Flaring westward from the upper valley of the Wabash lies the prairie triangle, embracing most of central and northern Illinois and almost all of Iowa. Much of this region today lies in the heart of the corn belt. Its economic history is a story of practical experimentation, adaptation, and change as its restless settlers endeavored after 1820 to unlock its wealth. To do so, the prairie pioneers had to adapt techniques and crops to the novel environment of an almost treeless grassland at a time when both technology and markets were undergoing revolutionary change. In 1830 the farm-makers had hardly begun their task; by the 1890's the land was tamed, the corn belt a fact, its farmers on the threshold of a golden age.

A persistent argument in condemning foreign economic intrusion in China (1840–1937) is that the “traditional” or the “indigenous” sector of the economy was “hampered,” “disrupted,” or even “ruined.” It is maintained that the handicrafts, small mines, native banks, junks, and coolie carriers were all helplessly depressed because of competition from their counterparts in the modern sector of the economy, which was an outgrowth of external trade and foreign investment in China. Some have argued that the supposed decline in the traditional sector was a net loss to China, since the limited development in the modern sector was not large enough to offset losses in the traditional sector, or that gains in the modern sector were primarily reaped by countries which traded with or invested in China. Others have taken a more moderate view: that the net effect of foreign economic penetration in China cannot be ascertained, because gains and losses in the two sectors cannot be compared quantitatively. But in either case there is the assertion that there was a decline in the traditional sector.

No Matter which authority we consult on the English Poor Laws in the nineteenth century the same conclusion emerge: the Old Poor Law demoralized the working class, promotedd population growth, lowered wasges, reduced rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on retepayes; the poverty which it relieved; the problem of devising an efficeient public relief system was finally solved with the passaage of the“harsh but salutry” Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. So Unanimous are both the indictment and the verdit of historians on this question that we may forego the pleasure of citing “chapter and verse.”

Economic development and deliberate policy to accelerate its pace are relatively recent concepts, but the facts of development and economic policies to bring it about are, of course, ancient. Mercantilist, Colbertian, cameralism Smithian policies, all had in mind what now is called development; and much of the discussion of the stages of growth with which German economists during the nineteenth century were so preoccupied is obviously a preoccupation with growth at a time at which pure theory concentrated on the allocation of resources and on slowly developing an intellectual apparatus of which one could cease to be ashamed.

Technological change has come to absorb an increasing share of the attention of the economist in recent years. Several attempts have been made to assess the quantitative importance of technological change, as opposed to increases in factor supplies, in accounting for the secular rise in per capita incomes in the United States. It appears, in all these studies, that technological changes (shifts in the production function) have been far more important than has the mere growth in the supplies of capital and labor inputs, as conventionally measured (movement along an existing production function). In a sense, this should be cause for deep concern, since the comparative neglect of the process of technological change (with the major exceptions until very recent years, of the works of Marx, Schumpeter, and Usher) suggests a serious malallocation of our intellectual resources. If the studies of such people as Abramovitz and Solow are even approximately correct with respect to orders of magnitude, then the contribution of technological change to rising per capita incomes absolutely dwarfs the contribution from a rising but qualitatively unchanging stock of capital. It would appear that we have indeed been playing Hamlet without the Prince.

Wage rate statistics are available for common labor, carpenters, masons, and “teamworkers” for a span of sixty years or more in the nineteenth century in the Erie Canal Papers now on deposit in the New York State Library in Albany. The data are abundant, the documents in which wage reports were made are well preserved, the wage record is for a well defined area and by 1828 the data are un ambiguous.Within three years of the completion of the canal theforeman of repairs had learned to write reports specifying clearly the kind of work each man in his gang performed, to distinguish between wage payments and wage rates, and to record the dates and continuity of employment. Over the fifty-four years covered by our series the operation of the canal did not greatly change, the kinds of work done were not altered from year to year, and this conservatism of the management of the canal had at least one merit from our point of view, it rendered our series homogeneous. Nor did the social environmentin which the wage bargains were determined show much modification; the nascent trade union movement was without perceptible influenceon wages on the canal and, though employment on the canal was a matter of interest to legislators in Albany, public regulation did little to influence the wage determination process.

This study is intended as a confirmation of the global presence of the economic institution to which, for want of a better word, we have given the name “port of trade.”

From 1841 throught 1845 and again in 1847 and 1848 ofiicials of the United States patent Office estimated the output of the principal agricultural crops of each state and territory. These estimates have been generally disregarded by economic historians, presumably because their acuracy has been considered questionable. But I have bee unable to find any published, comprehensive evaluation of them. In this note I will briefly examine the methods used to make the crop estimates and apply a few checks againsts the results, with the object of evaluating them, in a preliminary way, as historical data.

