consequences of a peasant system of agricultural production. It is argued in this paper that the poor performance of French agriculture from the 1870s to the 1940s is to be found in the limited opportunities for agricultural growth provided by the French economy. Evidence suggests that the slow growth in demand for agricultural output, the slow growth in demand for labor by the non-agricultural sector, and the limited investment in the institutional infrastructure to support agricultural development were the primary sources of stagnation.

In this paper, I will discuss three classic problems in economic history. I label them “classic” because they are problems of general interest that share the central characteristic of classic problems: an extensive literature has not led to general agreement. They are taken from the literature on the history of the United States because of the wealth of data and secondary material on this country's history, but they all have their analogues or reflections in European history. They are the problems of labor scarcity in America, the depression of the 1930's (which Americans call the Great Depression), and the deflation of the late nineteenth century (which the British call the Great Depression).

Credit financing of automobile sales and dealer inventories was provided primarily by hundreds of sales finance companies in the interwar United States. The few finance companies tied to auto manufacturers wrote 90 percent of credit business. Manufacturers initially established finance companies not to bolster retail sales but to finance dealers' wholesale inventory so manufacturers could lower average costs by smoothing seasonal production patterns. Moreover, until the Justice Department intervened, manufacturers apparently illegally coerced franchised dealers into using the manufacturer's preferred finance company rather than an independent.

The history of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate before World War I demonstrates that a cartel can be established and maintained in the face of significant disintegrative forces, including many members, heterogeneous production and cost conditions, dynamic markets, competition from outside producers, and cheating. Opportunities for individualistic behavior, including contractual loopholes and horizontal combinations, combined with a collusive objective function that emphasized overall control and stability, allowed the cartel to survive for over two decades without government interference or support.