In early modern Europe the major concern of many people was getting enough food to stay alive. The “problem of subsistence” varied considerably, however, between one country—or one region—and another. England, for instance, was free of major subsistence crises during the later seventeenth century, when France was hard hit by repeated and deadly famines. In this essay I shall point out some of the differences between these two countries that might explain the success of one and the failure of the other to feed its people.

The analysis of labor and capital productivity in the New England cotton textile industry has been extensive in recent years. The well-preserved records of the early textile firms have provided the basis for major studies by Layer, McGouldrick, Davis and Stettler, Zevin, David, and Williamson. Although these studies vary in approach and focus, they are alike in using measures of labor input that are primarily based on data for mill operatives. The labor productivity indices thus constructed have indicated increasing labor productivity prior to the Civil War. These estimates not only have substantially revised traditional historians' often implied beliefs of falling labor productivity due to declining labor quality in this period, but also have led to a variety of explanations of the relationship between labor productivity, capital productivity, and technological innovation.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Britain was the major supplier of iron and steel to the world market, while Germany and the United States were substantial importers. But by 1913 German exports had exceeded British exports—with American exports not far behind—and Britain had become a major importer of steel. The goal of this paper is to explain this change in the pattern of trade. Its method is, first, to establish that the pattern of trade reflected the pattern of iron and steel prices prevailing in the three countries, and, second, to account for the pricing pattern in terms of international differences in input prices, technical efficiency, and deviations between price and unit production costs. I shall demonstrate that Britain's mid-century export success was due to its superior technical efficiency and lower raw material prices, and to the enormous excess profits earned by the German iron industry during its mid-century period of rapid economic growth. Britain's decline as an exporter was due to a reversal of this favorable situation: after 1900 the British industry was considerably less efficient than the German and American industries, and it labored under the burden of higher raw material prices. I shall argue, however, that vigorous entrepreneurs could have overcome both of these disadvantages.

The contribution of railroads to economic growth in the nineteenth century depended on two critical variables: unit savings in transport costs the railroads made possible and the quantity of passengers and freight the railroads attracted. Unit savings depended mainly on geography; either cheap water transport existed before the railroads or it did not. Unit savings depended secondarily on the value of the time the railroads saved and on the flexibility in selection of routes made possible by the new technology. The quantities of passengers and freight actually transported depended on two interrelated factors: the prior development of the economy and its responsiveness to cheaper transport.

Urbanization of the United States in the nineteenth century has been described in numerous scholarly texts. As Eric Lampard, writing in 1961, pointed out, “… the urban-industrial transformation [has] now become part of the furniture displayed in every up-to-date textbook of U.S. history.…” Yet, as the same author had pointed out six years earlier, at that time “no systematic study has ever been made of the role of cities in recent [as opposed to medieval] economic development. We are still unable to counter the charge that cities are ‘abnormal’ and ‘costly’ with any account of the ways in which they have actually facilitated, let alone fostered, progressive economic change.” Obviously, since 1955 significant progress has been made towards filling this lacuna.

Students of agricultural history, of pre-industrial labor productivity, of New England town histories, and, especially, of pre-1840 rates of economic growth have long needed a price index of Massachusetts farm prices for this period. The article presents two indexes, covering 15 farm products, weighted by their relative importance, first in 1800, then in 1855. Among the several issues raised by the behavior of farm prices between 1750 and 1855, one of the most interesting may be what this behavior reveals about the market imbeddedness of these farmers, particularly in view of the fact that the prices come, not from market quotations, but from farm account books.

A low rate of growth of world demand for cotton figures prominently in recent attempts to understand the post-bellum retardation of the southern economy. Gavin Wright, especially, stresses this factor in several articles and a recent book.1 Using-sophisticated regression techniques to estimate the rate of growth of demand for American cotton during both the ante- and post-bellum eras and the magnitude of the change in the rate between them, Wright finds a decline of more than two thirds. Such an occurrence could hardly have helped the South make a prompt recovery from the Civil War.

Since writing “Cotton Competition,“ I have many times wished that I had never included the paragraph joining pages 632 and 633, since figures that were intended as no more than back-of-the-envelope confirmation of the econometric results have been cited as the central conclusions of the study. To make matters worse, the demand-shift formula was incorrectly applied, most seriously in the exaggerated decline in demand for American cotton between 1860 and 1870. For these reasons I am grateful to John Hanson for making these corrections and for giving me an opportunity to disown this particular halfdozen numbers.