The economic development of Venice claims attention for several reasons. As the birthplace of capitalism, Venice has been assigned a leading role in a semi-Marxist scheme of world history. Within a more specifically historical and geographical framework, it presents a classic case of maturity and decay. After being for centuries a leader among world markets it was so placed as to register the effects of the oceanic shift in the world's trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In September 1833, Andrew Jackson issued an executive order ending deposit of Federal funds in the Bank of the United States, which had been the government depository since 1817. The culmination of Jackson's long struggle with the Bank and its friends in Congress, this measure closed a chapter in the political history of the era. To the conservative Jacksonians, “victory over the Bank of the United States was a consummation” that freed the state banks and business enterprise from the control of a powerful and despised institution. To the radical, hard-money faction of the Democratic party, however, “removal of the deposits” (as the order was popularly termed) was merely a first step toward more fundamental reform—elimination of the monetary disturbances that they attributed to reliance on bank paper for the currency of the country. Because of this divergence of views, partisan and factional disputes over Jacksonian financial policy did not cease with victory over the Bank. Central to the continuing debate was the relationship of die Treasury Department to the group of state-chartered banks, usually called the “pet banks,” in which Federal funds were deposited after September 1833. My purpose here is to review Treasury operations in die period 1833–1841, to suggest the political role of die pet banks and the economic impact of financial policy in die administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.

The Archives du Rhone at Lyon contain a unique collection of eighteenth-century business records—partnership agreements, merchandise inventories, financial statements, and depositions concerning a variety of commercial houses. Working in these papers, one begins to acquire a clear and detailed idea of the character of French business enterprise, of how business was organized and carried on and commercial capital mobilized at the end of the old regime.

Historians of medieval prices have relied very heavily on grain prices, which are abundant and easily available. In France, for example, there is an impressive run of biweekly figures from the grain market at Albi. A different category of data, that has not received much attention, concerns the cost of travel in fourteenth-century France.

This paper is concerned with two questions: What was iron and steel used for in the course of the late nineteenth century? And how were the uses of iron and steel affected by changes in the methods of production of iron and steel? The first question asks what was the composition of the iron and steel industry's output, that is, what products were being produced. The second question asks if the changes in this composition were caused by changes in the supply schedules of the industry.

This note presents some statistical evidence on the growth and geographic distribution of membership in the Economic History Association. The interpretation suggests that, despite a reasonable growth of membership on a national basis, particular areas of the country are under-represented in the Association, relative to the probable extent of their interest in economic history. An attempt is made to identify the areas of under-representation and thereby to provide some guidance for missionary work.

When requested in the spring of 1961 to review the overdue third volume of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I read eagerly the proof copy sent me and then wrote this review, fearing that if I delayed until the volume was actually out the lapse of time would dull my reactions. Time had already blunted the impact of some of the contributions, for example, the opening essay, “The Rise of Towns,” by H. van Werveke. No wonder, since he finished writing it, as he tells us in a footnote, in 1940 (sic), and retouched it in 1953 and 1956 Such long-suffering contributors deserve to be reviewed before 1963, but only in this year has the Cambridge University Press finally released the last of the three volumes planned as an authoritative and balanced account of the economic life of Medieval Europe.

The terminal dates of this study are the year of the foundation of the Crédit Lyonnais and the year of the transfer of the management from Lyons to Paris. Until 1882, the siège social remained in the south, though from the late 1860's on, the initiative in the larger financial operations lay with the “succursale” in the capital. To satisfy the requirements of what Bouvier calls a two-headed direction, an extensive, daily correspondence was indispensable. The result is one of the richest banking archives ever opened to an inquiring researcher. It is not only their abundance that makes these records of the Crédit Lyonnais so valuable; it is their quality, the subjects they treat, the insights they give into the problems and minds of the directors of the bank. These papers deal with matters that today would be confined to conversation—directly or over that bane of the future researcher, the telephone; they concern not only decisions, but the reasons for decisions and the debates that lay behind them. Even if such thoughts were consigned to paper today, the records would in all likelihood end by being removed from the premises as the personal property of their authors. Given the catholicity of interests of the Credit Lyonnais—its activity in the regional and national economy, its innovations in French banking practice, its wide excursions into the field of international finance—its archives are a broad gateway into the economic history of the late nineteenth century.