This paper offers a new interpretation of Canadian Prairie settlement during the “wheat boom” period. Rather than use a Nerlovian model on which most recent work has been based, I develop a method of simulating the extension of the feasible region of cultivation: the area on which farming is profitable. The model is applied to a wheat-growing district of Saskatchewan that experienced rapid settlement from 1898 to 1911. Comparisons of the actual area of cultivation with the simulated feasible region indicate that settlers responded quickly to changes in the profitability of wheat farming. I also find that the extension of rail lines and the increase in mean wheat yields accounts for nearly all of the increase in the feasible region.

A Weakness often apparent in interpretations of economic history lies in failure to evaluate properly the factor of relative location and the mechanism of cultural diffusion through which it operates to affect the changing character of regions. In studies of the historical geography of New Zealand, for example, extant interpretations have both emphasized an almost teleological view of unilinear cultural descent and shown a strong tendency toward environmental determinism. Neither of these philosophies or approaches in the writing of history has proved satisfactory in itself, but, taken together (antithetical though they may seem), they have provided a deceptively simple interpretive base upon which there has been almost universal reliance.

Most students of Jacksonian America are familiar with the Locofocos of New York through the interesting and informative history of the party which its secretary, Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, published in 1842. But Byrdsall himself was primarily interested in the antimonopoly features of his party's program, and therefore his history all but ignores the even more significant monetary policy of the Locofocos. At the present time in historical writing, it is fashionable to emphasize the role played by the Jacksonian movement as a whole in liberating the expanding American economy from the fetters of a dying mercantilistic approach to business enterprise. There is much to be said for such an interpretation. But the Jacksonians faced toward many meccas, and one of the most articulate and widely known groups which rallied around the Jackson standard—the Locofocos—cannot be trimmed to this pattern.

This article examines the establishment in the 1830s of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company and the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. Utilizing manuscript letters, company records, and government reports, the author contends that conservative financiers, exemplified by Isaac and Arthur Bronson of New York City, structured both firms in an effort to reform the speculative practices of commercial banks and to move capital into the agricultural sector, particularly in the West. The trust company's development also marked an important step in the financiers search for more efficient methods of capital mobilization and formation.

This paper reexamines the well-known increase in cotton production in the postbellum American South, revealing a rather less well understood pattern. The shift to cotton was confined to the Piedmont area of Georgia and South Carolina; it was not a phenomenon of the entire South. The changes in cotton production between 1860 and 1880 followed patterns quite different from those shown in an analysis of 1880 alone. And the 1880 pattern is best explained by the racial composition of the inhabitants, as noted originally by DeCanio, not the tenure variables emphasized in much of the existing literature.

I test the hypothesis advanced by Richard Easterlin and others that the importation of modern technology and prospects for economic development in the Third World are principally a function of the local population's formal schooling. According to orthodoxy, manufacturing more than any other sector should repay investment in human capital. Yet the correlation of schooling with the manufacturing sector is much lower than with the mineral sector, an enclave in colonial economies and a symbol of underdevelopment.

Comparing the dating of turning points of fertility with real wage trends for the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Wrigley and Schofield reported that an average of 50 years elapsed between changes in real wages and in fertility. Using a formal statistical procedure, it is shown that over these three centuries the average lag length was closer to 16 years. With eighteenth-century regional wage data the estimates of average lag length range between 12 and 16 years.

The paper presents an estimate of the limits to British economic growth in the period 1870–1914. It is argued that in contrast to the historical experience, vigorous and effective exploitation of the technological possibiites of the period would have required the relative expansion of some sectors—most of which, like engineering, were growing in relative size in any case—and the relative contraction of others. The conservatively estimated gains from such counterfactual sectoral shifts of economic activity were found to be of the order of 25 percent to 50 percent of British GNP in 1913. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why opportunities of this magnitude were not seized.

The power loom, which had almost completely replaced the hand loom in America by 1860, remained the center of continuous technical development until about 1880. The main effects of the improvements were to increase the speed at which the looms could be operated and to decrease the amount of attention a weaver had to devote to a single loom. Estimates of plain looms tended by one weaver range from four to twelve; six is the most frequently cited figure, based upon the census report for 1880. The number of looms a weaver could tend was limited because of the frequent need—at least once every eight minutes, or about one hundred times a day—for him to stop the loom to place a new bobbin of yarn in the shuttle. With the number of looms per weaver set at about six and allowing for certain improvements in carding and spinning, weaving costs formed at least half of the total labor cost of manufacturing textile fabric.

