We examine the geography of cotton textiles in Britain in 1838 to test claims about why the industry came to be so heavily concentrated in Lancashire. Our analysis considers both first and second nature aspects of geography including the availability of water power, humidity, coal prices, market access, and sunk costs. We show that some of these characteristics have substantial explanatory power. Moreover, we exploit the change from water to steam power to show that the persistent effect of first nature characteristics on industry location can be explained by a combination of sunk costs and agglomeration effects.

We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing extremists in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered was not simply growth at the time of the election, but cumulative growth performance. The impact was greatest in countries with relatively short histories of democracy, with electoral systems that created low hurdles to parliamentary representation, and which had been on the losing side in World War I.

The spinning jenny helps explain why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain rather than in France or India. Wages were exceptionally high relative to capital prices in Britain, so the jenny was profitable to use in Britain but not elsewhere. Since it was only profitable to use the jenny in Britain, that was the only country where it as worth incurring the costs of developing it. Irrespective of the quality of their institutions or the progressiveness of their cultures, neither the French nor the Indians would have found it profitable to mechanize cotton production in the eighteenth century.

The scholars of continental Europe have devoted much attention to the social consequences of rules and customs of inheritance, and there exists a large body of work on this subject by lawyers and agricultural historians. The purpose of this paper is to consider, in the light of this European evidence, the possible significance of such rules and customs for economic development in the nineteenth century.

Although white women have only recently entered the work force, their black counterparts have participated throughout American history. Differences between their rates of participation have been recorded only for the post-1890 period and analyzed only for the post-1940 period due to a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency my work explores female labor supply at the dawn of emanicipation, 1870 and 1880, in seven southern cities, using data drawn from the manuscripts of the population census. Probit regression techniques demonstrate that economic and demographic variables explain only part of the difference between black and white women and, as in the findings of contemporary research, race is shown to be an important factor. Several explanations are discussed, in particular one relying on socialization differences which are termed a “legacy of slavery.”

Standard treatments of U.S. agriculture assert that, before the 1930s, productivity growth was almost exclusively the result of mechanization rather than biological innovations. This article shows that U.S. wheat production witnessed wholesale changes in varieties and cultural practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without these changes, vast expanses of the wheat belt could not have sustained commercial production and yields everywhere would have plummeted due to the increasing severity of insects, diseases, and weeds. Revised estimates of Parker and Klein’s productivity calculations indicate that biological innovations contributed roughly half of labor-productivity growth between 1839 and 1909.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the various new or current approaches to economic history. In so doing I reluctantly use the now widely accepted terms “new” economic, or “econometric,” history considered by some authors as synonymous. In fact, however, there is both a broader and a narrower application of the phrase “new economic history.” In the broader sense, the term embraces the work of the various authors who have in common as their aim theoretically underpinned quantitative economic history; in the narrower, it refers only to what I shall call the “model builders.” Moreover the terminology seems to be in process of change.

We review different interpretations of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and explore how they relate to the discussion of the link between the EMP and economic growth. Recently Dennison and Ogilvie have argued that the EMP did not contribute to growth in Early Modern Europe. We argue that the link between the EMP and economic growth is incorrectly conceptualized. Age of marriage is not a good scale for the degree to which countries were characterized by EMP. Rather, the economic effects of the EMP should be seen in the broader context of how marriage responds to changing economic circumstance.

The industrial revolution transformed Great Britain from a nation of agricultural villages into a nation of factory towns. Many of the social changes accompanying industralization aroused the indignation of contemporary critics and later historians. Perhaps the most despised was the employment of children. Edward P. Thompson alleged “that the exploitation of little children, on this scale and with this intensity, was one of the most shameful events in our history.”

In April 1906 the San Francisco earthquake and fire caused damage equal to more than 1 percent of GNP. Although the real effect of this shock was localized, it had an international financial impact: large amounts of gold flowed into the country in autumn 1906 as foreign insurers paid claims on their San Francisco policies out of home funds. This outflow prompted the Bank of England to discriminate against American finance bills and, along with other European central banks, to raise interest rates. These policies pushed the United States into recession and set the stage for the Panic of 1907.

