Colonial societies exhibit peculiar institutions frequently attributed to the unequal and exploitative nature of the relations between colonizer and colonized. Repartimiento has been depicted as a coercive system of production and consumption designed by Spaniards to draw reluctant Amerindians into the market. An examination of repartimiento through the lens of New Institutional Economics provides an alternative understanding of this credit system. Characteristics of the repartimiento most often identified as exploitative are better explained as institutional adaptations designed to facilitate contract enforcement and economize on transaction costs in this cross-cultural trade. Consequently, this peculiar colonial institution served to expand trade.

Several macroeconomic studies have found evidence of diminishing cyclical wage flexibility in the United States since the turn of the century. But the importance of wage reductions during downturns must be questioned even for the era of allegedly flexible wages. This article shows that during the severe contractions of 1893 and 1908 only a small minority of Ohio manufacturing workers experienced cuts in their wage rates.The apparent downward flexibility of average earnings in these data was largely the consequence of changes in the occupational composition of the employed work force rather than pay cuts for individual workers.

The dominance of steam over sail was not finally established on long distance routes until the 1880's. When it came, steam's triumph was due primarily to the adoption of the high pressure compound engine, a marvel of its day and one of the major engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Yet within two decades experiments were being undertaken with two forms of marine propulsion—the steam turbine and the marine diesel—which were to render the compound engine uncompetitive over a wide range of uses. An experimental steam turbine was built by Parsons in 1884 and an improved design powered the Turbinia in 1894. The heavyoil or diesel engine was first adapted for marine propulsion in 1902. In 1910 a Dutch tanker, the Vulcanus, was fitted with a 450 BHP engine and in 1911 Burmeister & Wain began constructing the first ocean going cargo liner, the Selandia. By the early twenties steam turbine and diesel were replacing conventional steam vessels. Above all, the inter-war years witnessed the success of the marine diesel (motorship) which was adopted, particularly by European shipowners, for the propulsion of a wide variety of ship types and sizes.

The hypothesis that a region's or nation's laggard industrial development can be explained by its relatively more expensive supplies of coal and iron ore is challenged here. A simple model, based on location theory, is developed. Using this model, I demonstrate the conditions under which this hypothesis holds. A case study of Quebec and Ontario industry suggests that the differential resource cost hypothesis seriously lacks explanatory power.

From the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, the major countries of Western Europe—England, Holland, France, and Spain—can be viewed as a single entity in terms of overall economic growth. Population and output rose in all until the early fourteenth century when famine and then plague caused population and production to decline for over a century. Again in the sixteenth century there exist clear indications of a general expansion of population and output levels. In the seventeenth century, however, this uniform pattern is broken. Holland and England continue to expand; France falls relatively behind; and Spain absolutely declines. A simple Malthusian model appears to go far in explaining the general contours of the pre-seventeenth-century growth pattern. The differential pattern of the seventeenth century, however, has proven less amenable to unique explanation. This paper will not provide a unique explanation of the seventeenth-century growth pattern. It will, however, attempt to focus the search for such an explanation by arguing that the source of the differential growth lay in a single sector of the economies under discussion. Specifically, it will be argued that given the relatively constant technology of the period, growth, both extensive and intensive, can be explained by population increase in conjunction with economies of scale; that the source of the economies of scale lay in the transactions sectors of the economies under study; that only England and Holland had institutional structures that allowed the population growth beginning in the sixteenth century to give rise to large market areas and thereby allow realization of the economies of scale inherent in the transactions sector; and that the productivity increases brought about through realization of these economies of scale made it possible for Holland and England in the seventeenth century to support continued population increase and to evidence an increasing standard of living. This explanation of growth will necessarily remain incomplete because no attempt will be made to explain why Crown policies, and therefore institutional structures, differed between the countries.

Gregory Clark argued in A Farewell to Alms that preindustrial societies, including England, were Malthusian. Day wages show incomes were trendless: as high in Europe in the medieval era as in 1800, even in England. The opposed view is that England and the Netherlands grew substantially from 1200 to 1800. Early day wages overestimate living standards. Here we show that preindustrial farm employment shares can be estimated from probate occupation reports. These imply only 60 percent employed in farming in England in 1560–1579 and 1653–1660, consistent with the high incomes indicated by wages. Day wages do measure preindustrial living standards.

While definitions of terms must vary with the purposes of their use, several studies of American entrepreneurship might be started with the word entrepreneur confined to those business executives who are associated with (a) the organization of new business units, (b) substantial expansions of established units, and (c) strenuous efforts to adapt established units to a changing environment. Such a conception, which uses terms that would obviously have to be made more precise as a study progressed, excludes from the term entrepreneur those business executives who carry on more or less routine operations, and it directs attention to the dynamic activities of businessmen. It is a little broader than a strict interpretation of the term innovator and fits fairly well the idea implicit in many definitions of the term entrepreneur, namely, that the entrepreneur is the businessman who introduces new ideas and changes the rate at which the wheels of enterprise go ‘round. Moreover, it utilizes three types of business activity concerning which there are data available for studies of the policy-determining executive. I should perhaps add that those who attempt to organize, expand, or adapt business units should be called entrepreneurs as well as those who achieve these goals. Attempts often reveal new ideas that successors are able to put into operation.