Will technical change spur conflicts in the labor market? In this study, we examine electricity adoption in Sweden during the first decades of the twentieth century. Exploiting that proximity to hydropowered plants shaped the electricity network independently of previous local conditions, we estimate the impact of electricity on labor strikes. Our results indicate that electricity adoption preceded an increase in conflicts, but strikes were of an offensive nature and most common in sectors with increasing labor demand. This suggests that electrification provided workers with a stronger bargaining position from which they could voice their claims.

In october 1959 a small group of scholars met under the auspices of the University of Chicago's Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change to discuss problems of research in Asian economic history. Papers prepared by two participants explored work already done in Indian economic history. It was felt that these two papers might be useful to others, those concerned with Indian economic history and those interested in comparative analysis.

It will perhaps clarify the remarks that follow if we observe at the outset that the economic history of Latin America is in its infancy. This is not to say that the development of economic institutions, the operation of economic systems, the formation and growth of economic activities and attitudes, and the formulation and execution of economic policy have gone unnoticed in the history of Latin America. It is only to state that the formal discipline of economic history, even the use of economic history as part of a title, are of recent date. As in the historiography of most areas of the world, political developments and personalities in Latin America have constituted the core of historiography, and even today the “new” interdisciplinary history of half a century ago in the United States or the more recent French school of “total” history have drawn few adherents to Latin America. Many factors may be adduced to explain the delayed interest in economic history, but one may hazard the guess that there is a positive correlation between the degree of criticism of the nature and function of an economy and both the quantity and quality of economic historiography. At least in the United States, economic history owes no small debt to a muck-raking tradition. In Latin America, on the contrary, the nature of the literate elite and the limits on education have tended to stifle until recently the development of a body of economic literature of protest and, by extension, of economic history.

Numerous empirical studies indicate that, as a result of rent-seeking behavior, public-sector workers are overcompensated relative to their private-sector counterparts, with pensions representing part of the difference. I present a history of the Federal Employees Retirement Act of 1920 and show that rent seeking by federal workers cannot explain several features of the act. Instead, I argue that the act represented an optimal incentive contract between Congress and civil service employees in which civil servants accepted mandatory retirement and a compensating wage differential in exchange for the federal pension plan.

In a recent issue of this Journal North and Thomas outlined a model of the rise and fall of the manorial system, with special reference to England. Unfortunately, their model contains a number of inaccuracies which weaken quite seriously its applicability. The propositions of the model are based upon a confusion of terms and an oversight of authorities, both of which have led to a questionable factual and theoretical interpretation. In the following paragraphs an attempt will be made to elaborate upon these criticisms, and to suggest an alternative approach.

The discussion of the social character of the English revolution is carried on at present largely in terms of the well-known controversy over the gentry. The debate which has been conducted has undoubtedly been welcomed by all historians as a valuable stimulus to think afresh and more deeply about the seventeenth century. But the preoccupation with the gentry, instructive as it has been, has also had its disadvantages, for it has served, I think, to obscure how much a general judgment on the social origin and development of the revolution depends on a knowledge of many other topics besides those to which R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, and H. R. Trevor-Roper have drawn to our attention.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

This article uses the history of the Whiskey Trust to explore the competitive effects of vertical restraints such as exclusive dealing. The Whiskey Trust distilled alcoholic spirits and bribed distributors not to carry competing brands of spirits. For the Whiskey Trust, exclusive dealing was an ineffective predatory strategy. Despite the trust's market dominance and manifold predatory strategies, it failed to preempt entry. The trust failed, in part, because its rivals could vertically integrate at low cost. Competition disciplined the trust more effectively than did numerous antitrust suits.

Jules Michelet remarked that the forms of association “must differ … among the different countries, according to the diversity of national genius.” and Denis W. Brogan once said (he is surely one who does not merit the reproach): “Because we have studied only France, we have not understood even France.” The second remark might apply to the United States, too. There has been talk of the value of comparative study of labor movements, but comparatively little application of comparative methods to labor history. A comparison of the history of association in labor unions in France and the United States may therefore throw a little more light on the “national genius” of each country as well as on die behavior of each labor movement.