Manufacturing firm data for 1820 to 1850 are employed to investigate the role of women and children in the industrialization of the American Northeast. The principal findings include: (1) Women and children composed a major share of the entire manufacturing labor force; (2) their employment was closely associated with production processes used by large establishments, both mechanized and non-mechanized; (3) the wage of females (and boys) increased relative to that of men with industrial development; and (4) female labor force participation in industrial counties was substantial. These findings bear on the nature of technical change during early industrialization and why American industrial development was initially concentrated in the Northeast.

Evidence drawn from records of auctions held by the Royal African Company in Barbados between 1673 and 1723 is used to obtain annual estimates of slave prices by demographic category. These price series are then used to investigate the implications of an economic analysis of the demographic composition of the slave trade. The results provide quantitative support for the prediction that rising slave prices in the West Indies caused an increase in the share of children among the population of slaves in the transatlantic trade. This economic effect may have been a significant link between American slave markets and the demographic history of black populations in both Africa and America.

New indices of industrial production show that Britain's industrial growth in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century was about a third slower than currently available estimates indicate. Therefore, mid-eighteenth-century industrial output was nearly twice as high as previously assumed.

In the summer of 1951 the Bering Sea fishermen's union strike against the Bristol Bay salmon packers signaled the end of old-time industrial labor relations there. The issues of the strike and its conduct offer a case study of deteriorating symbiosis in industrial relations, which is not untypical elsewhere in American industry. This paper concentrates on events in 1951 and 1952 at a remote cannery site on the Nushagak River as a partial microcosm of larger evolutionary consequences in American industry.

Official tax records and other documents provide the sources for an estimation of wool exports overtime. Four main points emerge: after a peak circa 1550, exports stagnated and declined for over a century before rising again strongly; political and economic developments in Spain and the rest of Europe affected both the volume and the direction of wool exports; most exports went to Flanders before 1550, then to Italy for a time, and finally to northern Europe again from about 1650 onward; and Spanish merchants controlled most of the trade until the mid- sixteenth century but lost dominance thereafter, retaining control only over the internal market supplying wool for export.

The lack of success of the 1807–1809 Embargo by the United States has generally been attributed, first, to a lack of effective enforcement, and, second, to an inability to inflict greater economic damage on Great Britain than was suffered by the United States. This paper challenges both explanations. It is argued, first, that the Embargo did effectively reduce both countries to autarky. It is argued, second, that in autarky the relative price in Britain of agricultural products that had previously been imported rose by more than the relative price in the United States of manufactured goods that had previously been imported.

The rise of serfdom in the sixteenth century undoubtedly has political explanations, but the form that it took has economic explanations. In particular, it took the form of forced labor on enlarged manorial farms. The economic explanation, buttressed with evidence from the period, is that an enserfed labor force must be watched more than free renters and the watching is best done in a manorial framework. The model is stated formally and its implications compared point-by- point with the voluminous evidence for Poland and neighboring regions.

Monetary innovation, the development of new forms of money, has not received much systematic study from economic historians. This essay presents a framework for analyzing the determinants of monetary innovation and illustrates the argument by means of a sketch of monetary innovation in America from colonial times to the present.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century protection for agriculture became an important feature of the economic and political landscape in Germany. The large landlords, who specialized in arable agriculture, used their political power to get high levels of protection. Peasants, who specialized in animal husbandry, received lower but substantial and rising levels of protection. Material interest can thus help explain the peasants' political alliance with the landlords. Protection encouraged German agriculture to modernize along intensive lines, bringing to the countryside the social and political developments dreaded by the same conservative elites who promoted protection.

The railroads in the American West were constructed in a few concentrated building booms. This timing of construction resulted from the alternate creation and collapse of imperfect property rights to rights of way in partially settled areas. These “property rights” arose from strategic behavior within the railroad oligopoly. When enforcement costs of cooperative action were low, the railroads were able to create rents by avoiding construction ahead of demand. When enforcement became difficult, however, construction was the only way to capture rents on unbuilt lines so a construction boom ensued.

The economy of North Carolina in the early colonial period was agrarian. Land was a central element in the wealth stock and it was distributed unevenly among households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. The data are drawn from an eastern community, Perquimans County, and refer to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

The laws and regulations that shaped the structure of the banking industry from the Civil War to the Great Depression were strongly influenced by the banking community. In this period legal constraints on banks were weakened by competition between state and federal regulators trying to increase membership in their banking systems. The elimination of regulation was not completed, however, because the politically most powerful group in the industry, the unit banks, had an interest in preserving some regulations.

In the South after 1865, workers and property owners employed a variety of contracts—wage payment, crop sharing, and land rental—to bring together cooperating resources in agricultural production. The contractual mix varied over time and space, depending on the relative resource endowments of the contracting parties, the prevailing risk conditions, and the transactions costs of alternative contractual arrangements. To understand the contractual mix, certain empirical distinctions must be made, and the major hypotheses advanced to explain the mix must be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. These hypotheses, however, differ in their demonstrated ability to account for the empirical variance. In addition to factual clarification and theoretical explication, the paper presents a new sample of plantation data and a new econometric procedure for performing more detailed and better controlled tests of hypotheses.

The decline in U.S. fertility rates, beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century, is examined within a general model of fertility determination. The ability of land availability measures to explain the variation in components of the crude birth rate is tested using a pooled regression technique. A set of crude birth rate predictions for rural areas of 23 northern states during the period 1760–1870 is produced and compared with other estimates. It is concluded that the availability of land was a critical factor in determining the demand for children and, ultimately, the fertility rate, across states and over time.

Late nineteenth-century immigrants tended to concentrate in large cities despite the fact that they experienced less occupational mobility there than they did in small cities. This paper suggests that variation across cities in labor management systems and in the associated froms of discrimination may help to explain this apparent paradox. Analysis of data from Michigan's agricultural implements and iron-working industries in 1890 indicates that discrimination in hiring made it more difficult for immigrants to break into the small-city labor force. But in large cities, immigrant mobility was restricted by discriminatory barriers to entry into higher level jobs.

Multiple regression analysis reveals that work in New England cotton textile mills during 1905–1912 raised age-adjusted mortality rates over those of non-mill- workers, and that worker mortality increased with years of mill experience. Mortality varied among groups because of differential self selection. Central age group native males with broad occupational choices had lower mortality rates than control groups. Young males, women, and the foreign born had restricted occupational choices. Hence they were less self selected and experienced higher mortality. Death rates were highest among married women workers who bore children. The combination of homework and millwork worsened their health and raised their mortality rates.

This article presents new estimates of the Italian utilities industries' production from 1861 to 1913. The improvements over the currently available series include the restriction of the electricity series to the production of the electric utilities, the extrapolation of the gas production series to 1861, and the calculation of production series for the water supply industry. These new estimates suggest that the existing aggregate production series significantly overstates the utilities' growth rate. The existing utilities series for other countries do not incorporate separate estimates for the water supply industry, and also appear to overstate the industryapos;s growth rate.

Agrarian growth was related to overall development in Regierungsbezirk Oppeln in Germany between 1846 and 1913. Oppeln was characterized by an ethnically mixed population (Polish and German) as well as by both agricultural and industrial development. Using new estimates of agricultural output, acreage, and yields, agrarian growth and its sources are described and its linkages to the nonagrarian sector are explored. Variation among subdistricts (Kreise) is also studied. Agriculture experienced uneven growth, but it supported overall growth through rising incomes, provision of labor to the nonagricultural sector, and helping to restrain growth in food prices.