The railroads in the American West were constructed in a few concentrated building booms. This timing of construction resulted from the alternate creation and collapse of imperfect property rights to rights of way in partially settled areas. These “property rights” arose from strategic behavior within the railroad oligopoly. When enforcement costs of cooperative action were low, the railroads were able to create rents by avoiding construction ahead of demand. When enforcement became difficult, however, construction was the only way to capture rents on unbuilt lines so a construction boom ensued.

The return of growth theory to center stage in mainstream economics provides opportunities for historians to reconsider the forces shaping longer-term economic development. A key motivation for developing new growth modeling strategies lay in the desire to reestablish contact between theory and the empirics of economic growth. By postulating diminishing returns to capital, the traditional neoclassical paradigm precludes the sustaining of per capita growth in the absence of exogenous technological progress. Since historical records of economic development offer scant evidence for declining per capita growth, disenchantment grew with a theoretical perspective that leaves the crucial part of the empirical record unexplained, prompting a search for alternative modeling strategies.

This article proposes a unified framework for studying the greenback-gold price during the U.S. suspension of convertibility from 1862 to 1879.The gold price is viewed as a floating exchange rate, with a fixed destination given by gold standard parity because of the prospect of resumption. This perspective is tested using daily data for the entire period, and the effect of news during and after the Civil War is measured. New evidence of a decline in the volatility of gold returns after the Resumption Act of 1875 provides statistical support for the importance of expectations of resumption.

Critics who doubt the sources and meaning of some four inches of catch-up growth claim that market-based distortions created by slave traders biased measured heights of children and adolescents. Here we analyze this possible bias using a new database of all slave manifests available at the National Archives. Employing procedures to match names of shippers with known or suspected professional traders, we find that biases in height by age due to trader selectivity were negligible relative to the four inches of catch-up growth.

This note contrasts the familial origins of 136 Jewish American entrepreneurs with those of 187 American non-Jewish entrepreneurs described in a previous study of mine. Information on both groups was drawn from published biographies. In addition, manuscript biographies were used to gather information on Jewish entrepreneurs.

Prevailing theory regards subsistence or pastoral agriculture as a prerequisite for the spread of proto-industry. Commercial agriculture and proto-industrialization are viewed as incompatible. The expansion of the cotton industry in the pays de Caux, a fertile cereal-producing region in Normandy, contradicts the theory and indicates that seasonal unemployment and landleness, not subsistence agriculture, were the distinguishing features of proto-industrial regions. When these regions were located near market towns, the peasants' need for off-season work complemented the growing demand of eighteenth-century merchants for a large labor supply and determined the location of proto-industries.

This article surveys the history of tourism in America from colonial times to World War II. In that time there were substantial increases in the numbers of tourists, in the extent to which middle-income classes participated, and in the number and type of tourist destinations; but most of that growth may have been confined to the period after World War I. The growth of income and reduced costs of travel no doubt explain most of the growth, but some cultural factors helped to shift out the demand curve. The industry also possesses characteristics that should make further study of interest to economic historians. “I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind.”Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, p. 488.Mark Twain

This article proposes to do three things: to test for and date the emergence and integration of regional farm labor markets in Massachusetts; to demonstrate their growth consequences for the preindustrial economy; and to present new wage and labor productivity indices for the agricultural economy of Massachusetts from 1750 to 1855. Together with my previous studies it makes the case that the economy of rural Massachusetts was transformed by and under the subtle dominion of commodity, capital, and labor markets, the simultaneous emergence of which by 1800 is observed in the behavior of relevant prices and ratified in the growth of labor productivity.

Prior to the Civil War in the United States much of the economic development of the country was financed by means of European credit, extended for both short and long terms. The flow of capital was chiefly from England and considerable Continental capital moved through England to the United States. A few firms in England were the chief instruments in this process of financing American trade and marketing American securities. These Anglo-American merchant bankers are the subject of this paper.

Since its publication in 1949 Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has been received as a major addition to the literature of early modern history. In France, the excitement over this eleven-hundred-page work has centered on what would appear to be its revolutionary innovations in historical method. Lucien Febvre, for example, in an article in the Revue historique, after describing the book as more than a “perfect work of an historian with a profound grasp of his métier” and even more than a “professional masterpiece,” declared that the book introduces a revolution in the mode of conceiving history. “It marks,” said Febvre, “the dawn of a new time, of that I am certain.” His article concluded with this charge to youth: “Read, re-read, and meditate on this excellent book. … Make it your companion. What you will learn of things, new to you, about the world of the sixteenth century is incalculable. But what you will learn simply about man, about his history and about history itself, its true nature, its methods and its purposes—you cannot imagine in advance.” Braudel himself devoted an article in the Revue économique to elaborating the method used in his book and presented it to economic historians for their consideration.

Based on a large sample from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the long-term private credit market in Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and analyzes how it was affected by government-caused redistribution. It estimates the level of private indebtedness from 1662 to 1789, explains the problems the credit market faced, and determines who profited and who lost when government defaults, banking reforms, and currency manipulations struck private borrowers and lenders. It concludes by accounting for the expansion of the credit market in the last half of the eighteenth century.