The gold money of the Byzantine Empire “is accepted everywhere from end to end of the earth. It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it.” These boastful words of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a contemporary of Justinian die Great, are a typical expression of die pride of die Greek nation. Cosmas was a monk who tried to demonstrate from the Scriptures that the earth was flat, but in his youth he had been an adventurous merchant and traveler, and well he knew where the true primacy of his nation lay. While die armies of Justinian had not marched as far as those of Trajan, and his law was not enforced in all die countries which had obeyed Theodosius, the monetary empire of New Rome was even greater than that of Old Rome. The gold nomisma (or bezant, as die Westerners later called it) was as peerless as die sovereign whose effigy it bore. Procopius, another contemporary of Justinian die Great, stated: “It is not right for die Persian king or for any odier sovereign in die whole barbarian world to imprint his own likeness on a gold stater, and that, too, though he has gold in his own kingdom; for they are unable to tender such a coin to those widi whom they transact business.”

American historians have commonly given attention to the manner in which the Federal Government stimulated the early growth of railroads by the remission of tariff duties on railway iron and particularly by land grants after 1850. They have said little about government promotion of railroads before the Civil War through the provision of engineering services. But this engineering aid was a major element in the initial progress of railroading and is an important aspect of the history of government economic policy toward transportation and science. This government aid is here discussed in terms of (1) the technical assistance given to railroads directly by the Army engineers and (2) the indirect stimulus given to railroads by government promotion of engineering science.

The problem of the distribution of the agrarian product in feudalism is not at all new. It has been raised frequently by European historians and at the beginning of the 1930's led to a scientific controversy in Poland. The following article sets itself two tasks: first, to acquaint the American reader with contributions to the subject that may not be known in this country; second, to suggest an economic theory applicable to the problem. Not being an economist by profession, I will not attempt a theoretical analysis at length, but I hope, by a discussion of various approaches to the problem, to bring us closer to a solution.

Leland H. Jenks and Thomas C. Cochran have suggested that the actions and motivations of modern businessmen be studied through the examination of “sanctions,” the latter defining “social sanction” as “a label for certain types of opinion or attitudes” involving judgments on what is worthy of praise and blame and of social penalties and rewards. When speaking of sanctions, we deal, he says, with a “general concept that stresses the stabilizing function of adages, admonitions, social ceremonies, traditional practices, and other such devices for protecting society from unpredictable behavior.” I believe this concept is a good tool for comparing two cultures of the same period or the same culture at two different periods, for showing the possibilities of, say, the Point Four Program, or for explaining otherwise inexplicable differences in the rate of capitalistic development. But considerable theoretical deliberation and many empirical studies are needed before it can be forged into a tool that can be widely used for research in entrepreneurship. This discussion is concerned with some considerations in connection with the application of the concept to the study of American businessmen and the freedom of enterprise in the nineteenth century.

Joseph Schumpeter had more influence on professional economic thinking than any other economist of his generation with the one exception of Keynes. His influence was exerted through numerous articles and books written and published in many languages; it was exerted even more through his teaching; his world-wide fame attracted students from everywhere and through them his influence spread to all the corners of the world in which economics is taken seriously.

Since its publication in 1949 Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has been received as a major addition to the literature of early modern history. In France, the excitement over this eleven-hundred-page work has centered on what would appear to be its revolutionary innovations in historical method. Lucien Febvre, for example, in an article in the Revue historique, after describing the book as more than a “perfect work of an historian with a profound grasp of his métier” and even more than a “professional masterpiece,” declared that the book introduces a revolution in the mode of conceiving history. “It marks,” said Febvre, “the dawn of a new time, of that I am certain.” His article concluded with this charge to youth: “Read, re-read, and meditate on this excellent book. … Make it your companion. What you will learn of things, new to you, about the world of the sixteenth century is incalculable. But what you will learn simply about man, about his history and about history itself, its true nature, its methods and its purposes—you cannot imagine in advance.” Braudel himself devoted an article in the Revue économique to elaborating the method used in his book and presented it to economic historians for their consideration.