Written history abounds with colorful generalizations which can often be regarded as immovable and undying monuments to the truth. Stately, memorable, unself-conscious, their smooth surfaces and clean lines are unmarred by the asymmetry of qualification. Particularly impressive are those memorials which stand majestically on pedestals of aggregate quantitative evidence. Decomposition is then akin to deformation; iconoclasm becomes a species of philistinism. Nonetheless, although history may be considered a type of art, it is not pop art. The melancholy task of critical destruction is part of the historian's mandate.

From its beginning the Quebec dairy industry was characterized by many small factories producing butter and cheese of such a low quality that the British called all bad cheese coming from Canada “Joseph.” The Société d'industrie laitière, created in 1882 to promote the industry, asked the government to impose compulsory inspection, licensing, and grading. Between 1905 and 1921 the government finally but reluctantly responded.

Few economic historians have addressed the impact of poor health on economic productivity.1 This relationship, neglected and poorly understood, is the subject of my dissertation. Specifically, the dissertation examines the effect of a chronic debilitating disease on agricultural productivity in the American South between 1860 and 1940. As is well known, per capita gross agricultural output dropped sharply during the Civil War decade and remained low until 1910. Contrary to what one would expect, between 1870 and 1910 agricultural output was lowest in sandy soil regions and highest in regions composed mostly of clay soil. A rapid expansion of per capita agricultural output occurred after 1910. The income decline of the Civil War decade and subsequent increase of the post-1910 era were also related to soil region, with the greatest income swing occurring in sandy soil regions.

The boll weevil's impact on southern agriculture poses a dilemma. Micro-level evidence suggests the weevil triggered a transition out of cotton, but macro-level indicators fail to register much long-term impact. Econometric simulation of boll weevil impact—taking into account the low demand elasticity for southern cotton, differences between states in the timing and levels of infestation, and long-term supply and demand shifts independent of the weevil—shows that the two sets of evidence are not inconsistent.

The Upcountry of the Lower South was located on the periphery of the antebellum cotton economy, but some of its subregions were integrated into the market system in the 1850s. An analysis of sample counties in the Georgia Upcountry demonstrates that the spread of market production into the western half of the region depended on local development which created opportunities for diversified market production and increased household wealth through capital gains on improvements. The absence of market development in the eastern half of the region, in contrast, limited the wealth of farm households, reinforcing their economic isolation.

Kikuchi and Hayami found that irrigation investments were undertaken in East and Southeast Asia when the costs of increasing output through irrigating were lower than through bringing more land under cultivation. In Thailand, however, despite the lower costs of irrigation, the investments were postponed for several decades. The delay was due to a divergence between national security and economic development goals and to a conflict of private versus public interests. The results highlight the importance of the returns to decision makers in determining the amount and timing of public investments.

The rapid development of the nationwide telephone network following the expiration of the Bell patents in 1894, along with expansion of private wire telegraph networks, created the “nerve center” necessary for rapid growth in the decentralized, dealer-intermediated, over-the-counter security markets. Using membership roles from the National Quotation Bureau—the predecessor of the NASDAQ—I link growth in the number of dealers to the expansion of these communication networks prior to World War I. Moreover, trading activity on the organized stock exchanges fell during this period, suggesting that these technologies provided a competitive advantage to the over-the-counter markets.

This article uses the Bateman-Weiss samples of manufacturing firms from 1850 and 1860 to estimate the labor and total factor productivity of southern and midwestern manufacturing industries in the late antebellum period. The results indicate rapid growth in productivity, especially in the South. The article also demonstrates a positive association between measured productivity, firm size, and urbanization. Differences in manufacturing performance between the South and the Midwest are shown to be crucially dependent on the extent of markets within the two regions.

Previous studies explain the extension of royal power in fifteenth-century France by the professionalization of military combat or by the commercialization of economic activity. Neither approach can account for the turnaround in Charles VII's fortunes between 1435 and 1445. Using Lösch's model of spatial competition to examine the determinants of state borders, we suggest that the key factor in the formation of the French hexagon was an innovation in artillery projectiles that increased military scale economies. A reduction in state economic intervention apparently accompanied this development rather than the increase suggested elsewhere.

