The turn of economic events in the early 1970s correlates with a revival of ideas about the existence of long swings in economic development. The subject of Kondratieff cycles has attracted the pens of social scientists of very different persuasions. This paper draws on Walt W. Rostow's interpretation—with its emphasis on the role of exporters of food and raw materials in the world economy—to explore Australian long waves over the last 110 years. I conclude that the case for their existence is not confirmed and moreover that Rostow's cycle-mechanics offer a doubtful explication of movements in the Australian series.

This article explores how injuries, sickness, and the geographic mobility of Union Army veterans while in service affected their postservice migrations. Wartime wounds and illnesses significantly diminished the geographic mobility of veterans after the war. Geographic moves while carrying out military missions had strong positive effects on their postservice geographic mobility. Geographic moves while in service also influenced the choice of destination among the migrants. I discuss some implications of the results for the elements of self-selection in migration, the roles of different types of information in migration decisions, and the overall impact of the Civil War on geographic mobility.

France is often described as the country that planned its network of railroads with the greatest care, wisely arranging for private construction and operation under control of the Government. She deserves criticism, it has been said, only because it took ten years to make these excellent arrangements. Yet most of the writers who have painted this rather attractive picture have not looked beyond the well-known books of Audiganne and Kaufmann, studies based chiefly upon collections of French statutes and legislative debates as well as the best known contemporary newspapers and literary reviews. Little attention has been paid to the Corps des ponts et chaussées, whose activities were far more important than the speeches of its director in the Chambers. Little concern has been given to the vital problem of obtaining the very large amounts of capital that were needed, or to the influence of the serious depression that began in 1837.

We argue that falling farm product prices, incomes, and spending may explain 10–30 percent of the 1930 U.S. output decline. Crop prices collapsed, reducing farmers’ incomes. And across U.S. states and Ohio counties, auto sales fell most in crop-growing areas. The large spending response may be explained by farmers’ indebtedness. Reasonable assumptions about the marginal propensity to spend of farmers relative to nonfarmers and the pass-through of farm prices to retail prices imply that the collapse of farm product prices in 1930 was a powerful propagation mechanism worsening the Depression.

Do large franchise extensions bring about dramatic electoral changes? Electoral reforms in 1918 nearly tripled the number of people eligible to vote in Ireland. Following the reforms—the largest franchise extension in U.K. history—the previously obscure Sinn Féin party secured 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats, an outcome that precipitated a guerrilla war and ultimately independence from the United Kingdom. However, our analysis finds little evidence that the franchise reforms benefited Sinn Féin. New female electors appear less likely to have supported Sinn Féin while new male electors were no more likely to vote for Sinn Féin than the existing electorate. Women also appear less likely to have cast a vote at all. Economic and social factors did matter when it came to voting, however, as did public opinion in relation to armed rebellion. These results remind us that dramatic political changes, such as those that took place in Ireland 1918, do not require dramatic changes in political participation. Sinn Féin’s electoral success was more likely driven by a change of heart on behalf of the Irish electorate, rather than a change in its composition.

In the 1950s the United States conducted scores of atmospheric nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. This article studies the effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests on agriculture in regions hundreds of miles from the NTS. While research has shown that this radioactive material posed a health risk near the NTS, little is known about the direct economic effects nuclear testing may have had. I find that fallout from nuclear tests adversely affected U.S. agricultural production, and this result suggests that nuclear testing had a much broader economic and environmental impact than previously thought.

Disputes over whether the Scientific Revolution contributed to the Industrial Revolution begin with the common assumption that natural philosophers and artisans formed distinct groups. In reality, these groups merged together through a diverse group of applied mathematics teachers, textbook writers, and instrument makers catering to a market ranging from navigators and surveyors to bookkeepers. Besides its direct economic contribution in diffusing useful numerical skills, this “practical mathematics” facilitated later industrialization in two ways. First, a large supply of instrument and watch makers provided Britain with a pool of versatile, mechanically skilled labor to build the increasingly complicated machinery of the late eighteenth century. Second, the less well-known but equally revolutionary innovations in machine tools—which, contrary to the Habbakuk thesis, occurred largely in Britain during the 1820s and 1830s to mass-produce interchangeable parts for iron textile machinery—drew on a technology of exact measurement developed for navigational and astronomical instruments.

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.

Scholarship on African “underdevelopment,” its antecedents, manifestations, and consequences, is now limited in focus and method. This article suggests a broader approach and emphasizes insights that might come from combining aspects of economic anthropology with analysis of institutions. A modest case study then sketches some monetary perceptions and policies of Tanganyika's colonial bureaucracies (German and British) and their reception by Tanganyika's diverse population. Indigenous reaction to alien media was rational within a neo-classical tripartite demand-for-money framework. The combined consequences of all parties'actions for both the territory's “underdevelopment” and “under-growth” receive final but not definitive scrutiny in the last section.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.

The current controversies about production and yields of medieval agriculture may give an outsider the impression that on this subject historians are more at variance than they actually are. Some historians may still cling to the Victorian belief that things economic were perpetually on the rise; historians thus minded are inclined to take it for granted that both the aggregate product of agriculture and agricultural output per head improved all through the Middle Ages. Other students, for example, Beveridge or Bennett, derived from the imperfectly selected data of the Bishop of Winchester's manors the impression that output per acre, and probably also per unit of seed, stayed put all through the Middle Ages. More recently other historians, including myself, have argued that output per acre tended to slump in the earlier, that is, pre-Black Death period, and may have picked up somewhat in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The concert of historians may therefore strike the ear as being even more cacophonous on this theme than on most other medieval themes.

I Take it that what lies in the back of the minds of most of us when a subject like this comes up is the problem of the relation between economic unrest and political and social change, and more especially, the kind of change we call a revolution. We all know those for whom the solution of this problem is very simple: they say “look for the economic motive” as innocently as if they said “cherchez la femme.” Even at a more mature level of thinking the problem is still often put in such a way that something economic always lies at the bottom, or pulls the trigger, or provides the main impulse, or—and this is the precious word—“determines” everything.

The incidence of fatherlessness among English emigrant servants was measured using contracts recorded in London between 1682 and 1686. This incidence was relatively high and systematically related to the servant's age, gender, county of origin, occupation, and father's occupation. Many emigrant servants were youths who had lost their fathers and lacked alternative support in England. Fatherlessness helps explain why the short-run supply of emigrant servants was relatively inelastic, and why some unskilled servants continued to migrate to America in spite of competition from slave labor.