Many distinguished foreign visitors to the United States in the 1850s commented on the advanced states of mechanization in manufacturing. But why, at the same time, were interest rates higher and the aggregate manufacturing capital stock lower in American than in Britain? We resolve this paradox by noting that British engineers were most impressed by only those industries which relied on skilled workers. Using production parameters estimated from 1849 census data, we develop a computable general equilibrium model of the American and British economies which reconciles the apparently contradictory evidence.

Despite its wealth of economic data, Domesday Book, complied almost nine hundred years ago, has been surprisingly neglacted by quantitative economic historians. In analyzing one of the central issues in Domesday book—namely the relationship between manorial resurces and income—we here provide a first step in the attempt to redress the balance, by employing recently developed statistical techiniques. The result of the analysis constitutes strong grounds for rejecting the traditional interpretation of the relationship. It also suggests that the English economy of 1086 can be reconstructed more completely than previously thought possible.

Integration in the American foreign-exchange market under the nineteenthcentury specie standard is examined using a newly developed series of the dollar- sterling exchange rate and estimates of specie-point spreads. A distinction is made between internal and external integration. The latter is much more important over the entire 1791 to 1900 time span, but by 1881–1900 the market is tightly integrated in both senses. The long-term trend of improved integration is interrupted only by wartime.

The Russian Industrial Society, the first national organization of commercial and industrial interests in the empire, attempted to win governmental support for a comprehensive program of economic development. It enjoyed some successes in the fields of tariff protection, factory legislation, and the conquest of Central Asia. The tsarist bureaucracy, however, proved unwilling or unable to implement rational reforms in such key areas as subsoil mineral rights, monopolies, and corporate law. Moreover, policy disagreements among the society's regional branches, especially those in Moscow, Warsaw, and Lodz, weakened the organization from the 1880s onward.

Perhaps no single element involved with the rapid assumption of economic power by the federal government was more important than the passage of the income tax, the means by which the increasing role of government was financed. We explain the political and economic interests that came together to successfully pass the income tax, and we provide extensive empirical evidence regarding the determinants of the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The boll weevil's impact on southern agriculture poses a dilemma. Micro-level evidence suggests the weevil triggered a transition out of cotton, but macro-level indicators fail to register much long-term impact. Econometric simulation of boll weevil impact—taking into account the low demand elasticity for southern cotton, differences between states in the timing and levels of infestation, and long-term supply and demand shifts independent of the weevil—shows that the two sets of evidence are not inconsistent.

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

More than a century after its termination the slave trade in Africa remains a controversial topic. In particular, disputes continue to wax strong over the profitability of the Atlantic slave trade, on three major dimensions: first, the degree of competition characteristic of the market in slaves; second, the typical magnitude of the rate of profit achieved by enterprises engaged in the “peculiar” industry; third, the status of Eric Williams's hypothesis on the contribution of the slave trade to European industrialization.

In his essay J. E. Inikori argues that the British slavers “had freedom to carry as many slaves per ship as possible” to foreign colonies after 1788.1 He takes issue with my argument in Econocide that the British regulatory acts applied equally to those in the British direct trade to foreign colonies.2 In support of this he cites instances of British slave ships that undoubtedly loaded far more than the allowed slaves per ton in 1803.

In his rejoinder in the September 1983 issue of this JOURNAL to our comment on his article that appeared in December 1981, J. E. Inikori claims that we fail to address effectively any of the six major points raised by his article. We confess that we did not respond to his arguments about temporal fluctuations and interfirm variations in profit margins, largely because we regarded such arguments as commonplace and the subject of little debate among historians. We do have doubts, however, about Inikori's attempt to relate profit margins to the size of firms in the trade, as we indicate below. The main concern of our comment was with several more questionable assertions made by Inikori about the market structure and general profitability of the slave trade, and we sought to challenge these. Our criticisms centered on Inikori's classification of British slaving firms, his analysis of the elasticities of supply of trade goods and export credit, his method of calculating profits, and his interpretation of the career of one Liverpool slave merchant, William Davenport, for whose ventures we have exceptionally detailed accounts. Inikori's Rejoinder rejects all of our criticisms, but the arguments he advances remain conceptually unsound and rely upon questionable interpretations of slender evidence. We propose to deal only with the main points of our criticisms that Inikori either misunderstands or still fails to meet.

Seymour Drescher's comments center on whether British traders exporting slaves from Africa directly to non-British territories in the Americas were able to load more slaves per ton after 1788 than the slave-ton ratios imposed by British laws. The bone of contention here arose originally from attempts to estimate the volume of the trade. I argued that the British traders did load considerably more slaves per ton after 1788. Neglecting this factor would lead to a significant underestimate of the volume. Drescher disagreed and offered comments in Econocide; I replied in Forced Migration. In discussing the profits I found the subject still relevant: I argued that loading considerably more slaves than British laws allowed enhanced profits of the larger firms with access to non-British territories. On this Drescher here takes issue.