In the second half of the nineteenth century, the patent office of the German state Wuerttemberg strategically discriminated against foreign inventors by charging comparatively high patent fees. We show that this administrative practice was driven by fiscal and protectionist motives.

It is a great honor, deeply appreciated, to be chosen first president of the Economic History Association. I cannot pretend to act as spokesman for this newly organized scientific group. I assume that I owe my present honor and responsibility partly to the number of years I have imperfectly taught economic history—and, I hope, stimulated some interest in it—and partly to your recognition of the principle of historical continuity. For I was a student under Schmoller at Berlin; he in turn was a pupil of Roscher (whose last lectures at Leipsic I heard); and Roscher, almost a century ago, was one of the first historical economists and the original formulator of a program for the new “school” of economics. I wish to recall to your attention these beginnings of our discipline in order to emphasize how the subsequent shift in its development has made us economic historians instead of historical economists.

The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism. We use new data on local governments, or “Native Authorities,” to present the first quantitative comparison of African institutions under indirect rule in four colonies in 1948: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland, and Kenya. Tax data show that Native Authorities’ capacity varied within and between colonies, due to both underlying economic inequalities and African elites’ relations with the colonial government. Our findings suggest that Africans had a bigger hand in shaping British colonial institutions than often acknowledged.

The Nazis dealt rather cautiously with the German monetary system during die first two years of dieir regime. Hitler was particularly sensitive to questions of “confidence,” and was glad to saddle Schacht with the responsibility of keeping die monetary system from blowing up in die face of die new government. But by the end of 1934, diere were signs that the Nazis were beginning to take Germany out of die stream of what Goering contemptuously called “the so-called free play of economic forces.”

Tenant-right, or a tenant's right to sell his holding, was one of the most puzzling institutions of nineteenth-century Irish land tenure. Historians have argued that the institution reflects the tenants' assertions of a proprietary interest in the land, an assertion often backed up by threats and violence. In this article we argue that landlords respected tenant-right because they could profit from the instistution. Our model reflects comments by contemporaries and explains that tenant-right functioned as a bond aganist nonpayment of rent and was part of a rational landlord's income-maximizing strategy.

We study a period of Javanese history when the consumption of opium was legal, but the supply of it was undergoing substantial institutional transformation. Through most of the nineteenth century the opium trade was organized into a system of “revenue farms,” which were privately owned local monopolies that bought raw opium from the government, refined it, and sold it to consumers. After 1893 this system was replaced by a government monopoly, the so-called opium regie, which controlled importation, refining, and retailing. Our main conclusion is that this change in policy substantially reduced opium consumption.

The major purpose of this paper is to call attention to an article by Keynes (1937) published in Eugenics Review the year following the publication of the General Theory, and which has been neglected in the literature on Keynes. The emphasis in the General Theory is on the short-run with given resources and a given state of technology. In his Eugenics Review article, Keynes examined the effects of a changing population upon savings and investment and the level of income and employment. He was thereby led on to an approach nearer to what might be regarded as growth theory than that of the General Theory. In this sense, Keynes' 1937 article may be viewed as supplementing the General Theory.

Underemployment in LDCs has been spreading from its rural habitat to envelop the cities. Demographic growth has been a major cause in many LDCs, but the prevalence of the phenomenon in LDCs experiencing rapid industrial growth since World War II has also focused attention on the sluggish growth of industrial employment and on the industrial technologies employed. Since new technology has been almost entirely of foreign design, a central dispute has been whether declining industrial labor coefficients reflect primarily faults in the selection mechanisms governing the choice of industrial techniques, or whether labor-saving trends inherent in advanced country technology are reducing the feasible range of choice for industrializing LDCs.

The West Main Cree of northern Ontario adapted readily but selectively to the European technologies and institutions made available by the fur trade. Yet some basic cultural and psychological differences regarding the accumulation of wealth, attitudes to work, and dependence on relief and government transfers complicated Indian-European relations. In a rational attempt to compromise among today's complex choices, the Cree have abandoned their traditional bush pursuits for village life and wage employment, with hunting and trapping reduced to part-time or recreational activities.

The cost of fencing the farm was a topic of constant discussion and complaint in American agricultural circles in the second half of the nineteenth century This prosaic topic appeared continually during the period 1850 to 1880 in agricultural journals, state agricultural bulletins, and annual reports of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture.

The relative position of the Chesapeake in the economy of the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution is a matter of some ambiguity. On the one hand, we are traditionally taught to view Virginia and Maryland as somewhat backward compared to their northern neighbors, particularly in their lack of large towns and of those forms of a centralized market economy commonly based upon urban commercial centers. On the other hand, simple quantitative measurement seems to indicate that they were among the most highly developed of the colonies. Virginia was the most populous of all, and even Maryland had more inhabitants than New York. If between them they were to account for about 30 per cent of the population of the thirteen colonies on the eve of the Revolution, they were even more strikingly to account for close to 50 percent of colonial exports to England. If we add in oft-neglected Scotland as a recipient, then the Chesapeake's share of exports to Great Britain passes 60 per cent. If we had chosen to make our measurements as of a generation earlier, then the Chesapeake's share of colonial exports would have been even higher.

National, state, and individual-level data are used to explore the implications of the crowding of educated women into the teaching profession in nineteenth-century America. It is found that the more young women attended school, the lower were teacher wages and the price of educational services. Through this mechanism young women paid for their own education and, by lowering the price of educational services, helped America develop the best-educated population in the world by the century's end.

State-level estimates of income shares for the top one and five percent of the population are presented for 1929, 1933, and 1939. Significant cross-sectional variation is found in 1929, but the range narrows as the shares fall dramatically to 1933. Analysis indicates that property incomes influence the shares but provides little evidence of a tradeoff between per capita income and inequality as measured by the shares.

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century.

This paper studies the evolution of mate preferences throughout the twentieth century in France. I digitized all the matrimonial ads published in France’s best-selling monthly magazine from 1928 to 1994. Using dictionary-based methods, I show that mate preferences were mostly stable during the Great Depression, WWII, and the ensuing economic boom. These preferences started transforming in the late 1960s when economic criteria were progressively replaced by personality criteria. The timing coincides with profound family and demographic changes in French society. These findings suggest that, in the search for a long-term partner, non-material needs have replaced material ones.

In the Netherlands a kind of urban system emerged very early in the sea provinces, but inland the country cities functioned as regional capitals without many links to cities outside their regions. After 1800 political and economic unification accelerated and the peripheral towns lost their independence. Using two indicators—the division of labor and migration—the article analyzes how this process of integration took shape after 1850.