Local governments played a notable and somewhat neglected part in the American movement for internal improvements. Their activities in aid of canals and railroads varied greatly in scale and method and in the scope of planning involved. They ran the gamut from the far-flung projects of great commercial cities striving for the dominance of the trade of vast areas to the donations of obscure rural townships trying only to make sure that the promised railroad should pass through their village rather than the adjacent crossroads. Among the greater cities, none played a more notable role than Baltimore in the promotion of internal improvements. Its total of railroad subscriptions, loans, and bond endorsements was about twenty million dollars—a figure of municipal contribution only exceeded by Cincinnati's investment in a city-owned railroad. Baltimore was in the field of internal improvements well before Cincinnati and remained in it long after such early rivals as Philadelphia had withdrawn. Baltimore's first investment in the Baltimore and Ohio was audaorized in 1827, and its last loan to the Western Maryland was made in 1886. It continued to vote stock and to appoint public directors to the board of railroad corporations until it sold its interest in the Baltimore and Ohio in 1890 and in the Western Maryland in 1902.

This article explores the determinants of wealth for seventeenth-century Englishmen living in three very different environments—Worcestershire, East London, and Tidewater, Virginia. Wealth differences among these regions can be described in terms of the particular mix of occupational status groups, age groups, and literates each possessed. When all of these variables are accounted for, region becomes an insignificant determinant of wealth. Occupational status, predictably, had the primary influence on wealth, but the system, through provisions for age and education, also made definite allowances for the ability to use and consume resources efficiently.

An analysis of over 10,000 loans made by a major credit source in Keene, New Hampshire, from 1832 to 1897 is presented. The data sources are unique and include information on property ownership and wealth, occupation, involvement in businesses, age, and connections with the credit source. As time passed more funds were lent to borrowers out of the city and county, lending was used to support many new industrial and other enterprises, as well as for infrastructural and social capital investments. Many loans were made to individuals and businesses with close ties to the source of credit.

We analyze patterns of informal information exchange by the English East India Company’s captains to assess the role of relational and institutional governance systems and uncertainty in encouraging information exchange. Using archival data from the emerging early-modern global trade network, we show that uncertainty drove information exchange. Relational-based contract enforcement mechanisms such as small group exchange were largely absent, and increasing institutional strength was associated with decreasing rates of information exchange. The results suggest that opportunity and demand were more important determinants of information exchange than the emergence of formal and informal governance systems.

This article investigates the impact of “learning-by-producing” on inventive activity. From 1870 to 1910, in both emerging (electrical equipment and supplies) and maturing (shoes and textiles) industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak. Regional shifts in production did not lead to corresponding increases in invention. The location of inventive activity tended to mirror that of individuals with advanced technical skills appropriate to each industry. Consequently, scholars may have overemphasized the importance of learning-by-producing in accounting for geographic differences in inventive activity, and underestimated the significance of technical skills amongst the population.

This article analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the market-purchased transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. Occupation was financed principally by printing large quantities of money. While some Southeast Asian countries had high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money and because of Japan's strong enforcement of monetary monopoly. Highly specialized Southeast Asian economies and loss of Japanese merchant shipping limited resource extraction.

This paper investigates part-year factory operation, a common but understudied dimension of industrializing economies, in a prototypical late-industrializing setting that offers rich factory-level data: Imperial Russia. Newly compiled data provides detailed descriptions of all Russian manufacturing firms operating in 1894 and shows that factories operating a greater number of annual working days were more mechanized, more urban, more likely to employ women and children, more productive, and more likely to survive. Rather than arguing that part-year operation demonstrated Russia’s uniquely inexorable backwardness, we stress operating time’s relationship to fundamental drivers of growth, including urbanization, geography, and institutions.

The Old Poor Law has recently found a forceful defender in Mark Blaug, who in two articles has challenged the critics of England's first public welfare system and displayed the clay feet of that towering structure of words, the evidence for the 1834 Report. This is a notable achievement, but Mr. Blaug's case should not be accepted in toto: indeed, that it has survived so long without criticism is surprising. G. R. Elton felicitously referred to one of his critics as a “self-appointed hound of heaven,” but scholars who propound provocative theses are likely to provoke responses. Mr. Blaug's interpretation of the Old Poor Law is, to at least one “selfappointed hound,” eminently provocative.

Wyoming's Johnson County War of 1892 is the historical basis of later popular depictions of the West as violent, and it influenced the development of Wyoming. Many see this era as the end of the open range system and the ascendancy of stock ranching and farming. Popular depiction argues that the event was an act of vigilantism of large foreign-owned firms against small individual settlers. We argue that the war was a conflict of property rights systems and use a model developed by Alston, Libecap, and Mueller to explain why violence broke out in Johnson County in 1892.

Richer (the Rancher): We made this country. Found it and we made it … Made a safe range out of this. Some us died doin' it. We made it. Then people move in who never held a rawhide through the old days. Fenced off my range. Fenced me off from water. Some of them like you paw ditches, and take out irrigation water, and so the creek runs dry sometimes, and I got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no rights to the range. Stark (the Homesteader): You talk about rights. You think you got the right to say that nobody else has got any. Well, that ain't the way the government looks at it. Shane [Paramount Pictures, 1953]

Based on information related to the Stop of Exchequer, 1672, this article calculates the current yields of sovereign debt and examines the effect of the Glorious Revolution on the government’s credibility. The results show that even though the interest payment had not been paid for years, when Parliament authorized the resumption of payment, the current yields fell not only below the level when the interest payment was made by Charles II, but quickly converged to the rates of return of alternative investment. The movement of current yields supports that the constitutional change of 1689 did enhance the government’s credibility.

Despite certain common cultural elements, the component states of Malaysia—the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah—have each undergone a somewhat different historical evolution. But in the course of the last 180 years, they have evolved more or less a single regional economic system and common constitutional and administrative practices as the result of having shared British rule and influence. For this reason, this essay will confine itself principally to the period of British rule. Concern with an earlier period would mean involvement in the general economic history of the Malay Archipelago.

During the last twenty years Business History has become one of Economic History's most important subdivisions. This has been partly, but certainly not altogether, the result of prosperity. With highlevel employment and income the general attitude toward the businessman has changed. He is no longer popularly regarded as the personification of viliainy. In the “new Business History” he has fared very well indeed. He has not been restored to a place among the saints, but he certainly is back among the choir boys. There are two points of view on this whole development. One is to condemn the new Business History as a sinister plot on the part of Big Business to bamboozle the American public. The other is to regard the new Business History as the most promising of the three major developments that have taken place in Economic History during the last thirty years.

The paper examines the spread of sharecropping that followed a wave of investment in agriculture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Using results from the modern theory of share contracts, it argues that sharecropping was a means of risk sharing that favored both landlords and tenants. Although the evidence used in this paper comes from France, the results may well apply to other areas of early modern Europe.

The economic importance of the sanctuaries of antiquity has long JL been recognized. The Babylonian shrines were no exceptions; not only were the chief Mesopotamian temples religious centers, law courts, schools, and archive depositories, but they were also banks and mercantile establishments. Indeed, as fiscal institutions of the Babylonian economy, the importance of the sanctuaries cannot be overemphasized: “In financial or monetary transactions the position of the Babylonian temples was not unlike that of national banks; they carried on their business with all the added weight of official authority.”