In the December 1968 issue of this Journal, Professors Officer and Smith question the “classical and generally accepted view of Reciprocity.” A careful reading of earlier writing on this subject casts doubt upon the novelty of their conclusions. D. C. Masters, one of their authorities, was aware of the limited effects of the Treaty. In Reciprocity, 1846-1911, he writes, “To a considerable extent the prosperity of the period, including the increase in American-colonial trade, was the result of factors other than the treaty itself.” My note raises questions about the authors' use of customs union theory (Part I) and their interpretation of the data (Part II).

The pioneers' trek across the land has long been taken as a central element in American social history. But that redistribution of resources has been no less vital in fueling the advance of productivity, in supporting the varying pattern of final outputs. Because migration both caused, and was a consequence of, these massive changes there has long been an interest in measuring the scope and detail of population redistribution.

The theme of this conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” implies a concern for specifying the limits of the applicability of classical and neo-classical economic theory. Presumably because we sociologists have been in the forefront of those who insist on the recognition of these limits, I have been asked to present a paper from the viewpoint of historical sociology. Now I suppose that your field and mine are alike in at least one respect: the infrequency of finding any one view on a broad and significant question. I am sure you will understand, therefore, my concentration on some lessons to be learned from the work of one of the heroes of my discipline, Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber, as you may know, was, among his other titles, a professor of economics and avoided the epithet of “sociologist.” Yet because sociology has changed since his day, largely under his influence, and because he was also a professor of law and of political science, we sociologists have now claimed him. Nevertheless, many of the issues that informed his massive scholarly research were and are issues central to both your field and mine.

On January 2, 1837, in Kirtland, Ohio, a bank which was founded upon divine revelation, which had no charter, whose officers were not bankers, and whose capital base was narrow, opened its doors for business. These, characteristics probably did not differentiate the bank too much from the hundreds of other such institutions begun in this period. But the circumstances attending the founding of the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, or more accurately, the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, and the record of its operations are sufficiently different from the run-of-the-mill wildcat bank to justify a closer look at the colorful history of this institution.

It is indeed a pleasure to be invited to address economists and economic historians regarding the dynamics of peasant economic integration into a national economic system. The particular subject of these meetings, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and their Evolution,” is an appropriate one for us since, as anthropologists, we are generally interested in the “Evolution of the Organizational Forms of Life.” Today we will examine the organizational form of peasant economic life in Brazil in an effort to develop a fuller understanding of the socio-economic transactions which take place within this traditional—better, transitional—agrarian society.

In his comment “Canadian-American Reciprocity,” R. E. Ankli raises a number of conceptual, methodological, statistical, and interpretive issues about our article, “The Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty of 1855 to 1866.” Although some points are well raised, the majority appear to stem from a misunderstanding of our work. Nevertheless, it should be stated at the outset that despite his criticisms, Ankli does not quarrel with our conclusions that (1) Reciprocity cannot conclusively be said to have benefited Canada; (2) Reciprocity alone did not appreciably increase Canadian trade; and (3) Reciprocity was not necessarily beneficial from a welfare standpoint. In fact, Ankli seems concerned that others may have hinted at these conclusions previously. While we feel our conclusions do differ essentially from the traditionally-stated views, our purpose was not to quibble over who first said what, but rather to introduce more meaningful and comprehensive data and to analyze the question in the context of modern trade theory.

The recent contribution by Knauerhase in this Journal raises some important issues regarding productivity change in ocean shipping in the late nineteenth century. The study is limited to the German fleet for the period from 1871 to 1887, but the findings do bear on the decline of freight rates after 1870. The traditional argument, which is now less in vogue, is that steam played the significant role in the last half of the nineteenth century and was the main source of advancing productivity. The novelty and importance of the findings by Knauerhase is that they support this hypothesis. The evidence given by Graham, on the other hand, points to the 1870's as a period when the sailing vessel underwent significant productivity change and experienced revived growth. This position has been buttressed by North, who argues that sail dominated the long-haul routes where most of the goods were carried and where the reduction in freight rates was most dramatic.

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”

The Resnick paper is a report on the working out of comparative advantage in the three countries over nearly seventy years. It starts out with a model based on production possibilities curve analysis, terms of trade shifts, and income and substitution effects. An offer curve results that implies that, at least within a range, labor and other resources shift from cottage and craft production (Z goods) to farm production (F) in which there is comparative advantage and which is exported in exchange for increased imports (M). In each of the three countries statistics and descriptive material are interpreted in terms of the model.

Though Social critics have often spoken of the “wage slavery” associated with modern capitalism, it is more common to believe that coerced labor was banished with the coming of modern standards of civilization. Thus the corvee of ancient China, the feudalism of Western Europe and Japan, and the New World enslavement of blacks in the 17th-19th centuries are seen as products of those earlier and less enlightened ages, mere way stations in the historical evolution of modern day economies.

This paper attempts to provide an explanation of the formation and mutation of economic institutions. It is specifically concerned with that process as it has developed over the past one hundred and seventy-five years of American history, but with appropriate changes the model might be used to predict institutional change in the future and to explain institutional change in other nations and in other eras. Like more traditional theory, the model has been formulated in a manner that makes it in principle operational, although we admit that it predicts relatively little. Profit maximization is the motivating force, and in this sense too the model fits into the stream of neo-classical economics, although like the macro models of Keynes its subject has not traditionally been considered a part of that discipline. Finally, we admit that the theory is at some points woefully weak and the explanations at times incredibly simplistic. The work, however, does, we feel, represent a first step towards a useful theory of institutional change.