Turnpike trusts were private organizations that financed road improvements by levying tolls and issuing mortgage debt. They were established by Acts of Parliament throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. The acts transferred authority from parishes to a body of trustees, composed of local landowners and merchants. Parishes financed road improvements with local property taxes; but they could not levy tolls. This article uses a new data set to show that turnpike trusts increased road expenditure, rather than replacing existing or forthcoming parish expenditure. It also illustrates how institutional changes contributed to the process of economic development in England.

The Purpose of this article is to clarify some historical features of Brazilian economic development in order to gain some insight into the process of long-term growth. The recent extension of the principal macroeconomic time-series to 1920 and the publication of several specialized monographs provide the material for such an analysis. We will begin with a consideration of the timing of Brazilian industrialization and, more important, of the conditions in which it took place. Such a discussion is all the more necessary since it appears that some of the stock ideas concerning Brazilian economic development before 1939 require revision.

The railroads played an important role in the economic history of the United States. It was an epic role, involving enterprise on a grand scale, evoking heated passions, and rich in anecdote and drama.

The Near East was subject to many of the same fiscal and monetary forces that affected Europe and parts of Asia during the early modem era. For almost two decades during the seventeenth century, debased European coinage circulated widely in Ottoman markets at values far above their specie content. This article provides an explanation in terms of Ottoman fiscal deficits, currency instability, currency substitution, and decline in local silver mines all of which led to the closure of mints. The reasons behind the conspicuous absence of Ottoman copper coinage during this period are also explored.

This article challenges the traditional view of French industry—that small, inefficient family firms retarded France's economic growth—by examining data for the French textile and flour milling industries taken from the industry census of 1861–1865. The evidence suggests that the average size of French firms suited the economic and technological conditions of the day. The industries studied exhibit constant returns to scale over a wide output range. France would not seem likely to have gained much from larger firms. This is consistent with revisionist contentions that French industry was as rational as that of other nations.

Although the aggregate growth rate of the American economy was relatively slow between the Revolution and 1840, certain sectors did expand at a rapid rate, and from these sectors originated some of the factors responsible for the later dynamic growth of the whole system. One such sector involved the making of clocks. Never large by any measure, the clock industry was, nevertheless, a leader in the introduction of the system of interchangeable parts production and in the mass marketing of a “luxury” consumer good. The purpose of this article is to outline and to analyze the transformation of this activity from a craft to an industry and, in particular, to indicate the factors which influenced Eli Terry, the main entrepreneur of the transformation.

Official tax records and other documents provide the sources for an estimation of wool exports overtime. Four main points emerge: after a peak circa 1550, exports stagnated and declined for over a century before rising again strongly; political and economic developments in Spain and the rest of Europe affected both the volume and the direction of wool exports; most exports went to Flanders before 1550, then to Italy for a time, and finally to northern Europe again from about 1650 onward; and Spanish merchants controlled most of the trade until the mid- sixteenth century but lost dominance thereafter, retaining control only over the internal market supplying wool for export.

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

I suggest that converting economic history from a topic to a discipline requires three steps: economic theory and quantitative methodology must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good economic history; economic history and historical statistics must be relevant and necessary for writing and teaching good economic theory; and economic history must be relevant and required for writing and teaching good history. Over the past 50 years the first task has been accomplished and the second nearly so. The third task remains, but incorporating the life-cycle perspective into economic history would hasten its successsful completion.

If successful prediction were the sole criterion of the merit of a science, economics should long since have ceased to exist as a serious intellectual pursuit. Accurate prognosis is not its forte. The real strength of the discipline lies in another direction—namely, in its apparently limitless capacity to rationalize events after they happen. This helps explain the indifference of most economic theorists to “the lessons of history”; men to whom all things are possible have little to learn from experiments conducted in the laboratory of time. It also helps explain the indifference of most economic historians to abstract theory; what have they to learn from a subject that “yields no predictions, summarizes no empirical generalizations, provides no useful framework of analysis”?

