This article tests the claim that public water companies provided black communities with better service than did private water companies. It draws from three sources: typhoid fever rates in 1911 and 1921, waterborne disease rates in 14 North Carolina towns between 1889 and 1908, and investment patterns in cities with public and private water companies. A study of New Orleans, which municipalized its water system in 1908, complements the evidence that public ownership reduced white disease rates only slightly, but reduced black disease rates sharply. These surprising results have implications for contemporary policy debates and for understanding American history.

We estimate the extent of common land in England from 1475 to 1839, treating charity land as a sample. We find common was only 27 percent of land in 1600. Thus there was little common beyond what Parliamentary acts later enclosed. More tentatively, common was only one-third of land even in 1500. Further, common land in 1600 was mainly stinted, excluding those without formal property rights. Common waste, to which the landless poor did have access, constituted a mere 4 percent of land, and was mainly land of marginal value. Private property was thus the norm in England by 1600.

It is widely believed that one of the main causes of productivity decline in British coalmining in the late nineteenth century was that when wage rates increased, miners responded by reducing work effort and/or attendance. However, previous empirical studies have conflated behavioral responses with correlations between coal-seam quality and wage rates. Using individual panel data from a single mine, I show that the short-run wage elasticity of worker effort was in fact positive. The true elasticity of attendance is less clear, but there is no support for the idea that absenteeism increased when wage rates rose.

Earlier accounts of the creation of property rights in the California gold fields ignored culture and are incomplete. We argue that culture matters in solving collective-action problems. Such problems in the California gold fields were solved through reliance on cultural focal points. Focal points included individualism, equality, respect for property, and rewards commensurate to work. Cultural concepts of fairness served to create norms and institutions that miners were willing to defend, which included majority rule, election of officials, trial by jury, allocation of a first-come, first-served basis and rules for working claims.

Like Europeans and colonists, eighteenth-century Native Americans were purchasing a greatly expanded variety of goods. As fur prices rose from 1716 to 1770, there was a shift in expenditures from producer and household goods to tobacco, alcohol, and other luxuries by Indians who traded furs at the Hudson's Bay Company's York Factory post. A consumer behavior model, using company accounts, shows that Indians bought more European goods in response to higher fur prices and, perhaps more importantly, increased their effort in the fur trade. These findings contradict much that has been written about Indians as producers and consumers.

Recent research has suggested that the U.S. cotton-textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection throughout the antebellum period. We reaffirm Taussig's earlier judgment that the U.S. cotton-textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the early 1830s. American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were imperfect substitutes for one another. Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could easily have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.

This article reexamines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire's slow adoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additional transport costs and technical complementarities reduced ring adoption rates, these supply-side constraints were not dominant. Instead what mattered most were demand-side factors. Lancashire produced far more fine yarns than other countries, and this yarn was better spun on mules. Furthermore, Lancashire had a sizeable export trade in yarn, a market again more suited to mule spinning. Low ring adoption rates were thus a rational response to demand patterns dominated by high-quality goods.

An international sample of 349 British-owned firms is analyzed to test the effectiveness of the International Tea Agreements of 1930 and 1933. Although the agreements reduced output overall, in 1930 there were significant regional differences in the extent of compliance, with firms in Eastern India reducing output more than did firms in Ceylon. These differences can be attributed to regional differences in organizational structure. Archival evidence suggests that the breakdown of collusion in 1931 and 1932 was due to a bargaining conflict between established producers in India and Ceylon and the newer plantations of Java and Sumatra.

Producers of commodities like wheat and sugar may envy the facility with which the tea growing industry obtained a 30 percent rise in average tea prices and a 90 percent enhancement of tea share values—all within the space of a little more than six months.

The Economist, 26 August 1933

“It is impossible to say definitely what percentage of the movement of slaves to the lower South was comprised in the domestic slave trade.…”

L. C. GrayGray, History, p. 658.

Between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves moved from the exporting areas to the importing areas of the United States South.Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics, p. 47. Gutman and Sutch (“Slave Family,” p. 99) estimate “more than a million slaves entered the interstate migration between 1790 and 1860.” For other estimates of the net migration of slaves (or blacks) within the United States, see Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 61–67; Bancroft, Slave-Trading, pp. 382–406 and sources therein; Lang, Effects, pp. 57–72; Sutch, “Breeding,” pp. 178–80; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, pp. 159–64; and Tadman, Speculators, pp. 237–47. These slaves either moved with their owners as whole plantations or were bought by interregional traders and shipped to the lower South. Until recent years historians had no way of estimating the share of sales in the interregional movement of slaves. Consequently, most of the early quantitative estimates of the interregional slave trade were vague or deliberately imprecise.According to Weld (Slavery, p. 13), “perhaps four-fifths or more” of the slaves were transported through the interregional slave trade. For the period 1820 to 1850, Collins (Domestic Slave Trade, p. 62) estimated that less than two-fifths of the migrants were carried south through the trade. According to Phillips (“Racial Problems, p. 223),” The conjecture of about 25,000 per year which has often been made for the interstate slave trade is probably as just an approximation as can be had.…” Bancroft (Slave-Trading, p. 398) “supposes that” the slave trade accounted for 70 percent of the slave exports. Stampp (peculiar Institution, p. 239) suggests that the slave trade accounted for “perhaps a majority” of the slave exports. According to Miller (“Note,” p. 182), “Estimates indicate that from two-fifths to one-half of these [slaves] may have been sold by their owners and moved by slave-traders to newer regions. Presumption lies in favor of the lower estimate,…”

This article assembles new data and methods for studying wealth inequality trends in industrializing America. Inequality grew sharply between 1820 and 1850, leveled off, and increased steadily between 1870 and 1900. Inequality grew due to compositional changes in the population, but also grew within occupations, age groups, and the native-born population. Proposed labor-market explanations are inconsistent with the fact that wealth inequality between occupational groups was declining. Wealth accumulation patterns are also inconsistent with the hypothesis of child default on responsibilities for old-age care. We propose research on a new explanation based on luck, rents, and entrepreneurship.

