A new study of labor in France in the earlier nineteenth century seems justified for two reasons. First, a change in the point of view is desirable. Labor in that period has been treated as a movement related to political factors and to socialistic and other doctrines. I feel that it should be studied now in the light of the changes wrought in the lives of the French people by the advent of large-scale industry with its factories, machinery, and concentration of capital. It is important to realize that much of the unemployment from which French laborers suffered in this period was due to those recurrent crises in industry and trade which we now study as parts of the business cycle. We have been taught wrongly to believe that while England suffered from these crises early in the nineteenth century France was virtually exempt until 1857. Secondly, the study of French labor needs revision in the light of new evidence and of a reappraisal of some of the familiar evidence.

In his autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back on the long crusade that ended with the abolition of Negro bondage in the United States, declared: “The anti-slavery movement was not strongest in the educated classes, but was primarily a people's movement, based on the simplest human instincts and far stronger … in the factories and shoe-shops than in the pulpits and colleges.” Few people have challenged this statement, which Higginson made in 1898; probably because the scarcity of material on the subject has prevented a thorough examination of all its implications, and especially of the main argument that the laboring man was the real force behind the antislavery crusade.Yet there is sufficient evidence to throw serious doubt upon the accuracy of Higginson's statement, evidence which reveals that workers in shops and factories often exhibited an almost callous unconcern for the entire crusade.

Strangely enough, up to the present day, commercial documents have contributed almost nothing to our knowledge of trade between Europe and India or China in the Middle Ages. The actual management of a voyage to “the Indies,” as India and China were designated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, has remained obscure because our evidence about commerce has come from sources mainly concerned with other matters.

Perhaps in no other stage in history has a rapidly changing pattern of economic life raised so many acutely disturbing economic problems as it did in England during the last decade of the eighteenth and the first few decades of the nineteenth century, even as there have been few periods in which the body of economic thought has been more enriched. The era that included the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1814) and the postwar period witnessed such historic events as the suspension of specie payments by the Bank of England, modification of the corn laws, industrial depression, widespread introduction of machine technology, and the Luddite riots. Little wonder that the brilliant minds of Malthus, Ricardo, James Mill, Bentham, and many others were stimulated by the troublesome issues of the day.

The steamboat was the first great American contribution to modern technology. First developed to the point of practical commercial success in this country, the steamboat was quickly incorporated into the economic structure of the nation and within a few years became the principal vehicle of transportation on the main channels of inland commerce. Eventually the influence of the American steamboat was felt all over the globe, and there were few great river systems that in time did not feel the beat of the paddlewheels by which it was propelled.