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.”

This study analyzes the content and distribution of shops in provincial England between 1550 and 1700. Its major finding is that although retail trade was declining at markets and fairs, most tradesmen did not develop product specialization until the mid-seventeenth century.

The only official measure of overall Soviet munitions output in World War II, first published in 1965, was based on changes in values, not volumes, and grossly understates change in the level of real Soviet war production. Subsequently published official data on production of ground and air munitions in physical units, supplemented by information about real spending on naval munitions, provide foundations for a new index. During the war the USSR produced more munitions than Great Britain or Germany, but much less than the United States.

During the course of U.S. economic development, the institutions used to organize agricultural labor have undergone interesting and sometimes puzzling transformations. The transitions from wage contracting to tenancy observed in the post-bellum South and in nineteenth-century Iowa have been studied extensively.2 This paper evaluates the relatively neglected transition from wage labor to tenancy that occurred in the California fruit orchards during the period 1900–1910.3 Before 1903 Chinese and Japanese orchard workers were organized via the padrone system of wage labor, but in an abrupt series of events there ensued a shift into tenancy so dramatic that by 1909 contemporary observers noted that virtually all orchards were under tenant control. The fact that the new tenants were recent Japanese immigrants prompted investigations by the Immigration Commission as well as other agencies so that this particular shift into tenancy is documented in greater detail than those occurring in the South and in Iowa.

The belief that the state should, can, and must contrive to make its subjects wealthier, and that in part this can be done through its taxing powers, certainly is one of the most powerful concepts in modern times. Intuitively it seems that this belief must arise from important and strongly rooted developments starting far back in the history of Western thought and institutions. Economic historians concerned with the history of economic growth ought to be able to demonstrate which developments produced this belief, and when. But work on this highly interesting problem of origins has yet to be begun. The dimensions of the problem, at least, can be presented by sketching in the main developments for one country, France, over the whole period from a time when the concept of a beneficent national fisc obviously was still unborn to that point when it was alive and thriving. Viewed as an essay on the history of economic thought, this paper is a suggestion that some of the concepts concerning French mercantilism found in modern writings need to be improved. The questions to be raised are: At what point did influential persons in France begin to argue that by changing its tax policies the state could promote what we call economic growth? And when can we say that an important part of royal fiscal policy was aimed at promoting the wealth of the king's subjects?

All scientific research requires at its initial stage as precise a formulation of the problem under investigation as is possible to the human mind. In a study of retardative factors in French economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the need for clarifying the implications of the subject and of removing possible ambiguities is particularly urgent. By economic development is meant here an increasing amount of goods and services which are customarily exchanged for money. I am eliminating from consideration many of the intangibles of life, which are important and which the French may have in abundance, like joie de vivre.

This paper examines the failures or in some cases near-failures of financial institutions that started the 12 most severe peacetime financial panics in the United States, beginning with the Panic of 1819 and ending with the Panic of 2008. The following generalizations were true in most cases, although not in all. (1) Panics were triggered by a short series of failures or near-failures; (2) many of the failing institutions were what we would now call shadow banks; (3) typically, the source of trouble was an excessive investment in real estate; and (4) typically, they had outstanding reputations for trustworthiness, prudence, and financial acumen—before they failed. It appears that in these respects the Panic of 2008 was an old-school panic.

[a panic] occurs when a succession of unexpected failures has created in the mercantile, and sometimes also in the non-mercantile public a general distrust in each other’s solvency; disposing every one not only to refuse fresh credit, except on very onerous terms, but to call in, if possible all credit which he has already given.

—John Stuart Mill

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

—Peter Pan

We examine the politics of the “Salary Grab” of 1873, legislation that increased congressional salaries retroactively by 50 percent. A group of New England and Midwestern elites opposed the Salary Grab, along with congressional franking and patronage-based civil service appointments, as part of a reform effort to reshape “who should govern Congress.” Our analyses of congressional voting confirm the existence of this nonparty elite coalition. Although these elites lost many legislative battles in the short run, their efforts kept reform on the legislative agenda throughout the late nineteenth century and ultimately set the stage for the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century.

The first president of our Association, Edwin F. Gay, remarked to me as he was pondering the subject of his presidential address that presidents of learned societies should present in their messages to their scholarly colleagues the results of their current research. This seems to me to be a capital idea, but, as I look back upon the speeches of my predecessors, I discover how few have followed the counsel of our wise and esteemed forebear. Even Gay himself, in his command performance, failed to adhere to his own precept. Most of our presidential addresses have been devoted to making suggestions for research (mostly to be undertaken by others), to delineating the broad “tasks” of economic history, to defending the kind of work in which the speaker has been engaged, and to advocating some particular methodology in our discipline. In the course of time, our presidents have exposed a variety of positions, have espoused a multitude of causes, and from time to time have excited controversy. They have created a tradition that presidential addresses should be homilies and exhortations.