Based on six sets of witnesses' accounts from the North of England and London over the period 1760 to 1830, new estimates of male labor input during the Industrial Revolution are derived. I present a new method of converting witnesses' activities into estimates of labor input, and derive confidence intervals. Working hours increased considerably. Moderate gains in per capita consumption during the Industrial Revolution have to be balanced against this decline in leisure. This adds further weight to pessimistic interpretations: I calculate that consumption per capita, adjusted for changes in leisure, remained essentially unchanged between 1760 and 1830.

Doug Irwin and Peter Temin offer a welcome study of the tariff and American industrialization. Although largely overlooked, the tariff significantly influences our interpretation of early American industrialization. If the tariff had no substantial effect, as Irwin and Temin argue, we view early American industrialization quite differently than if the tariff induced industrialization by diverting trade to otherwise noncompetitive firms within a customs union, as I believe. Although I welcome attention to the tariff, I feel that Irwin and Temin's argument rests on a misconception of the British cotton industry and of the nature of potential competition between American and British cloth in the absence of protection.

As the United States became more urbanized in the nineteenth century, local-government expenditures increased as local governments expanded their services in response to their growing populations. Expenditures at all levels of government increased substantially in the nineteenth century, but local governments grew more than either the states or the federal government. Total local-government expenditures increased along with the growing urban population, but expenditures per urban resident also increased substantially. The major expansion in local-government expenditures began in the 1830s. This study examines the period of transition to local-government growth from 1820 to 1870.See Davis and Legler, “Government”; Legler, Sylla, and Wallis, “U.S. City Finances”; and Wallis, government expenditures only back to 1880, 1850, and 1840 respectively. The first two used less comprehensive data than the present note, and Wallis (“American Government Finance”) gives summary data on local expenditures without discussing how they were calculated.

The 1911 Canada–United States Reciprocity Agreement had a central role in the campaigns of the Liberal and Conservative parties in the 1911 Canadian General Election. Consequently, Laurier's defeat in 1911 has been interpreted as Canada's rejection of reciprocity and her commitment to tariff protection. This analysis shows that reciprocity bolstered support for Laurier in 1911. In the absence of opposition from pork packers, particularly in Quebec, Laurier would have retained his majority mandate. Thus, Canada was not committing to a path of protectionism after 1911.

The long awaited publication of volumes II and III of the Cambridge Economic History of the United States (hereafter CEHUS) is a landmark in the historiography of the U.S. economy (volume I, on the colonial economy, appeared in 1996). A decade in the making, and appearing after the untimely death of one of its editors, Robert Gallman, these volumes will without doubt be accessed and accessed frequently as reference works in the twenty-first century. Not since 1972, when, under the editorial leadership of Lance Davis, Richard Easterlin, and William Parker, Harper and Row published American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States has a comparable multi-author work been attempted. In the event, ten of the original 12 contributors to that work are here for a return engagement.

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Editor-in-Chief, Wm. Roger Louis.

Volume I: The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxx, 553.

Volume II: The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 639.

Volume III: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 774.

Volume IV: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 773.

Volume V: Historiography. Edited by Robin W. Winks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 731.

The historiography of the British empire has long exuded a somewhat musty air, like a relict of glory preserved in faded regimental standards, hanging forlornly in English cathedrals or expressed in the overblown Edwardian baroque of the imperial capital. Even the names of the leading academic posts—such as the Rhodes professorship of Imperial History—now seem retrograde. The initiative has clearly moved elsewhere: as the empire's former subjects would scarcely wish to see their history written through the eyes and institutions of the colonizer, the history of India or Australia, Jamaica or Canada have forsaken the view from Whitehall and the governor's mansion, to become national history.

The Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to announce the recipients of its prizes for outstanding articles in early American economic history published during the year 2000. There were numerous distinguished nominations for this year's award, and we are most fortunate to be able to make these awards of outstanding scholarship. Please join us in recognizing the following: David Cowen, “The First Bank of the United States and the Securities Market Crash of 1792,” Journal of Economic History 60, no. 4 (December, 2000): 1041–6; and Robert Martello, “Paul Revere's Last Ride: The Road to Rolling Copper,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Summer, 2000): 219–39. The winners will be recognized at the annual awards banquet of the Economic History Association in September 2001 in Philadelphia.

The residual in equation 2 of Suchit Aurora's article in the September 2001 issue, “Health, Human Productivity, and Long-Term Economic Growth,” should have been shown as {\hat{\varepsilon}}_t to correspond to the notation used in equations 6 and 7. The corrected equation is \Delta\ln y_t = \mu + \xi\ln h_t + \sum\limits^{-m}_{i=m}\phi_i\Delta\ln h_{t+i}+\hat{\varepsilon}_t\qquad t=1,2,3,\ldots T

It is with much sadness that we bring news of the passing of Moses Abramovitz, our esteemed colleague and dear friend, who died on 1 December at the Stanford University Hospital, just a month before reaching his eighty-ninth birthday. He had been hospitalized with a gastroenterological condition for one week, during most of which time he remained alert and conversational; then succumbed to a sudden, unexpected infection.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.This dissertation was completed in September 1999 in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Russell R. Menard and Steven Ruggles. Financial support was provided by a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians.”