For many Western countries the history of the last two centuries reveals both a sustained rise in per capita output and a tendency toward a more equal distribution of the economic product. The experience has been characterized, however, by repetitive fluctuations in the levels and growth rates of aggregate production and its components. The length of the shorter of these fluctuations, the business cycle, ranges from the 40- to 45-month inventory cycle to the so-called Juglar of seven to ten years. Two other classes of interruptions in the secular trend have also been singled out for study by economic historians. The first is the Kondratieff cycle, a movement of roughly fifty years which has been primarily identified in price series. The second is the Kuznets cycle, or “long swing,” which in length is between the Juglar and the Kondratieff. The long swing constitutes the primary theme of this study.

One seemingly certain characteristic of the social structure of Europe between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries was the persistence in power, wealth, and eminence of limited numbers of individuals or families. These made up the aristocracies, the nobilities of feudal origin, the ennobled officeholders of the new monarchies, and the patrician oligarchs of the towns. Political structures provided these families with privileged status and favored their preservation of wealth and influence, while a relatively slow rhythm of economic change and growth in general population tended to secure them against displacement by newcomers. In Italy, distant from the new centers of Atlantic trade, where tensions between absolutism and traditional liberties were fought out mainly within the ruling groups themselves, this stratification of society seemed almost a “new feudalism” in the seventeenth century as the powerful families of the petty courts consolidated their power.

AS Hugh Aitken explained in our September issue, the editorship of this, the spring number of THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, which in memory of Edwin F. Gay is entitled also THE TASKS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, falls now on someone involved in preparing the program for our annual meeting. Except in our business meeting and in the session devoted to discussing doctoral dissertations, we met last fall with the International Economic History Association. Accordingly we are presenting here, in addition to the summaries of dissertations, a few of the papers which were prepared for the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association and which were discussed at its meeting at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10–14, 1968. This issue of THE JOURNAL may be considered a kind of supplement to the volume containing the proceedings of the Congress, a volume which is in the process of publication by the University of Indiana Press. In order to minimize delays in the publication of those proceedings, the Executive Committee of the International Economic History Association approved restricting its content to the rapports and brief summaries of the communications. Other outlets are being found for the full texts of the many valuable communications presented for discussion at Bloomington.

The success with which capital funds are mobilized and transferred to industrial and related activities is widely regarded as a critical determinant of both the timing and the pace of industrialization in the modern era. Gerschenkron, for example, has suggested that institutional developments which increased this type of capital mobility played an important role in the varying degrees of industrial progress of nineteenth-century European countries. A functionally similar development, resulting from government intervention at the time of the Civil War, occurred in American banking and provided a powerful capital-supply stimulus for the United States's postbellum industrialization. This study deals with the origins of this banking development, presents an analysis of its potential effects on patterns of capital movement, and tests the hypotheses arrived at in the theoretical analysis using banking data derived primarily from the Reports of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Since the time of Malthus and possibly earlier the prevailing theory of the birth rate has connected births to the’ mother's age at marriage, which in turn is related to current economic and social conditions. In this manner changes in the economy are tied to changes in the birth rate and thus, even more indirectly, to changes in the rate of growth of the population.

While it is inevitable that the word “capitalism” will be used by various participants at the Congress in various senses, some mutual understandings concerning the different meanings likely to be intended may help to clarify the discussions. The following is an attempt (a) to indicate the different usages which will probably occur, (b) to suggest modifying adjectives or substitute terms by which the different meanings may be distinguished, and (c) to indicate relevant historical questions.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth, American agriculture was expanding and improving under the influence of growing demand, the westward movement, mechanization of farm operations, and scientific farming developments. Under these influences, yields and labor productivity in field crops generally increased. Until recently, however, little has been known about the course of productivity change in specific agricultural activities during the nineteenth century. Dairy production was an important component of the American farm economy, accounting for about 16 percent of U.S. farm output at the beginning of the twentieth century and approximately 14 percent of gross income from farm production in 1910. Changes in dairy yields during the period 1850–1910 have been analyzed previously. The purpose of this article is to estimate labor input time, to measure the change in average labor productivity in U.S. dairy farming, and to examine the economic implications of this change, thus extending the analysis to another component of the dairy production function. The necessary data were estimated with techniques that utilized available fragmentary data in conjunction with information in literary material.