It is extraordinary how little is known about the engineers who produced the water wheels, steam engines, textile and other machinery of the early Industrial Revolution. In most economic histories of this period there are merely a few brief and vague references to smiths, carpenters, and millwrights, based on Smiles or Fairbairn, with no contemporary evidence whatever. Most accounts of the development of mechanical engineering normally begin with Bramah and Maudslay, from about 1800, and carry on with such renowned nineteenth-century names as Fairbairn, Roberts, Whitworth, and Nasmyth. Before the nineteenth century, we are usually led to believe, mechanical engineering hardly existed. This belief is largely based on nineteenth-century evidence. William Fairbairn, for example, stated that when he first came to Manchester, in 1814, “the whole of the machinery was executed by hand. There were neither planing, slotting, nor shaping machines; and, with the exception of very imperfect lathes, and a few drills, the preparatory operations of construction were effected entirely by the hands of the workmen.” Similarly, the Select Committee on Exportation of Machinery reported in 1841 that “[machine] tools have introduced a revolution in machinery, and tool-making has become a distinct branch of mechanics, and a very important trade, although twenty years ago it was scarcely known.”

A novel series of interest rates paid by the Corporation of London shows that interest rates in London declined by 350 basis points during the seventeenth century. The decline followed a similar pattern in Europe. Records from the Corporation’s archive provide evidence for financial development: an increase in the number and volume of debt instruments, an increase in the number of lenders, and the development of a secondary market. Econometric analysis establishes that increasing the debt instruments’ liquidity contributed to the convergence of interest rates between London and Amsterdam.

We test for wage discrimination and occupational crowding in the nineteenthcentury American whaling industry. Although our results indicate little evidence of wage discrimination, we cannot reject the hypothesis that certain groups—specifically blacks and Portuguese–experienced some occupational crowding, though it was by no means complete and the minority-dominated occupations were not low-paying ones. In addition, we find that members of the majority group—white American and Northern European seamen—did accept a negative compensating wage differential for working with members of their own group.

The labor markets in the railroad industry went through extensive institutional changes between 1890 and 1945. Federal laws increased railroad employers' liability for workplace accidents in several stages. Unions expanded to cover more occupations. The federal government set railroad wages during World War I and then mediated and arbitrated a large number of collective bargaining disputes between 1920 and 1945. We examine how these changes in institutions affected compensating differentials for fatal and nonfatal accident risk. The increasing role of unionization and government intervention coincided with a decline in the size of compensating differentials.

In 1930, the West—for present purposes, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado—had a level of per capita income payments that stood at 79 per cent of the national figure. In that same year, the figure for the South—Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—was 51 per cent.

If problems of historical study are to be chosen on the basis of their importance in affecting the course of human affairs through time, no phase of life in Western culture during the century and a half after 1800 is more worthy of study than that of economic development. During these one hundred and fifty years there was an increment of total production within western Europe of an estimated 1,500 per cent and an increase of output per capita of some 500 per cent. At no time in history had an equal advance been made at such a rapid pace.

I present evidence that shocks to the Medieval English harvest persisted. Hypothesized mechanisms include varying supplies of seed corn and other complementary harvest inputs. Peasants are modeled as trading off current consumption against grain stores and sow rates so that subsistence-level shocks may persist. For my sample I find that a failed harvest increased the probability of subsequent harvest failure by 20–30 percent. Grain yields are analyzed as a strongly balanced panel by year, manor, and crop. While I reject the hypothesis that harvests were self-contained annual events, I caution against linking harvest persistence directly to runs in grain prices.

The 1858 discovery of crude oil in Ontario led to the development of a refining industry initially composed of many small firms. Ontario's refiners relied upon generous tariff protection in order to compete with cheaper, higher-quality imports. We apply a regime-switching model to the pattern of monthly wholesale prices to find the extent to which trade policy affected collusive efforts. Tariff protection encouraged collusion, but ease of entry resulted in frequent price wars. An 1877 downward revision in tariffs, while reducing the gains to collusion, also reduced the likelihood of entry and supported efforts to rationalize capacity.

Between 1880 and 1910, Japanese exports increased in volume, changed composition, and shifted from leading industrialized countries toward poorer Asian neighbors. Using a new dataset disaggregated by product and trade partner for the universe of Japanese exports, we find extensive margins accounted for 30 percent of export growth, with trade costs and market size associated with successful market entry. There was also considerable persistence in maintaining market presence and exit was rare. These stylized facts provide insight into both the country’s economic development, as reflected in its exported products, as well as the demand conditions of its trade partners.

Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This article introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first one-half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.