Never in history has man successfully invented a device, an instrument, a machine, or a structure without creating a demand for performance far beyond the capacity of the original design. The acceptance of an innovation starts a continuous stream of improvements in the product or in its manufacture that leads to larger, more powerful, or more efficient models; and the widespread diffusion of a product almost automatically implies the evolution of a broad range in the dimensions of serviceability. The increase in the size of the product is an important aspect of industrial growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, very few sailing vessels of 300 tons were produced in American shipyards. When the clipper ships were finally outmoded, the largest were at least ten times that size. The first American-made steam engines before 1810 included some that were large for the time, around 100 horsepower. By 1865, engines of 1,000 horsepower were in use, and by 1880 the size had been increased to 4,000 horsepower.

This article attempts to explain why the adoption of potentially productive institutions is delayed and why inefficient ones persist by exploring the dynamics of institutional change in a particular historical case—the closing of the Georgia open range in the late nineteenth century. A closed range policy would have generated net benefits for specific regions of Georgia, but distributional conflicts, coupled with high transaction costs, made a voluntary agreement to do that unattainable. The article describes the Georgia legislature's important role in facilitating the adoption of a policy that led to more rapid agricultural development in the postbellum period.

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

As Fritz Redlich has had occasion to point out, business history is neither of American nor of recent vintage–that interest in company histories which began on the Continent early in the nineteenth century had by 1900 prompted at least one prominent German scholar to suggest how a study of business might be developed into an academic discipline. What was new in the United States was the term “business history,” and what is more relevant for my comments in this paper were the circumstances that led to its emergence as a special field and the effect that this separation has had on the relationship between business history and economic history.

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders differs from that of Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger (1992). Using a sample of inward coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, we show that Steckel and Ziebarth made errors classifying shippers, that they underestimate the relative number of slaves shipped by traders, and that their empirical estimates of selection bias are attenuated towards zero.

The literature of economic history abounds with studies of nineteenth century banking. Unfortunately, most of these studies have drawbacks which make them of limited use to the modern student of economic history. The most serious drawback is their almost unanimously institutional character, punctuated here and there with biographical sketches of past bank presidents and directors. Those studies which do offer solid quantitative evidence on banking practice and performance are often based on aggregate statistics compiled by state or national banking commissions and thus preclude the study of individual institutions or small groups of institutions which may have played a key role in the development of early banking practices. This article represents a detailed investigation of the largest non-chartered bank of the early nineteenth century, the Bank of Stephen Girard.

A chronology of invention in farming is given, based on patent data, for England between 1611 and 1850. The chronology is explained using market analysis. Technological constraints determined the timing of some inventions, most notably for fertilizers. Relative input costs explain the early development of the seed drill and the threshing machine. Inventive output also depended on the market for food. The overall level of patents issued was related to the level of population and to changing food prices.The output market for food was influencing invention through of population growth on the advance of farming technology.

The initial problems in writing the history of a business are similar to those encountered in writing the history of anything else: obtaining free access to all the existing records; determining whether these records are adequate to warrant the writing of a history; and then deciding what one wants to know from the records.

One of the recent tendencies in the United States has been the movement away from private methods of finance to finance through government agencies, a trend that has been particularly noticeable during periods of national catastrophe such as wars and depressions. In these periods we have seen, in addition to other sources of government financing, the use of the War Finance Corporation during World War I and the use on a far larger scale of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and World War II.

During World War II two thirds of a total expenditure for industrial facilities of approximately $25 billion was directly financed by the government. In contrast, during the three-year period of 1917–1919, only about one tenth of the $6 billion in new facilities under construction was directly financed by the government.

We apply disjoint principal components analysis to study institutional influences on the course of poverty in the nineteenth century. Classificatory data summarize varied facets of economic and noneconomic institutional structure and change.Four sets of countries are distinguished by characteristics of the course of poverty. The components models show that the impact of economic and demographic changes (export expansion, marketization, industrial expansion, immigration) have consequences for poverty that vary greatly between and within country sets, depending on the character of institutions: above all, land systems, dependence relationships, and political institutions.

The successful establishment of the European Common Market on January 1, 1959, has renewed interest in the tool by which this most ambitious of all economic integration projects has been accomplished. The interest is the greater as this is only the first of three attempts to integrate economic development on a continental scale. The others are the common markets envisioned for Africa and Latin America. This article is an attempt to convey in the briefest possible space the history of economic integration that preceded the current drive toward common markets.

The most recent representation of “British” economic development over the century from 1855, as given in Kuznets’ Modern Economic Growth, does not suggest much vitality in this important economy. This representation is not new. Since it became fashionable to villify the “Britain” of the 1950's and 1960's as the laggard country of Europe, attempts have been made to justify or rationalize recent British performance by claiming that recent slow growth rates have been long established. The justification is based merely on the fable of the tortoise and the hare: slow but steady growth in Britain versus the erratic path of foreigners. Kuznets’ picture of Britain over the past century would, however, suggest a country in which population growth competed only with France for lowest place among developed countries; omitting Netherlands from his list because of its limited period, Kuznets showed that the decade average rate of increase of British gross product, at 21.1 percent, was third lowest and only slightly above that of France with its special population experience; and British increase in product per head, at 14.1 percent decade average, ranked only above that of Australia, with its very low rate of growth at 8 percent. No race was being won here; rather the judgment on the recent past, from the perspective of a century of growth, is that Britain has always had it so bad. The question is whether this perspective is open to reasonable doubt.

The following bit of research has two purposes, one general and one specific. Its general purpose is to suggest how the three elements in its title arc linked together, and in doing this to connect more closely the work of historians, which has focused on entrepreneurship, with that of economists, which has centered around economic growth as measured in statistical aggregates. The specific purpose is to show how the organization of the German coal-mining industry in fact constituted one such connection between the economic activity of individuals and the industrial development of a nation.

The Bureau du Commerce allocated rights and rents to private entrepreneurs via a mix of hierarchical division of labor and peer-based collegial deliberation. This set-up reflected an attempt to maximize information and expertise, but also allowed for the recognition of private rights and social interests. The final decisions of the Bureau (for or against each demand), and the qualitative arguments brought forward during the procedure, are robust predictors of eventual decisions. We see this result as an indication that impersonal, rational and informed decision-making could be obtained even within a patrimonialist, rent-seeking State.