By-Employments, one may suppose, tend to ready preindustrial people for modern economic roles since they represent an incipient shift from agriculture to other occupations, spread skills useful to industrialization among the most backward and numerous part of the population, and stimulate ambition and geographical mobility. Although widespread in Western preindustrial societies, by-employments have been mainly treated there from the standpoint of the history of industry to the neglect of their effect on the habits, aptitudes, and outlook of fanners and their wives and children. This is partly due to the scattered and widely varied and changing forms of by-employments, which make it all but impossible to know what proportion of farmers practiced them and what part of their income they earned in this way.

There is widespread agreement among historians of the colonial period, as there was among contemporary observers, that a significant deficit existed in the American colonies' balance of trade with Great Britain. That a large deficit did exist in the late colonial period is shown by estimates of commodity trade given in Table 1 for the period 1768 through 1772 (for which period statistics of all legal overseas trade exist in the “American Inspector-General's Ledgers”). It is clear from Table 1 that the overall deficit in the commodity trade with the British Isles was due mainly to the deficits incurred by New England and the middle colonies. Similarly, it appears that on the average for this five-year period, the southern colonies, as well, incurred a deficit—although a small one—in their commodity trade with Great Britain.

This paper, as presented at the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association, is the first of four concerned with economic growth in England before the industrial revolution, in what, for purposes of brevity and analytical distinction, I propose to call “preindustrial England.” It might be prudent for this period to talk of “economic change” (“the movement of economic processes over time”) rather than “economic growth” (“the growth of output per head of population”), because change does not necessarily imply growth, and because, for the thousand years which preceded English industrialization, the historians are uncertain about the direction and duration of the secular trend of the economy over long periods, although they seem to have identified some periods of growth as well as some periods of decline.

The article entitled “Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues,’ published in the March 1969 issue of this Journal, was written by R. M. Hartwell(Ronald Max, if Christian names are required) and not by Richard M. Hartwell. The Editor regrets the error and any misunderstandings that may have resulted.

To those senior citizens and somewhat younger members of our guild who attended the 1949 annual meeting of the Association at Rutgers University, the death of Professor Ashton last September may revive memories of his lively participation in the program of that meeting. Others may have met him during his spring semester as visiting professor at Johns Hopkins in 1952, with side trips to some eastern campuses followed by a summer school stint at Columbia. Meanwhile the publisher's royalty statements indicate that tens of thousands of students in this continent and elsewhere yearly continue to buy his classic little volume The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948).

Alexander Gerschenkron has suggested that certain characteristics of development during a country's initial period of industrialization, or “great spurt,” can be better understood if reference is made to that country's degree of relative backwardness just prior to the spurt. Referring to the European countries which began their rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, Gerschenkron stated that the greater a country's relative backwardness on the eve of its spurt (1) the more rapid was the subsequent rate of manufacturing growth, (2) the greater was the stress on bigness of the size of plant and enterprise, (3) the greater was the stress on producers’ goods as opposed to consumers’ goods, (4) the less rapid was the increase in the level of consumption, (5) the greater was the role played by special institutional factors designed to speed industrialization, and (6) the less the agricultural sector contributed to economic growth, as measured by the rate of increase in agricultural labor productivity.

This Article summarizes the main findings of a detailed. study of the changing occupational and industrial structure of Mexico's non-agricultural labor force from 1895 to 1930 and from 1930 to 1950, based on a comparison of population censuses, especially those of 1895, 1930, and 1950. Structural changes in Mexico's labor force have never been adequately studied, and the results of the present research shed considerable new light on Mexico's development. The findings also suggest important paradoxes and discontinuities in the early stages of industrialization that merit systematic recognition in models and measurements of structural change over the course of development.

When we ask ourselves the question why India failed to industrialize (and develop a capitalistic economy) either before or after the British conquest, we touch the core of an old and hallowed controversy in which the partisans and opponents of British imperiahsm once confronted each other. To admirers of British rule, generally, it seemed that the fault lay with certain inherent weaknesses in Indian society. The influence of an “enervating climate,” the heritage of “oriental despotism” and recurring cycles of anarchy (inhibiting the accumulation and investment of capital), primitive techniques and ignorance, the rigidities of the caste system, the prevailing spirit of resignation rather than enterprise, all created conditions in which nothing but a subsistence economy could function. From such wretched beginnings, the British could not, whatever they did, lift Indian economy to European levels. The critics of imperialism saw things in a different light. They insisted that the primitive nature of Indian economy before British conquests ought not to be overstressed, and they ascribed India's backwardness chiefly to the strangulating effects of British rule, to “the drain of wealth,” the destruction of handicrafts, heavy taxation, and discrimination against Indian industry and capital. It will thus be seen that though the controversy involved a number of important aspects of modern Indian economic history, in part at least it centered on the potentialities of development in the Indian economy prior to the British conquests.