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

The mainstream of Russian historiographical studies holds that at the turn of the century peasant economic conditions were in a state of near collapse. In one of the poorest parts of the empire three measures of that economic impoverishment were seriously in error: draft animals were incompletely inventoried, and the meanings of both land leasing and fallow reductions were misinterpreted. These methodological errors have systematically distorted prevailing discussions about the wealth and poverty of peasant farms in Voronezh. Accumulating evidence is beginning to suggest reopening the question of the severity of the Russian “agrarian crisis” on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

I'm honored by this assignment: partly because I think after-dinner speeches are a necessary combination of regularizer and tranquilizer; also because it is a pleasure to share in our silver jubilee before silver vanishes from circulation. I wonder what the Association will do when the golden jubilee comes round. But the last two words of the title were not of my choosing, and when the program came I had to consult my dictionary. There I learned that “to evaluate” means “to ascertain the numerical value of”—which suggests I am to talk in digits. As for “reflective,” the good book says “throwing back images, light, etc., as in a mirror.” Of late years, since I gave up using a hairbrush and took to an electric razor, I haven't done much looking into mirrors; and when I do so my bifocals compel me to stand so close that the view is limited in area or to move far back and thereby get width and depth of vision.

The first order of business for the new Congress under the Constitution of 1787 was raising revenue to fund the government's operation and to service the public debt. On 8 April 1789, two days after the first Congress achieved a quorum, James Madison introduced a proposal to levy duties on imported goods. This tariff proposal became one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Congress and was signed by President George Washington on 4 July 1789.The author thanks the National Science Foundation for providing partial research support.

This paper shows that the best practice of American methods for producing iron in 1890 was slightly better than the methods employed in Great Britain. It argues that the difference in technique was not of sufficient magnitude to have any bearing on Britain's “decline” as an industrial power. Profits in America are shown to be quite large, and it is hypothesized that these profits arose because the Americans did not anticipate the growth in the demand for pig iron.

Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine was a poor and backward economy. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is accordingly often considered the classic example of Malthusian population economics in action. However, unlike most historical famines, the Great Famine was not the product of a harvest shortfall, but of a major ecological disaster. Because there could be no return to the status quo ante, textbook famine relief in the form of public works or food aid was not enough. Fortunately, in an era of open borders mass emigration helped contain excess mortality, subject to the limitation that the very poorest could not afford to leave. In general, the authorities did not countenance publicly assisted migration. This article discusses the lessons to be learned from two exceptional schemes for assisting destitute emigrants during and in the wake of the famine.

During the winter of 1867–1868 readers of Le Temps were entertained by a series of articles on the municipal finances of Paris by one of the paper's sharp-tongued contributors, the republican deputy Jules Ferry. The substance of the articles was not original, nor were they the most revealing of the many publications on the subject that appeared during the ‘sixties, but they were cutting and witty, and in 1868 Ferry republished diem as a booklet with an arresting title, The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann. (Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann was a pun on Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, a play presented at the Odéon in 1851 and later set to Offenbach's music.) When more analytical studies were forgotten, Ferry's work was remembered. The title found its way into popular histories, and for most people, Baron Haussmann's financing of the rebuilding of Paris is still something seen darkly through the glass of Ferry's political pamphlet.

This paper deals with the relationship between tonnage capacity and utilization of the Erie, Welland and St. Lawrence River canals before 1850. Estimates are presented for the capacities of the canals, as built and modified. Comparison with the actual tonnage carried eastward for selected years shows that the British canals were grossly and increasingly underutilized, while the Erie's utilization was closely correlated with its capability, particularly through its eastern half. Reasons for this situation are given and it is argued that had British funds been redirected away from canal enlargement and applied to the construction of vessels and harbor facilities, the British might have entered upon a prosperous carrying trade within North America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

This paper offers the hypothesis that the development of the textile industry in the South was shaped by the fact that by 1870 most experienced workers lived in the Piedmont. Thus, a firm which wished to hire experienced workers would have been led to choose the Piedmont; similarly, mills producing more difficult finer count cloth would have chosen the Piedmont in order to hire experienced workers. Finally, the persistence of a virtually all white workforce may be explained by the fact that most experienced workers were white and would have resisted working in integrated mills.