The study attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Comnenus, by considering often overlooked evidence of the Genoese experience in Constantinople during his reign. Manuel's alleged ill-treatment of Italian merchants is seen to have resulted not from greed but from his concern with maintaining peace in Constantinople. The Genoese, who remained peaceful and loyal to their agreements with Manuel, prospered under his goodwill in spite of Genoa's refusal to commit itself to a Byzantine offensive alliance. It is concluded that Manuel's commercial policy was equitable to the Italians and beneficial to his empire's economic health.

The Program Committee for the thirty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association began its work in early 1975, after several months of consultation with David Landes, President-elect of the Association. The basic goal of the Committee was two-fold. First, we selected a general theme—“Historical Dimensions of Social and Political Economy”—which would reassert the fundamental and integral importance of society and politics within economic history. It was, and is, our considered judgment that economic history runs a grave risk of losing general appeal and significance if it becomes a latter-day scholasticism focusing almost exclusively on narrowly defined “economic” problems. Second, we wanted to attract to our meeting and Association scholars with varied interests and methodologies within the entire field of economic history broadly conceived.

This study analyzes the demographic characteristics of a previously neglected area in colonial America—the urban center. Growth, birth, and death rates in Philadelphia between 1720 and 1775 are estimated using a variety of sources. Immigration, smallpox, economic vacillations, and a skewed age structure are attributed primary responsibility in determining the level of and changes in Philadelphia's vital rates. The elevated level of these rates is evident in a comparison with vital rates in Andover and Boston, Massachusetts, and Nottingham, England.

The aim of this article is to investigate the railroads' contribution to German economic growth from the 1840s to the 1870s. The analysis focuses on background linkage effects. It is shown that the emergence of the modern German iron industry was due to the railroads' demand for iron products. A comparison with the United States reveals the considerably greater importance of German railroad construction for its domestic iron industry from 1840 to 1860. The British iron industry not only profited from domestic railroad construction but benefited significantly from railroad construction abroad, a fact too often neglected.

The process of financial integration has been charted in several studies of the late nineteenth-century U.S. economy but lacks comparable documentation in a European case. This gap is filled through an examination of interregional interest rate trends in the pre-World War I Austrian economy. The Austrian data show a marked trend toward rate convergence beginning in the 1870s. These results are significant for the U.S. case and for the long standing debate on the economic viability of the Habsburg Monarchy before World War I and of the successor states in the interwar period.

This paper measures the growth and relative levels of total factor productivity in the American, British, French, Belgian, and German mineral fuel pig iron industries from 1840 to 1909. The American history was peculiar in that there was little productivity growth betwen 1840 and 1870 and then rapid growth until 1890. Regression models are developed to identify the techniques responsible for the American advance. Much of the American experience is explained by changes in the composition of the available iron ores. An assessment of the international transferability of late-nineteenth-century blast furnace technology is offered.

Some time ago I picked up a magazine that contained an article by Red Smith, a man whose work I try not to miss. The article was about the job of sports writer for a metropolitan newspaper and it opened with an account of an overnight journey from New York to a World's Series game in St. Louis. This was an eon or so ago, when Smith was a young man and I was a boy, and people travelled in sensible conveyances, such as railroad trains. The trip was a merry one, the activities including, among other things, much pleasurable and instructive chat. Smith didn't report the latter in any detail. But the point was that it was pleasurable and instructive and it lasted the whole night. Smith went on to say that sports writers are not paid much, in money, but that if you threw in the psychic income of pleasant afternoons in the sun and nights spent in the company of affable and intelligent eccentrics, they did pretty well.

New economic historians' explanations of market activity slight the timing of change, as well as the importance of institutions and attitudes. These deficiencies, unimportant in analyses of goods market activity, are unacceptable in analyses of political activity. To extend the domain of economic history to political activity, therefore, I summarize the political market in sentiment (what voters want ex ante), loyalty (what voters want ex post), and acquiescence (what voters accept). To show how these measures facilitate analysis of political activity, I discuss the origins of the American Civil War.

Volumes, prices, and composition of Hungarian trade are analyzed, focussing on the effects of association with Austria in a political and customs union in a time of increasing protectionism. The author concludes that the relative improvement in terms of trade with Austria compared to overall trade was an incomplete amelioration of a strong pre-existing pro-Austrian bias in the tariff system. Tariff policy strongly favored both countries' traditional exports, with the consequence that the structure of trade with Austria changed little, while that with the outside world was dramatically altered. Hungary's efforts at quasi-independence, especially with respect to import substitution in manufactures at Austrian expense, were essentially ineffective. The text and appendices contain numerous tables and descriptions of trade for important commodities and commodity groups.

Based on British and American primary sources, this article analyzes Anglo-American differences in the reconstruction of the international monetary order. London wanted a worldwide gold exchange standard to bolster its relatively weak financial position. The U.S. pushed instead for the gold standard. Winston Churchill returned to the gold standard largely because he feared economic isolation from the Dominions, especially South Africa, which had accepted private American advice to return regardless of Britain. Anglo-American wrangling continued over the Genoa proposals, loan regulation and war debts. Heavy gold exports were a primary factor in Federal Reserve rate increases in early 1928.

During the past twenty-five years American economic historians have made substantial progress in improving the quantitative measures of the nation's economic performance in the nineteenth century. Using New Hampshire as a case study, this paper attempts to build on this earlier research in the area of late-nineteenth-century American agriculture; the primary focus is on Richard Easterlin's estimates of state and regional income. The research reported here suggests that Easterlin's estimates need to be revised on the basis of state-level analysis and that in their present form his figures may lead to erroneous conclusions about the regional distribution of service income in late-nineteenth-century America.

Wars in early modern times, although frequent, generated little price inflation because of their limited demands on real resources. The invention of paper currency and the resort to deficit financing to pay for wars changed that situation. In recent centuries wars have been the principal causes of inflation, although since World War II programs of social welfare unmatched by offsetting taxation have also fueled inflationary flames.