Soon after establishing political control, the British colonial administration in southern Nigeria attempted to replace the existing currencies of the country with British currency. The traditional currencies competently discharged the functions of money, however, and it required fifty years before the pre-colonial currencies, attacked by the colonial authorities and unrecognized as legal tender, gradually lost standing and proved worthless to their last holders. Theoretical implications of these developments are discussed.

Labor costs historically have been decisive in determining the location of cotton textile production. Despite an apparent advantage in wage rates, however, the southern industry did not achieve sustained relative progress before about 1875. This study argues that in most times and places the region did not have “cheap labor” before this date. What matters is not just the level of wages in any year, but the quality of labor attracted at this wage and the geographic scope of the labor market within which firms operate. The scope of the labor market depends in turn on property rights and incentives toward recruitment activity.

This paper attempts to explain the reasons for the shift of labor from agriculture in the United States from 1869 to 1899. It focuses on the effects of productivity growth in agriculture and industry, and of increases in the supply of land (safety-valve theory). A two-sector general equilibrium model is used in the analysis. Many of the results hinge on whether the economy is assumed to be open or closed to foreign trade. In order to determine the appropriate specification, each issue is analyzed in terms of its equivalent counterfactual-conditional proposition. An important conclusion is that increases in agricultural productivity and the level of supply of land likely reduced the proportion of workers in agriculture even though the United States economy was open.

The theory of proto-industrialization holds that a major expansion of rural industry, primarily in textiles, formed a phase precursory to industrialization in many European regions. This phase was characterized by sweeping economic and demographic changes, including increasing population density, land subdivision, and agricultural intensification. Domestic industry boosted marriage rates and may have lowered the average age of marriage of rural dwellers. The present research examines the tenets of this theory for the case of Ireland, a country affected by rural industrialization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The data are cross-sectional and are drawn primarily from the 1841 census.

It is widely accepted that the expansion of government spending in Eastern Europe was financed during the half-century before World War I by steady increases in fiscal pressure on the peasantry. For Serbia, a quantitative analysis indicates that, relative to their incomes, the fiscal burdens on farmers declined markedly, and that the growing revenue was provided mainly by the nonfarm sector. These trends were facilitated by the political strength of the peasants. A superficial comparison of the Serbian case with those of Bulgaria and Russia suggests that fiscal pressures on farm incomes may have been decreasing throughout Eastern Europe, despite the growth of aggregate taxation.

This paper examines the behavior of the postal savings system in the Depression. It is shown that because the system was created with an inflexible structure it was unable to carry out its prescribed function when economic conditions changed in the Depression. Instead, the system evolved from a small-scale government program designed for the low-income saver into a financial force capable of causing problems for the savings and loan industry, the housing market, and even the banking system.