Economic historians generally agree that improvements in transportation were a significant aspect of nineteenth-century United States development, and the dramatic fall in transportation costs, 1815–1860, has been given special emphasis by a number of scholars. According to George R. Taylor, nothing less than a transportation revolution was experienced in the United States during this period

The major purpose of this article is to measure factor-saving biases in technical change within the American and British textile sectors during the nineteenth century. This empirical attempt will be made within the context of the historical debate concerning the causes for the superiority of American industrial efficiency as compared with the British.

The coastal trade of the British North American colonies, as well as the coastal trade among the American states and the remaining British colonies after the American Revolution and well into the nineteenth century, remains one of those areas in North American economic history about which we know very little. The broad outlines and patterns of this coastal trade, or various segments of it, have been described by others, but as Arthur L. Jensen has put it: “Trade among the continental colonies has been treated as something of a poor relation in many studies of colonial commerce.” The most serious inadequacy is the lack of any overall view of the specific patterns and magnitudes of the coastal trade and its relationship both to the overseas trades and to overall economic activity. Various and strikingly contrasting views have been expressed. One historian of transportation states: “Prior to the Revolution intercolonial commerce was inconsiderable, and intercolonial trade-routes, where they existed, were entirely inadequate.” On the other hand, Innis, in referring to the trade between Newfoundland and New England, states that in 1765 exports from New England to Newfoundland probably exceeded £200,000 sterling (including smuggling), and that by 1774 they had reached £.300,000 or £400,000.

The Program Committee prepared for the thirty-first Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association in a somewhat unorthodox way. In recent years it has been the custom first to choose a central theme for the conference, and then to solicit only those papers which amplify the theme. This year the program committee decided to forego the attempt to produce a unified set of essays. Instead we wrote to approximately 250 members of the Association and other scholars in the United States and abroad, inviting suggestions for papers without preconditions as to topic, time period, or methodology. Over 150 papers were proposed, from which the committee chose 15. All but one of these are published here. Herbert Gutman's, “Marriage Licenses and Registers Among Freed Men and Women, 1865–1866: New Light on the Family and Household Conditions of Slaves and Free Blacks,” will be published at a later date.

The federal policy of granting land in aid of railroad construction in the mid-nineteenth century has been the focus of many heated discussions. Both praised and attacked by contemporaries, it has remained a lively issue in the pages of history books and in journal articles. Several “land-grant legends” have developed, referring to different problems in the evaluation of these measures. At issue have been the question of the justification for land grants, the value of the benefits provided the railroads, and the determination of whether the government aid did provide net benefits to society as a whole. While the “land-grant legend” has been frequently buried, it has invariably been resurrected in one guise or another. In large measure this state of affairs has been due to the failure to specify fully the problems under discussion, and to approach systematically their resolution.

In studying the history of capitalism, one rarely encounters business enterprises without a capital stock or a profit account, founded and managed by men who expressed no desire for monetary rewards, and lacking owner-entrepreneurs. This paper deals with just such institutions—mutual savings banks. It has been recognized for some time that during the antebellum period mutual savings banks were relatively large and influential institutions. In 1860, when mutuals held a total of $150,000,000 in assets, the next most important type of non-bank financial intermediary, life insurance companies, held assets of only $24,000,000. More impressive was the size of some of the individual mutuals, for in 1860 several mutuals ranked among the ten largest business organizations in the country. Throughout most of the antebellum period the nation's largest mutual was the Bank for Savings in the City of New York. In 1825 this one bank held 56 percent of the nation's savings bank deposits; and ten years later, in 1835, it still accounted for over 34 percent of the country's deposits and 42 percent of its customers. Another New York institution—the Bowery Savings Bank—surpassed the Bank for Savings as the nation's largest mutual in 1860. At that time each of these banks commanded deposits in excess of $10,000,000 and a third New York mutual, the Seamen's Bank for Savings, was approaching that mark. In all, nineteen mutual savings banks were founded in New York City between 1819 and 1860. Table 1 shows the date that each bank opened for business, and the amount on deposit on January 1, 1861.

On this occasion it seems wise to take a leaf from Wassily W. Leontief's book as President of the American Economic Association. He discussed a problem of his organization. His presidential address was a plea for economists to limit their creation of models, especially those difficult of empirical testing, and to test some of those susceptible of verification. My remarks will also deal with a problem, one in the Economic History Association, how it came about, and what we might do about it.

This condition of affairs in the South introduced a vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families. As a policy, it is vindictive in its subtle sophistry; as a system, it has crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.…

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The work of H. J. Habakkuk, Peter Temin, Robert Fogel, and Nathan Rosenberg on the effect of relative factor price differentials between America and England in the nineteenth century on the course of technological development has generated considerable interest in providing some empirical evidence on the labor scarcity hypothesis. Briefly stated, the hypothesis claims that relatively higher wages in America brought about the invention and use in production of a relatively capital intensive technology, and since “technical possibilities were richest at the capital intensive end of the spectrum,” this phenomenon was somehow responsible for the unique characteristics of American technology, that is, interchangeable parts, certain machine tool developments, and the proliferation of self-acting mechanisms.

Between 1870 and 1900 American farmers organized in the Grange, the Alliances, and the Peoples (Populist) Party and protested against a variety of economic ills. Economic historians have generally explained the farm organizations and the protests in the same way that the farmers themselves explained them—in terms of low agricultural prices and high costs of inputs resulting in part from the monopolistic organization of the suppliers of those inputs. However, there now exists considerable evidence indicating that the economic conditions of the time were not: as the farmers depicted them, thus raising two questions: (1) if the farmers' statements about their economic state cannot be accepted as historical fact, then why were the farmers so angry? and (2) why did they choose to protest the issues which they did?

