I use new evidence from servant contracts, 1610–1890, to estimate male farm wages and the length of the work year in Japan. I show Japanese laborers were surprisingly poor and could only sustain 2–3 adults relative to 7 adults for the English. Japanese wages were the lowest among pre-industrial societies and this was driven by Malthusian population pressures. I also estimate the work year and find peasants worked 325 days a year by 1700, predating the “industrious” revolution in Europe. The findings imply Japan had a distinct labor-intensive path to industrialization, utilizing cheap labor over a long work year.

Little more than a century ago India rubber was a curiosity. Today, it is vital to our existence. The purpose here is to examine the basic factors that have influenced the growth of the rubber industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. The method chosen is to review the industry's position before and after the introduction of the automobile, say at 1900 and 1950. Much of what is to be said might be compressed into current economic terminology. Neither disrespect for this procedure nor the inapplicability of many of its concepts to economic history has prevented this course from being adopted.

Much of the confusion in the debate on slavery and technology derives from the belief that identifies technological change with progress. Not only the Awkwrights and Seniors thought this way; Marx and, from what I have heard from my colleagues at this conference, a fair proportion of economic historians maintain that the salvation of society depends upon changes in the techniques of production.

Thomas Jefferson believed that political democracy could be maintained in the United States only if it were made to rest on the firm foundation of economic democracy. “The small landowners are the most precious part of the State,” he said, contrasting this ideal economy with a congested population in urban centers which would, he feared, threaten democracy because it would be subject to control by agitators and demagogues. He urged the adoption of a policy of cheap land that would attract laborers from abroad and from the eastern cities to the newly developing areas of the West and the South. Thus he proposed to create a nation of farm owners who would be the very warp and woof of democracy.

This article uses data from Major League Baseball's integration to identify the sources and magnitude of labor market discrimination. Returns to hiring black workers in this industry were high, and the industry's labor supply was uniquely suited for rapid integration, yet integration evolved slowly. Many explanations for this sluggishness are considered, including both taste-based and statistical discrimination. Ultimately, only owner and collective coworker discrimination can explain baseball's slow pace of integration. The estimated levels of discrimination are high, showing the median team sacrificed profits of nearly $2.2 million in 1950 dollars (over $19 million 2010 dollars) by delaying integration.

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the Early Modern period has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” Using a new time series of nobility cases I provide the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that the tax exemptions cannot alone explain the flight to privilege. My data show that the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments. Although ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence linking it to economic stagnation in Spain.

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

The problem to which this paper addresses itself may be posed as follows: What part in bringing about the phenomenally rapid industrial growth of Germany between about 1890 and 1914 was played by governmental activities; what part was played by the private enterprise of businessmen; and what was the relative importance of each?

This study examines the interplay between financial crises, uncertainty, and economic growth during the interwar period. Comparing the experiences of ten countries, we provide evidence that reductions in the credibility of a country's commitment to the gold standard generated capital flight and higher interest rate volatility. This volatility, in turn, was inversely correlated with economic growth. These results suggest that financial crises helped propagate the Great Depression, in part, by increasing uncertainty.

A meeting of historians on “Colonialism and Colonization” certainly raises a terminological problem. Colonization is a great and old subject of historical study. The word “colonialism,” on the contrary, seems to me to have come to us from the international rostrums where diplomats and propagandists wage the psychological wars of today; and to my taste it has that Basic English quality of an international vocabulary ready-made for simultaneous translation, where the suggestive power of words is in inverse relation to their accuracy. In its current use it seems to be a synonym of imperialism or, more generally, of domination of one country by another, or by the rulers of another country. But imperialism, at least, says what it means: the policy of building and holding together an empire, a unit of domination which transcends the national state. Foreign domination is a self-defining expression apt to describe all degrees of dependency, from straight political and military to economic or even cultural ones. What, then, is the use of forging yet another term?

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.

Lombardy underwent an agricultural revolution (and a connected process of general economic growth) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The basis for this transformation was a series of fundamental institutional changes. These latter—consisting most importantly of the transfer of control over the land into new hands—must in turn be attributed essentially to the policies of the Visconti and Sforza dukes who, through direct or indirect means, encouraged, initiated, facilitated, and acquiesced in the processes by which the change took place.

I study the changing role of the banknote market in interregional financial arrangements of the antebellum American economy, using the Old Northwest as a case study. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the cyclical behavior of the banknote market, I conclude that the role of the banknote market in interregional balance of payments adjustments declined as the Old Northwest became more closely integrated into the external financial system.

Some of the factors which influenced the international diffusion of the Gramme dynamo, the Edison dynamo, the revolvingfield alternator and the Alexanderson alternator will be examined in this paper. The selection of a few specific power generators as diffusant tracers represents a methodological compromise within a technological continuum bounded by a single invention such as a new armature winding and a complete power system such as Edison's. Each of the selected machines possessed a distinctive morphology so that the adaptations or mutations which may occur when the machine is introduced into a new national environment can be easily recognized.

This paper brings together the existing commercial bank balance sheets for New England for the period 1785–1837. Approximately 79 percent of all balance sheets issued have been found, and data from these are presented in aggregated form. Data compiled from available statements were then used to estimate the balance sheets of missing banks and the missing items on individual balance sheets. The variables used in estimating included authorized capital stock, a time trend, age of bank, city population, paid-in capital, deposits, loans and discounts, bank notes in circulation, and reserves. The actual and estimated balance sheets are then combined and presented.

In 1747 the colony of Maryland enacted a law to improve the general quality of tobacco exports. Tobacco prices rose significantly after the law went into effect, while total tobacco exports continued to increase. The widespread use of tobacco as money, coupled with the exchange of inspection notes for tobacco at inspection sites, led to changes in the Maryland money supply due to the law. Transaction costs fell as a result of marketing all Maryland tobacco through inspection warehouses. The law also appears to have accelerated the trend toward diversification of the economy.

Twenty years ago Professor Frederic C. Lane recognized the close connection between economics and political history and suggested that it is impossible to understand fully the first without some understanding of the second. Relatively little work has been done in that area over the ensuing two decades. In that period both social and political historians have become more quantitative, and although their work has permitted us to discuss some alleged explanations of social and political development, it has not really produced viable alternatives. This failure is linked with the theoretical nature of the analysis. Although there does not appear to be a useful body of theory in sociology, positive political science offers such a structure for our understanding of political history.