This article examines the economic costs to the British nation of the Seven Years War. Drawing upon manuscript records and secondary studies, the author analyzes in detail the diversion of resources to the Navy and the effect of increased debts on the economy. Finding that the burden was great but the impact apparently slight, the author suggests that the English may have drawn substantially upon extra-national sources of capital, labor and materials.

The rapid industrialization of pre-war Japan depended upon extensive use of mechanical power. This dependence is studied quantitatively based on historical statistics of power for the years from 1890 to 1940. The introduction of engines (the change from human to mechanical power) and shifts in the kinds of engines (from water wheels to steam engines to electric motors) are clarified by industry group. The impact of these changes on technological progress in manufacturing is revealed.

The weakness of the Ch'ing land tax system is manifested in the gradual reduction of the tax burden. This weakness can be traced to two practices: that of commutation and a fixed tax quota. A model is provided to analyze these practices and their impact on the tax burden. The empirical data of Su-chou and Sung-chiang prefectures are used to implement the theoretical analysis. It is found that the tax burden was reduced enormously, about 50 percent by 1830. The article includes one table, five figures, and one appendix.

This article begins by disputing the claim by some scholars that the concept of a demographic transition is not applicable to Japan. Next, analysis of differentials and trends in natality over the period 1920 to 1960 suggests that changes in infant mortality and the degree of child employability may have been crucial reasons for Japan's modern fertility decline. In the short run, costs of birth regulation significantly helped determine levels of marital fertility. But in the long run, changes in such costs, without changes in attitudes toward desired number of births, could not have caused fertility decline.

This article explains the emergence of a plantation economy in the antebellum sugar sector. The hypothesis of increasing returns to scale was tested using a Zellner-Revankar generalized production function model. Economies of scale were found using samples from the manuscript censuses, but these scale economies diminished with size. A second important factor in explaining the size distribution of farms was the dual technology in the manufacturing stage of sugar production. Farms with inferior horse-power mills had poorer survival records and less flexibility in expansion than those using steam power mills.

This article analyzes the growth and distribution of agricultural tenancy in Iowa from 1850 to 1900. For the period before 1880 (when the published censuses did not record land-tenure data), it estimates tenancy rates based on a twelvecounty sample. It analyzes several explanations of the causes of tenancy and concludes that it was a natural outgrowth of a normally operating market system rather than a sign of economic malfunction. The article argues that the widening margin between current rates of return to land and mortgage interest rates explains much of the growth in tenancy. It also finds that regional specialization in farming largely explains the spatial distribution of tenancy by 1900.

This article explores the determinants of wealth for seventeenth-century Englishmen living in three very different environments—Worcestershire, East London, and Tidewater, Virginia. Wealth differences among these regions can be described in terms of the particular mix of occupational status groups, age groups, and literates each possessed. When all of these variables are accounted for, region becomes an insignificant determinant of wealth. Occupational status, predictably, had the primary influence on wealth, but the system, through provisions for age and education, also made definite allowances for the ability to use and consume resources efficiently.

This study, based on primary sources, shows that the army's role in the wartime mobilization of the industry was fundamental and extensive. It determined aircraft prices and labor exemptions, regulated the industry's supply of credit and raw materials, limited patent rights, and ultimately interfered in management-labor relationships. Its policies resulted in the industry's expansion and concentration and in above average real wages for the industry's labor force. The article concludes that while the mobilization of the aircraft industry was successful, military regulation of the German war economy in World War I was generally inefficient.

This article aims to determine what changes occurred in Britain's control over its Latin American investments between 1865 and 1913. This is done by examining trends in the direct-portfolio composition of total investment and of private investment, as well as that of each industrial grouping. A major finding is the rise of British private portfolio investment. Differences in the capital market instruments used in each type of investment are analyzed as is the nationality of those controlling private portfolio investment. Finally, there is an assessment of major factors associated with the rise of the private portfolio component of investment.

It has been widely believed that demand elements, jointly with supply shifts, were crucial in determining the timing, location, and general characteristics of the Industrial Revolution in England and Continental Western Europe. The possible forms which the role of demand might have taken are specified and examined both theoretically and empirically. While demand factors cannot be ruled out altogether, they were definitely of a secondary order of importance. Neither exogenous increases in the demand for manufactures, nor induced technological change are likely to have been a factor of decisive importance. A macroeconomic interpretation of the “demand hypothesis” is examined and rejected.

This article presents annual slave export figures for western Guinea, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Congo North, Angola, and southeast Africa. The sum of exports from these regions yields exports from Africa as a whole. The series are derived from imports into the Americas and thus include estimates of the African origin of slave imports into Cuba, Brazil, and the French Caribbean, estimates of slave mortality on the transatlantic crossing, and slaves captured by the British navy. Exports from some individual African points of embarkation are also included.

The Old South's economic stake in western land expansion and slave migration is examined in a two-region, general equilibrium model of slave mobility. The model separates the effect on the Old South's assets and slave population of more western land from that of slave sales per se. The authors conclude that the Old South had no economic stake in the New South. The most conservative estimate reveals that a doubling of western lands in 1850 would have increased Old South wealth by less than two percent.

Several accounts have documented the difficult employment experiences of immigrants in manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century. A recent quantitative study, however, has asserted that wage differentials between immigrants and natives were the result of differences in skill, and not discrimination. We examine the same data on a less aggregative level, and our regression analysis indicates that the so-called “new” immigrants received lower wages than either “old” immigrants or natives—even after standardizing for worker skills and industry characteristics. An analysis of a second data set confirms the finding of discrimination.

Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency.