The Canadian economy, already wealthy, diverse, and relatively industrial at the dawn of the twentieth century, had not yet outgrown its reliance on resource-intensive production. Empirical evidence indicates that the exploitation of Canada's natural resource endowment made direct and indirect contributions to the size and efficiency of the twentieth-century domestic economy. I conclude that the concentration of capital and labor in resource industries did not constrain the rate of change of Canadian real GNP per capita between 1900 and 1999, and it appears to have had a substantial positive impact on the level of real GNP per capita.

Between 1880 and 1939 Burma, Malaya, and Thailand received inflows of migrants from India and China comparable in size to European immigration in the New World. This article examines the forces that lay behind migration to Southeast Asia and asks if experience there bears out Lewis's unlimited labor supply hypothesis. We find that it does and, furthermore, that immigration created a highly integrated labor market stretching from South India to Southeastern China. Emigration from India and China and elastic labor supply are identified as important components of Asian globalization before the Second World War.

Wyoming's Johnson County War of 1892 is the historical basis of later popular depictions of the West as violent, and it influenced the development of Wyoming. Many see this era as the end of the open range system and the ascendancy of stock ranching and farming. Popular depiction argues that the event was an act of vigilantism of large foreign-owned firms against small individual settlers. We argue that the war was a conflict of property rights systems and use a model developed by Alston, Libecap, and Mueller to explain why violence broke out in Johnson County in 1892.

Richer (the Rancher): We made this country. Found it and we made it … Made a safe range out of this. Some us died doin' it. We made it. Then people move in who never held a rawhide through the old days. Fenced off my range. Fenced me off from water. Some of them like you paw ditches, and take out irrigation water, and so the creek runs dry sometimes, and I got to move my stock because of it. And you say we have no rights to the range. Stark (the Homesteader): You talk about rights. You think you got the right to say that nobody else has got any. Well, that ain't the way the government looks at it. Shane [Paramount Pictures, 1953]

After World War II Brazil experienced exceptionally high economic growth, ranking tenth among the largest economies by 1960. Yet evidence shows that real wages lagged far behind productivity, especially from 1956, the heyday of “developmentalism”—an economic ideology aimed at state-led, accelerated industrialization, with foreign and domestic private capital as active partners. The outcome diverged from that of the “social compact for growth,” the cornerstone of the “golden age” in Europe and Japan. A key reason was that in Brazil left-wingers controlled the main trade unions and pushed an agenda of social reform that was widely rejected by industrialists.

The present study analyzes computer performance over the last century and a half. Three results stand out. First, there has been a phenomenal increase in computer power over the twentieth century. Depending upon the standard used, computer performance has improved since manual computing by a factor between 1.7 trillion and 76 trillion. Second, there was a major break in the trend around World War II. Third, this study develops estimates of the growth in computer power relying on performance rather than components; the price declines using performance-based measures are markedly larger than those reported in the official statistics.

The mortality of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic crossing has long preoccupied historians but the relationship between slave traders' purchasing strategies and slave mortality rates in transit has escaped close investigation. We address these issues by using records of 39 eighteenth-century voyages of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. These allow shipboard mortality rates of enslaved Africans to be estimated. They also reveal previously un-noticed age- and gender-based variations in slave purchase and mortality patterns, which in turn shed light on the relative importance of African and shipboard conditions in determining slave survival rates in the middle passage.

This article examines changes in institutions that protected property rights in the Alps between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century and, in particular, alternative management systems adopted for the common pastures and forests in about 200 communities. Over time, private-order institutions in the form of charters replaced informal arrangements sustained by the long-run interaction among villagers. Although costly to run, the charters accomplished several tasks that increased resource use efficiency.