San Francisco's $200,000,000 “ash heap” involves complications which will be felt on all financial markets for many months to come [and] the payment of losses sustained … represents a financial undertaking of far-reaching magnitude….The Financial Times [London], 6 July 1906

We are right to see power, prestige, and confidence as conditioned by the Civil War. But it is a very easy step to regard the War, therefore, as a jolly piece of luck only slightly disguised, part of our divinely instituted success story, and to think, in some shadowy corner of the mind, of the dead at Gettysburg as a small price to pay for the development of a really satisfactory and cheap compact car with decent pick-up and road-holding capability. It is to our credit that we survived the War and tempered our national fiber in the process, but human decency and the future security of our country demand that we look at the costs. What are some of the costs? Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 49–50.

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Seven or eight years ago our Association and its common-law bride, the Committee for Research in Economic History, earnestly set about producing offspring. One cluster of them, it was expected, would look like examples of laissez faire in the United States. In 1943 we inspected these infants in the form of four papers read at our annual meeting; more recently they have been maturing into books. And now we are obliged to acknowledge that they have disappointed the anticipations of their parents by looking rather more like state intervention than like laissez faire. The announcement of Louis Hartz's study, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1774-–1860, is not untypical of the comments on all of them which have been consistently made by relatives, friends, and scholarly reviewers. That announcement says: “Through his critical appraisal of Pennsylvania, a leading state in the formative years of the Republic, Mr. Hartz advances the perhaps startling thesis that the contemporary theory of laissez-faire’ actually embraced a vigorous concept of state economic responsibility.”

We have used the household accounts of 1,350 husband-wife families to investigate trends in male earnings and family incomes. This evidence confirms the material progress suggested by trends in the real wage rates of adult males. But the budget data underscore occupational and regional distinctions, discontinuities in the growth process, and changes over time in the ability of other family members to offset the effects of the business cycle on men's earnings. Overall, family incomes grew less than male earnings.

By analyzing a newly compiled data base of grain prices, this article finds that prior to the nineteenth century the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that these premodern structures were transformed, and a national grain market had emerged. In the Great Divergence debate, the California School's claim that early modern “Asia” reached a similar stage of economic development as early modern Europe is therefore rejected for India.

The origins of the Italian North-South divide have always been controversial. We fill this gap by estimating a new dataset of real wages (Allen 2001; Allen et al. 2011) from Unification (1861) to WWI. Italy was very poor throughout the period, with a modest improvement since the late nineteenth century. This improvement started in the Northwest industrializing regions, while real wages in other macro-areas remained stagnant. The gap Northwest/South widened until the end of the period. Focusing on the drivers of regional trends, we find that human capital formation exerted strong positive effect on the growth of real wages.

Why did independent inventors account for over half of U.S. patents by 1930 and more than three times the number granted to R&D firms? Using new data on patents and historical patent citations, I show that independents supplied high-quality innovations to a geographically broad market for ideas. Those close to large urban centers developed some of the most significant technological advances. Demand for independent inventions remained high during the growth of the corporate economy as firms continued to acquire external innovations that complemented formal R&D. Despite their relative decline, independents remained central to the process of technological development.

We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample of individuals (from the 1915 Iowa State Census). The returns to a year of high school or college were substantial in 1915—about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young males. Education enabled individuals to enter lucrative white-collar jobs, but sizable educational wage differentials also existed within occupational groups. Returns were substantial even for those in farming. We find, using U.S. census data, that returns to education decreased between 1915 and 1940 and again during the 1940s.

This paper explores a number of the unresolved issues posed by the debate on the social saving of railroads. The final section includes a brief summary of the main findings of the new economic history of transportation.

The literature on the development of American industrial research suggests that during the twentieth century large firms “dominated” industrial research, and reaped the majority of the benefits from such activity. This paper utilizes new data to analyze both the relationship between firm size and research employment and the impact of research activity on firm growth and survival during 1921–1946. The results suggest that large firms were no more research-intensive than were small firms during the 1921–1946 period. Research activity significantly enhanced the probability of firms' survival among the ranks of the 200 largest manufacturing firms during 1921–1946. Research employment also improved the growth performance of both large and small firms during 1933–1946.