The most successful economies of modern, and perhaps earlier, economic history appear to have had “financial revolutions” that created innovative financial systems before they became leading economies. This suggests that good financial systems may have played a causal role in economic modernization. I identify the key institutional components of such financial systems. Using the United States and Japan as examples, I discuss how two financial revolutions occurred. Effective leadership on the part of strong-willed individuals was crucial in each case.

Utilizing a large volume of archival documents, this study establishes for the first time the long-term trends in real wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, from the second half of the fifteenth century until World War I. A detailed consumer price index and nominal wage indices are constructed for the city of Istanbul for this purpose. These price and wage series are then inserted into a larger framework of price and wage trends in European cities during the same period.

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

After beginning as a kind of outdoor poor relief, long-term indenture of poor children evolved into a specialized form of craft apprenticeship. Analysis of indenture terms indicates that relationships between end payments (“freedom dues”) and education and training clauses varied by region. In Boston, education and training clauses were associated negatively with freedom-dues clauses, but in Rhode Island and Charleston the relationship was positive. Variation in freedom dues to suit the needs of the master or overseer of the poor, without reference to the worker-child's own interests, resulted from the child's lack of advocacy during contract formation.

Interindustry factor mobility is a crucial determinant of the income-distribution effects of exogenous changes in relative commodity prices. This examination of interindustry variation in wages and profits using data from manufacturing industries from 1820 to 1990 suggests that interindustry factor mobility may be strongly related to the processes of industrialization. Development in the nineteenth century produced a sharp rise in mobility (a decline in interindustry wage and profit differentials) due to rapid improvements in transportation and the introduction of factory production. Twentieth-century industrialization, involving greater reliance on specialized equipment and knowledge, reduced levels of interindustry mobility.

This study documents the boom in Europe's imports from Asia and the Americas between 1500 and 1800 and explores its causes. There was no commodity-price convergence between continents, suggesting that declining trade barriers were not the cause of the boom. Thus, it must have been caused by some combination of European import demand and foreign export supply. The behavior of the relative price of foreign importables in European cities should tell us which mattered most and when: we provide the evidence and offer a model which is used to decompose the sources of Europe's overseas trade boom.

A number of hypotheses attempt to disentangle the “true” causes of the Panic of 1837 from domestic and international factors that came into play as the crisis approached. I analyze U.S. government documents and contemporary newspapers to reconsider the role of domestic factors. These sources place neither the official distribution of the federal surplus nor an international shock at the center. Rather, a series of interbank transfers of government balances and a policy-induced increase in the demand for coin in the Western states drained the largest New York City banks of their specie reserves and rendered the panic inevitable.

Housing was a major item of English consumer expenditure. Yet little is known of its average quality or rental cost. I estimate average rents, constant-quality rents, and housing quality from 1550 to 1909. Constant-quality rents rose substantially relative to other costs of living during the Industrial Revolution. This probably explains why, despite rising real wages, housing quality appears to have declined from 1760 to 1860. There were, however, substantial quality gains in the eighteenth century prior to the Industrial Revolution. The implications of these new series for measurement of growth during the Industrial Revolution are briefly explored.

The labor-force participation rate (LFPR, hereafter) of older males in the United States has fallen dramatically over the last 120 years.For the discussions of the long-term trend of the labor force participation rate of older males prior to 1940, see Durand, Labor Force; Long, Labor Force; Ransom and Sutch, “Labor” and “Trend”; Moen, Essays and “Labor”; Margo “Labor Force Participation”; Carter and Sutch, “Fixing the Facts”; and Lee, “Long-Term Unemployment.” In 1880 nearly four out of five men 65 and older were gainfully employed. Today, only 15 percent of males at those ages participate in the labor market. Such a sharp decline in the labor market activity of older men has been regarded as one of the most marked changes in the U.S. labor market that the twentieth century witnessed. In addition to the secular rise in retirement, the sharp increase in the share of the aged population has made this retirement behavior a major social issue in the post–World War II era. Many economists have attributed this phenomenon to the implementation and expansion of social insurance programs, especially Social Security.See Boskin, “Social Security”; Parsons, “Decline” and “Male Retirement Behavior”; Hurd and Boskin, “Effect”; and Gruber and Wise, Social Security. See Krueger and Pischke, “Effect”; and Lee “Rise” for some evidence against this argument. However, about half of the fall in the LFPR of older men took place prior to 1940, when the public programs for old-age security were not as yet well developed. Though a number of factors have been suggested, including rising retirement incomes and a changing industrial environment, it is not entirely clear what caused the exit of older workers from the work force during this period.Costa, Evolution.

A decade has passed since I surveyed the first 50 years of the Journal of Economic History.Whaples, “Quantitative History.” This note picks up that story by documenting changes in the “supply” of economic history since 1990—the topics of the JOURNAL'S articles, who has had articles published in its pages, and how rankings of economic-history programs are reflected by recent publications. In addition, I use data on articles published in the JOURNAL to examine the “demand” for economic history—which articles have been cited the most often and what types of articles are most likely to be cited.