The literature of economic history abounds with studies of nineteenth century banking. Unfortunately, most of these studies have drawbacks which make them of limited use to the modern student of economic history. The most serious drawback is their almost unanimously institutional character, punctuated here and there with biographical sketches of past bank presidents and directors. Those studies which do offer solid quantitative evidence on banking practice and performance are often based on aggregate statistics compiled by state or national banking commissions and thus preclude the study of individual institutions or small groups of institutions which may have played a key role in the development of early banking practices. This article represents a detailed investigation of the largest non-chartered bank of the early nineteenth century, the Bank of Stephen Girard.

When examining the various aspects of Soviet society, and looking back at its antecedents in pre-revolutionary Russia, a certain continuity in institutions and economic policies emerges. This is in particular true in the area of banking and credit. The Soviet banking system, as it evolved after the October revolution, and, more specifically, after the credit reforms of 1930–1932, is unique in many respects. Surely, there are examples in non-socialist countries of banking institutions which combine central banking and commercial banking. In many cases, central banks of the less developed countries have assumed a leading role in implementing development programs and in creating the required financial institutions, instruments, and markets. In some leading industrial countries, such as France and Italy, as well as in a number of the newer countries, large commercial banks are owned by the government. The uniqueness of the Soviet banking system lies in the complete integration of monetary processes within the system of central planning, the credit monopoly of the State Bank of the Soviet Union (Gosbank) and its broad control powers over the performance of the entire state-owned segment of the economy.

This study of Indian behavior in the fur trade is offered more as a report of a study in progress than a completed piece of historical research. In fact, the research has barely begun. But in spite of its unfinished state, the tentative results of the work I have done to this point may be of some interest as an illustration of the way in which the recent revival of analytical interest in institutions may be used to develop an approach to the economic history of the fur trade.

Being a brief account of Northern money market conditions from 1861 through 1865, including representative empirical tables, together with yield curves and graphs, and containing speculations on the influence of gold.

Discussion of the role of internally generated funds as a dynamic and influential determinant of investment decisions has been renewed lately in the macroeconomic investment literature. While there is a current revival, the hypothesis is not a new one. In the classic study of the financial history of eight leading American automobile manufacturers over the period 1910 to 1926, Lawrence H. Seltzer concludes that “the greatest part of the growth in their capital resources was derived from reinvested profits; and that this source accounts for much the greater part of their present invested capital.” He estimates that for the period through 1926 net aggregate reinvested profits were equal, on average, to almost 80 percent of the value of tangible invested capital.3 Seltzer suggests that this remarkably high percentage was the result of the unique situation of the automobile industry, although carefully pointing out that the general importance of internal funds may be greater than commonly realized.

The role of law in relation to social change is not well understood. One reason for our ignorance is the lack of evidence on the causal role of legislation. Too often the efforts at social reform and the intended consequences of legislation are accepted as proof that behavior has been significantly altered. A case in point is legislation that compels children to attend school. Although it is commonly believed that such laws have been effective in increasing the participation of children in schooling systems in the United States over the last 100 years, there is little evidence to support or reject this belief. Some persons have questioned whether these laws have been the cause or the result of observed increases in school attainment. Still others have doubted the degree to which compulsory schooling laws have been enforced. Reports of widespread truancy in urban schools today call into question not only present enforcement difficulties but also whether these laws were effectively enforced from their inception in the nineteenth century. Yet, in spite of the contemporary and historical interest in compulsory school attendance laws, the basic question remains unanswered: what has been the effect, if any, of these laws on school enrollment and attendance?

As the key conveyance of nineteenth-century American industrialization and early experimentation with tariff policy, the antebellum textile sector has always received extensive attention by economic historians. In the past two decades, we have learned much about industrial financing, investment behavior, productivity growth, the nature of the production function, and the optimality of tariff policy, yet we remain ignorant still on some fundamental issues. One of these involves a better understanding of the equipment replacement decision under conditions of rapid growth, technological improvement, and variable tariff policies. But most importantly, the identification of sources of productivity improvement and their magnitude had remained inadequately understood until very recently with the appearance of Paul David's article in this Journal. David's important contribution applies aggregate production function analysis to textiles in an effort to isolate the determinants of labor productivity growth during the three decades preceding the Civil War. The model is neoclassical with a Cobb-Douglas specification, variable returns to scale, disembodied technical progress and with a learning variable explicitly introduced into the production function. David finds evidence of constant returns to scale, strong learning effects, high rates of disembodied technical progress, and improved labor quality, the latter sufficient to offset the alleged downward pressure on productivity attributable to a long-run decline in input (especially labor) utilization rates.

Recently the Atlantic slave trade has received scholarly attention through the work of European and American historians. Account books of European merchants engaged in the slave trade, studies of the exports of given continental ports, and analyses of special trade routes have all led to a greater understanding of the dynamics of the trade. Also, the important work of Philip Curtin on the volume and direction of the entire Atlantic slave trade has finally provided us with the rough parameters of the trade in terms of total numbers.

The initiating forces and contributing factors in the contraction of economic activity during the Great Depression have received a good deal of attention from students of economic history. The occurrence of concomitant falls in the price level and income level during the 1929–1934 depression period has often been cited as evidence of the real-balance effect's lack of empirical significance. In light of the recent developments in monetary theory regarding the contribution of demand deposit creation to net wealth, some reappraisal of the role of monetary wealth as a stabilizing influence in the depression period seems in order. The purpose of this article is to examine the endogenous determinants of the deposit ratios during a severe economic downturn and their relation to cyclical changes in the price level by which changes in business activity affect the stock of demand deposits, bank reserves, and thus the stock of bonds held by banks.