On the whole we don't treat old people well in this country, but old scholars probably fare better than most. We let them use our libraries and come to our annual meetings. Occasionally we have them chair a session on some not-too-current topic. We refer to them in footnotes and we thank them in prefaces. We donét, in other words, completely depersonalize them, cut them off from our lives and banish them from our ceremonies, as happens too often with other people of advanced age.

Few would deny that the U.S. economy is today dominated by huge corporations. Much recent writing has proposed that these corporations form a stable and monopolistic (or oligopolistic) “core” around which a more competitive “peripheral” sector exists. Firms in the core are said to be “eternal,” while firms in the periphery demonstrate the mortality and high turnover expected in competitive industries. In another context, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy emphasized the permanence of big corporations when they noted:

A Major theme in the historiography of American slavery is the analysis of the slave plantation as a capitalist market oriented enterprise. Much of the controversy surrounding the work of such scholars as Stanley Elkins, Kenneth Stampp and Eugene Genovese stems from differing views of the interaction of commercial capitalism with the ancient institution of slavery. A recurrent topic in this literature is the impact of the profit motive and competitive market conditions on the relationship between master and slave. A major concern is the extent these capitalist incentives may have motivated the master to either brutalize or ameliorate the conditions of the slave's existence.

We wish to thank the following who read earlier drafts of this paper and made useful suggestions and criticisms: Professors Jerry Fastrup, George Jensen, Roger Ransom, Richard Roseman, and an anonymous referee. This study is part of a larger project, “The Optimal Accumulation and Utilization of Slaves” (forthcoming), which extends both static and dynamic neoclassical models of the firm to cases involving slavery.

In recent years economic imperialism in reference to Africa is being re-evaluated, and it is now sufficiently clear from the emerging literature on the subject that very few serious scholars would rigidly apply the classical interpretation or interpret the partition of Africa only in economic terms. One of the most significant recent contributions on the subject which has stimulated much useful discussion and is provoking further research is A. G. Hopkins' article “Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–1892.” He cites the case of Lagos in order to explore some neglected economic aspects of the partition of West Africa and deals with the economic aspects of the scramble for Africa. To Hopkins the critics of economic imperialism have tended to underrate all other economic motives.

The untimely death of Raymond de Roover in March 1972 removed one of the major figures from the field of medieval economic history. Now there has appeared a collection of eleven of de Roover's articles, one of them not previously published, to remind us of the magisterial quality of their author's contributions to our knowledge of medieval business and banking techniques and the milieu in which the medieval man of business operated.

In a recent article in this Journal David Galenson presents an interesting hypothesis about the impact of changing relative prices on the cattle driving industry in the late nineteenth-century West. Briefly, he argues that movements of.cattle prices in the urban marketing centers relative to the local prices in the range areas affected the profitability of the industry and thus the quantity of cattle driven north from Texas. Unfortunately, in testing his hypothesis, Mr. Galenson has incorrectly interpreted the history of the southern Great Plains.

The problem of how North American medievalists should deal with social and economic history is one which seems to have some importance the present time. Two recent articles in the JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY are concerned with this matter. So are two others which have just appeared in the American Historical Review and which, since they examine quantitative history in general, throw light on this problem. Because of this kind of current interest, it was decided to hold a special session devoted to social and economic history at the recent semicentennial anniversary meeting of the Mediaeval Academy of America. This session was preceded by a questionnaire sent to 105 medieval historians of the United States and Canada who represented every field study, every age group, and every geographic area of this continent. Seventy replies were received and a lively discussion took place later at the meeting itself, which some thirty scholars attended. This article represents an attempt to sum up the results of both the survey and the subsequent discussion because it should be of value not only to medievalists but also to a wider body of scholars who share an interest in economic and social history in general.

This paper reviews the output of journal publications by the twenty five leading economic history programs during the past fifteen years. At present, there are no formal ratings of the quality of economic history programs at the various academic institutions, but journal publications can serve as a partial indicator of quality. The Roose-Andersen ratings graduate programs provide separate rankings of economics and history programs, but this information may not be appropriate in evaluating economic history programs, and the ratings have not been updated since 1969. Journal publications are certainly not the only measure of quality academic institutions, but journals are regarded as the standard outlet for disseminating new research findings and expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Those institutions that have concentrated their publication efforts on books, textbooks, monographs, working papers, and other nonjournal forms of publication will of course be underrepresented by the procedures followed in this paper.

In the nineteenth century, the British were popular throughout the west coast of South America as the cultural and economic allies of the ruling elites. The criollos of Peru and Chile, who had inherited the colonial social order, looked to France in matters of art and fashion but viewed the British as the providers of commerce and economic progress. They welcomed Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants as merchants, artisans, and prospective grooms. In Peru, the British played a key role in developing the market for guano (the fertilizer composed of bird excrement and the precursor of the nitrate, salitre, trade), and British ships took Chile's copper and wheat to England from the 1840's through the early 1870's. By 1870, the development of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the London Bank of Mexico and South America assured the British dominance of the commerce along the west coast.

In responding to Mr. Dennen, I welcome the opportunity to clarify several points that may have been misunderstood by the readers of this Journal. Mr. Dennen makes three main criticisms, which I will deal with in the order he raised them.

Milton Friedman and I have been engaged for some time in a study of the characteristic behavior of the quantity of money over long periods in relation to income, prices, and interest rates m the United States and the United Kingdom. In our study, our observations of levels are the average annual values of each variable during cyclical phases, starting with the expansion phase of 1878–1882 in the United States and 1879–1883 in the United Kingdom, and ending with the final phase that can be marked off for each country, respectively, 1969–1970 and 1968–1969. In all, we have forty-five observations of levels for the United States, and thirtythree for the United Kingdom. In addition to levels of observation, we also examine rates of change, which we express as the slopes of least-squares lines connecting three successive phase averages. For each country, the rate-of-change observations are two fewer than the number of level observations.

There is an erroneous omission in Jacob Metzer's article, “Railroad Development and Market Integration: The Case of Tsarist Russia,” which appeared in the September 1974 issue of this Journal. The error, is the omission of Qd in the second term of the numerator of equation (1) on page 546.