The literature on French economic history generally dates the onset of the agricultural revolution in France from the midnineteenth century. However, the available empirical evidence on national agricultural trends, brought together in 1961 by Toutain, shows that the rapid, sustained growth in both total and per capita agricultural production comes earlier, during the period from 1815–24 to 1865–74. This article explores the sources of this rapid national growth by assembling and analyzing previously unutilized regional data on production and hectares of major field crops. The southern diffusion of mixed farming is identified as the change in the productive process which may account for the French agricultural revolution.

A survey of the financial history of France in the years from 1781 through 1787 reveals two interrelated developments: an unprecedented series of loans opened by the state in an effort to meet growing war and postwar expenses and to service a burdensome debt, and a speculative boom which thrived on the confusion of public and private finance which the French revenue system allowed. Both developments are of central importance in any inquiry into public finance in the decade, and thus in any explanation of the financial origins of the French Revolution. Both were fed in part by the unprecedented volume of capital and credit available on the Parisian Bourse as on other European capital markets in this decade. But to an extent too little comprehended, both the increase in public indebtedness and the speculative boom were assisted by investments from abroad, investments which helped to obscure the enormous and onerous public debt in a mask of apparent soundness by responding readily to repeated calls for credit, and which likewise helped sustain the speculative mania through the extension of credit to the speculators themselves. It is known that Genevan, Genoan, and Dutch credit played some role in these events. Indeed, Genevan commitments have, to a degree, been clarified. But the Genoan and Dutch roles have remained vague, always cited but never detailed. What will be attempted here is an analysis of the Dutch role, of the structure and method of Dutch investments in France during this period in which such investments made some contribution to maintaining the appearance of public solvency while assisting Bourse expansion.

The economic development and decline of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile has been the subject of considerable research in the last few years, and it has long been assumed that the rise of Madrid played an important role in dislocating the economy of the region. Yet little direct attention has been paid to the actual processes whereby a distinctive type of urban growth, the development of a political capital, undermined the relationship between town and country which was the basis of the economic activity of sixteenth-century Castile. The rapid growth of Madrid, in fact, coincides with the equally spectacular decline of Toledo, the largest urban center in the region until 1600. The interaction between the two cities, and between the urban sector and the countryside, during the period of prolonged economic stress at the close of the sixteenth century, helps to explain the severity of the crisis which Spain experienced in the seventeenth century.

In the three months after his inauguration—the now famous 100 days—Franklin Roosevelt proposed a veritable barrage of programs that were passed by Congress—programs which were to have a profound effect on the American economy. From this beginning sprang forth the economic policy of the 1930's which was aimed at returning the nation to prosperity and changing its social and economic structure. The programs were directed toward specific as well as general problems and affected differently the various geographic areas of the nation.

In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that “the material basis of the planters' power was giving way,” the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.

The circumstances resulting in the Coinage Act of February 21, 1853 support Harry Johnson's thesis that historically fiduciary money has been substituted “for commodity-money in response to the interaction of scarcity of the latter and ingenuity in devising the former.” The Act of 1853 replaced bimetallism in the U.S. with a Composite Legal Tender System composed of a subsidiary small silver coinage adjunct to a de facto gold standard. After 1853 bimetallism remained only as a legal fiction which was finally terminated twenty years later.

Alexander Gerschenkron's research on industrialization in Europe suggests that both the timing and character of growth may have conditioned the institutional structure of nineteenth-century industrializers. He argues that:

…the more backward a country's economy, the greater was the part played by specialized institutional factors designed to increase the supply of capital to nascent industries and, in addition, to provide them with less decentralized and better informed entrepreneurial guidance; the more backward the country, the more pronounced was the coerciveness and comprehensiveness of those factors.

The application of the notion of learning by doing to account for the measured input efficiency growth of an aggregation of production units admittedly creates worrisome ambiguities about exactly what was being “learned,” how, and by whom. (David, p. 562)

In a recent Journal article Professors Ransom and Sutch (R & S) suggest “debt peonage” as a broad explanation for the course of southern economic development after the Civil War. They summarize their general thesis in the following three statements:

“(1) That because of the readjustments in agriculture and the difficulties in forming new banks under the banking laws, the South was unable to re-establish a viable network of commercial banks to serve her agricultural economy.