Between 1852 and 1883 the nature and organization of work in the American shoe industry changed due to the introduction of machinery and the factory system. For generations before 1852 shoes had been made by hand in small workshops organized through a putting out system. Each artisan possessed the skill and tools to make an entire shoe by hand, and work was intertwined with family life. With the introduction of machinery, making a shoe was divided into many distinct tasks, each performed by a different worker, and work was moved into a factory where it came under closer supervision.

Bank failures in Chicago during 1930–1932 are examined to determine whether failures were attributable to poor management practices or to worsening economic conditions. Non-Loop state-chartered banks were divided into those which did not fail and those which failed in 1930, 1931, and 1932. Portfolio variables which contemporary writers held were indicative of poor management practices are used in a multiple discriminant analysis. Using semiannual bank call reports from December 1927 through December 1929, support was found for the poor management hypothesis only for banks destined to fail in 1931

Greek colonization had a long and varied history; it had begun indeed had already accomplished its first great period of expansion before the first Greek historians wrote; it continued in different forms intermittently throughout the classical period, had a second great era under Alexander the Great and the early Hellenistic monarchies, and again persisted with modifications after Rome became mistress of the eastern Mediterranean. The result we all know: the Greek polis, that closely integrated self-governing community of citizens, became the dominant political unit and political ideal of the Mediterranean world, and left its indelible imprint, for good or ill, on the Western World.

During the air conditioner industry's first four decades, most installations were “commercial comfort” air conditioning systems, purchased by retailers to increase demand for their products. Air conditioning spread unevenly through the commercial sector and across the country. Using data from a variety of sources, I offer a quantitative account of this diffusion, viewed through an interpretive framework that emphasizes differences across geographic markets and industries in the costs and benefits to retailers of installing air conditioning. Correlates of early adoption of commercial air conditioning include electricity rates and consumer income and education levels.

A unique aspect of agricultural production as a biological process is that it is basically conditioned by natural environments. Agricultural technology is so developed as to be efficient in the given environmental conditions in addition to being consistent with relative factor and product prices. In consequence, there is a tendency for agricultural technology to become location-specific, and its direct transfer is limited within a small area of similar environmental conditions.

In 1696 the British began to keep records of their imports and exports in terms of money values. For this purpose, tables of prices were prepared first for England, and subsequently for Ireland and for Scotland, with the rates based, it is said, on market conditions at the time. Some adjustments in the initial valuations were made in the early years, but thereafter, for over a century and a half, the same prices were used in calculating “official” values. For imports and re-exports they supplied the sole basis for computing money values throughout this period. For exports of domestic produce and manufactured goods, however, a concurrent series of declared values was begun when a convoy tax was imposed ad valorem in 1798; but this series, though continued after the war, has been overshadowed by the “official” valuations which attained something of the respectability of a time-hallowed tradition. Year after year through peace and war, dearth and plenty, high prices and low, the clerks meticulously multiplied their quantities by these unchanging rates. In other words, British “official” trade values became progressively more useless as measures of current market values until the system was reformed in 1854. As a result, historians and economists are faced with frustration or distortion in any question dependent on a fairly accurate knowledge of the course, or the terms, or the balance of British trade in the period.

In the 1986 volume of this JOURNAL we discussed the frequency of retirement and downward occupational mobility (on-the-job retirement) of older men in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.1 As we noted, study of retirement in the years before World War II is hampered by the lack of data on the labor force status of individuals. Indeed, until the concept of “gainful employment” was replaced by that of the “labor force” in 1940, the official census figures on occupations contained a large proportion of older men and women who by today's standard would be regarded as retired2.

Seventeenth-century planters developed a new system of husbandry, a long fallow, hoe-based agriculture that raised tobacco for export and Indian corn for subsistence. Plentiful land and shortages of labor characterized the system, which had few economies of scale. It provided rapid increases in wealth during the farm building stages, but its land and labor constraints set limits on growth. Eighteenth-century adaptations created economies of scale that permitted planters to grow grains for export without reducing tobacco crops. Planters who did not adopt these changes did not share in the resulting prosperity, and many left.

Since at least the seventeenth century the economic development of Spain has been limited because the rates of growth achieved in the peripheral areas of Catalonia, Valencia, and Vizcaya were greater than that of the interior under the old Crown of Castile. The stagnation of the Castilian interior not only created a dull market for manufactured goods, but conserved a persistently strong traditionalist faction which long hampered Spanish political development. The resulting tension between the interior and the more modern peripheral sectors of society dominates Spanish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.