He who looks for the term “capitalism” in the Islamic sources of the Middle Ages will look in vain. On the other hand, the term “capital” has been known since the beginning of Islamic culture. Even in the Holy Book of Islam, in the Sūrat al-Baḳara, the idea of capital appears in connection with trade, business, and the illicit practice of loaning for profit—usury. “O you who believe, keep your duty to Allah and relinquish what remains [due] from usury, if you are believers. But if you do [it] not, then be apprised of war from Allah and His messenger; and if you repent, then you shall have your capital. Wrong not, and you shall not be wronged.” In the same Sūrah God forbids usury but not Bai', trading, or buying. At another place God's commands clear the way for investments. “O you who believe, devour not your property among yourselves by illegal methods, although you may engage in trading by mutual consent. And kill not your people. Surely Allah is merciful to you.”The Islamic merchant tried to follow this system of ethics.

The economic development of the American colonies is one of the least explored areas in American economic history. Since the several regions in the colonies followed somewhat different paths of development, the colonial puzzle can be gradually pieced together through research which concentrates on particular regions. The subject of this study is an important aspect of the development of the tobacco colonies during approximately the thirty years preceding 1770. George Rogers Taylor and Jacob M. Price have suggested that the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century brought “rapid economic growth” to the tobacco colonies and a “marked resumption of growth” in tobacco exports. The findings of this study will suggest some reservations concerning the leading role of tobacco during this time. The series on American tobacco exports to Great Britain suggests that there was virtual stagnation in the first quarter of the eighteenth century followed by perhaps a doubling of exports in the second quarter and then near stagnation in the third quarter until the year 1771. The reason for the leap in tobacco exports in 1771 to a high plateau of approximately 100 million pounds annually during 1771–1775 is unknown. What is important for analysis of the growth and development of the tobacco colonies, however, is that the exceptionally high exports in the last five years of the colonial period tend to mask what was apparently a slow and erratic growth in world demand for American tobacco exports in the immediately preceding decades. The assumption that tobacco was a booming sector in the economy of the upper South at this time is open to question.

The Purpose of this article is to clarify some historical features of Brazilian economic development in order to gain some insight into the process of long-term growth. The recent extension of the principal macroeconomic time-series to 1920 and the publication of several specialized monographs provide the material for such an analysis. We will begin with a consideration of the timing of Brazilian industrialization and, more important, of the conditions in which it took place. Such a discussion is all the more necessary since it appears that some of the stock ideas concerning Brazilian economic development before 1939 require revision.

NEXT to John Law's Banque Royale, the most important mercantilist monetary experiment attempted in western Europe during the pre-Adam Smith era took place in Sweden. The Bank of Sweden (Riksens Ständers Bank), which had been established as a national bank in 1688, was used by the Swedish government in the mid-eighteenth century as an engine for economic development. Sweden's experiment in paper money mercantilism gave rise to an active debate which may be called the “Swedish bullionist controversy” because of its similarity to the monetary debate in England at the outset of the nineteenth century. This controversy took place in a highly charged political environment. Political power in Sweden from 1739 to 1772 was centered in the Swedish Riksdag, a representative body composed of the Four Estates: burghers, nobles, clergy, and peasants. Within this organization, the mercantile class predominated by virtue of its control of the influential House of Burghers when the Riksdag was in session and its control of the Secret Committee, which directed government policy when the Riksdag was not in session. The two political parties—the Hats and the Caps—vied with one another for control of the government from 1739 to 1772, a span including most of the epoch known in Swedish history as the “Age of Freedom,” 1719–1772. Participants in the bullionist controversy typically fell into one or the other political camp, and the political element is strong in most of the economic literature of the period. The two political parties locked horns on the issue of the “correct” monetary policy. At stake in the struggle was not only the correctness of economic theories and policies but, ultimately, also the viability of the Swedish parliamentary form of government. It is the purpose of this article to review the policies of the Riksbank in the mid-eighteenth century and to examine the economic theories of the two contending political parties.