Northern Spain Between the Iberian and the Atlantic Worlds: Trade and Regional Specialisation, 1550–1650

Peasants, Productivity, and Profit in the Open Fields of England: A Study of Economic and Social Development

New World Order: The Emergence of an International Monetary System, 1850 to 1913

The Economics of Cotton Harvest Mechanization in the United States, 1920–1970

Shattered Rails, Ruined Credit: Financial Fragility and Railroad Operations in the Great Depression

Real Estate Values and the Location of Economic Activity: A Case Study of the Urban Form of Cleveland, 1915–1980

Comments on Grafe, Karakacili, and Meissner

Tractors, Trains, and Trolleys: Comments on Grove, Schiffman, and Smith

SESSION 1: PLENARY THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE FINANCIAL MARKETS

SESSION 2A: THE CULTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR MARKETS

SESSION 2B: CRISES IN HISTORY

SESSION 2C: EARLY U.S. FINANCIAL EVOLUTION

SESSION 3A: THE BIG PICTURE 1

SESSION 3B: MEDIEVAL AFFAIRS

SESSION 3C: THE GOLD STANDARD

SESSION 4A: THE GREAT DEPRESSION

SESSION 4B: MACRO HISTORY

SESSION 4C: COLONIAL EXPERIENCES

SESSION 5A: THE BIG PICTURE 2

SESSION 5B: THE ROLE OF EQUITY MARKETS

SESSION 5C: FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

SESSION 6: PLENARY BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL, AND TROUBLE?: THE ROLE OF FUNDAMENTALS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS

SESSION 7A: THE ROLE OF BANKING SYSTEMS

SESSION 7B: THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY

SESSION 8A: FINANCE IN COLONIAL BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

SESSION 8B: THE CHANGING ASPECTS OF LAND IN THE UNITED STATES

Liquidity, Contagion, and the Founding of the Federal Reserve System, By JON MOEN, University of Mississippi, and ELLIS TALLMAN, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Central Banking Policy in Eastern Europe: Experience from the Interwar Years, By KIRSTEN WANDSCHNEIDER, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thank God for a Ship, By MICHAEL WEISEL, North Carolina State University

IN MEMORIAM RICHARD B. SHERIDAN

2001 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETINGS

2002 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETING 11–13 OCTOBER 2002

CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS ECONOMIC HISTORY SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE

ERRATUM

This book's central message is summed up in the following sentence, which appears about midway through it: “The transformation of reproductive patterns was part of a massive shift in the nature of social relations because social change was experienced by thinking people who reflected on it and changed their behavior with regard to it” (p. 243). The statement epitomizes both the book's flaccid prose and its lack of intellectual rigor. According to its author, the birth of modernization in the west was marked by the establishment of a “western” demographic pattern based on the economic viability of the nuclear family and the unusual length of time between puberty and marriage. But since everything social is connected to everything else, explaining this demographic change—if indeed it happened, a question we cannot yet answer on the basis of current knowledge—seems to require explaining everything else as well. Some intimation of this sort seems to have tempted David Levine to take the reader on a ramble through the vast literature on the medieval economy and society that has accumulated since the rebirth of medieval studies in the 1930s. It is a temptation devoutly to be resisted.

This book is constructed around the unusual circumstance that between 1560 and 1620 approximately 1,000 people left the Castilian town of Brihuega (population ca. 4,000) and settled in a single transatlantic destination, the Mexican city of Puebla. While emigration from Spain was not unusual, the concentration of settlers from one origin at a single destination was apparently unique. This circumstance allows the author to compare the behavior of communities with a common background in two different settings. The results are both interesting and frustrating.

The study of British cities and towns has advanced enormously in recent years. Once largely confined to the analysis of the great Victorian Cities—work inspired by the brilliant leadership of the late H. J. Dyos at Leicester—research has now extended to encompass the early and late Middle Ages, the early modern period, and also most recently the twentieth century. Not just metropolitan and industrial centers are being investigated, but the whole spectrum of the urban system: regional capitals, the myriad of market towns, ports, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, the new leisure and service towns. If the old urban studies were largely engineered by historians and sociologists, the new history of British contribution is attracting a galaxy of contributions from archaeologists, cultural geographers, literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, and museologists. Testifying to some of the wealth and diversity is the recent Cambridge Urban History of Britain (edited by D. Palliser et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which in three volumes and with 80 or so contributors covers the period from the fourth century to the Second World War.

In this carefully researched book, Monica Chojnacka stresses the independence of working women in early modern Venice. Accepting the premise that, in general, the wives, sisters, and daughters of the nobility led highly restricted lives throughout this period, she argues that both economic forces and the formation of new charitable institutions benefited popolane (non-elite women) by providing them with forms of sociability, community, and agency that were denied their social superiors.

Stephen Epstein is one of a growing group of scholars who are proposing a new interpretation of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The subject itself is not new. In the case of Italy, over the past century a few scholars have studied Italian slavery in local or regional studies, and it was the subject of a major work by Charles Verlinden (L'Esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale, vol. 2: Italie – olonies italiennes du Levant – Levant latin – Empire byzantine. Ghent: Rijsuniversiteit te Gent, 1977) and featured prominently in general surveys by Jacques Heers (Esclaves et domestiques au moyen âge dans le monde mediterranean. Paris: Fayard, 1981) and the present reviewer (Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Nevertheless, the historical profession has tended to ignore post-Roman slavery in the Mediterranean world, or to consider it either an attenuated relic from classical times or as a shadowy prelude to the great expansion of slavery in the colonial Americas. The numbers and percentages of slaves in Italy never approached those of true slave societies, in which more than 30 percent of the population was unfree. Common conclusions heretofore have been that slavery was not too important in the Italian economy, because most slaves were domestics; that slaves were not treated too harshly, because most lived in the households of their owners; and that slavery died out without leaving much of a trace in modern Italian society.

Historians, and especially medievalists, love to show how many primary sources they have read over their many years in the archives. The outcome of this painstaking excavation is often a heavily footnoted, barely digestible book. On the other hand, economists who like to be pseudo historians in their spare time often propose brilliant theories but have never so much as glanced through a primary source. Stephan R. Epstein's book is a fortunate combination of economic analysis mixed with serious archival research, a pleasure for both the economist and the historian.