Seventeenth-century English immigrants to the Chesapeake and their children experienced a trade-off. They died early and raised few children who survived to adulthood, most worked harder than in England at more boring tasks, and, except for food, they had a material standard of living inferior to what the homeland could offer at equivalent levels of wealth; but people ate well, there was work for all, and until late in the century the poor who lived long enough found opportunities not available in England to exercise control of their lives—opportunities to acquire land and the economic independence and community standing that it brought.

Relying on a large sample of private and public loan contracts taken from Parisian notarial records, this article examines the private borrowers and lenders who participated in the credit market between 1690 and 1840. It explains the important role notaries played in the market, describes the types of loans available to borrowers and lenders, stresses the importance of the life cycle in explaining the recourse to indebtedness, and ends with a discussion of the difficulties lenders had in assessing creditworthiness.

Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is the cause of high machinery investment or that a high rate of machinery investment is a good proxy for other factors that are important causes of growth.

Technological progress depends for its success on a conducive social environment. The resistance to innovation is identified as a central element governing the success of new inventions. Such resistance usually takes the form of non-market processes. It consists of vested interests, whose assets are jeopardized by new techniques, as well as by intellectuals who are opposed to new technology on principle. The role of resistance in the British and French economies during the Industrial Revolution is assessed.

This article examines the causes for the relatively high degree of vertical integration in the German cotton textile industry before 1914. Underdeveloped input and output markets exposed German textile firms to price risks not faced by English firms that had access to highly-developed cotton, yarn, and cloth markets. In addition, tariff protection may have prompted integration by its impact on market development. In the weaving sector in particular, the response to this structure of markets was a more diversified product line and integration of both spinning and weaving.

Since the appearance of Gerschenkron's 1955 paper, economic historians have discussed extensively the industrial transformation of Italy from 1896 to 1908, which Gerschenkron claimed was the period of Italy's first big or great “spurt.” Those discussions, however, have been in terms of national aggregates. This article attempts to create instead a regional view of Italian industrialization for this period. My analysis of regional output for two benchmark years suggests there were three regional patterns of industrialization.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

This article examines the recent view that economic distress was not an important cause of English immigration before 1860. Demographic information is used to show that characteristics of males on suspect passenger lists (those that listed only laborers) matched those of laborers on other lists. Based on this result and other information, laborers appear to be the dominant group of immigrants. Support is thus provided for the view that distress was the most important cause of immigration, even though many other immigrants were not fleeing economic distress.

Endogenous growth theories suggest that market integration will be more conducive to economic development when the previously isolated regions have large stocks of human capital. This paper uses the level of per capita patenting in nineteenth-century Virginia to measure this human capital. By the end of the 1870s, the rail network of the Old Dominion was rapidly being integrated with the rest of the nation. Inventiveness spread throughout northern Virginia, but the former plantation areas of the state fell behind.

The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital—savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control.

Throughout the Great Depression, the unemployment rates of blacks exceeded those of whites in urban areas of both North and South. Among men, this difference was largely due to racial differences in occupational status, whereas among women, unemployment rates were dramatically higher for blacks even within specific occupations. The occupational pattern of the unemployment gap suggests that labor market discrimination played a role, especially in unskilled service jobs.

After joining the industrial workforce during World War II, women disappeared from industrial employment with postwar reconversion. This article uses data from Ford Motor Company employee records to describe female industrial workers, their work histories before Ford, and their exit patterns from Ford. We draw a more complete picture of these industrial workers and discuss the differences between those who chose to leave Ford and those who left involuntarily. Contrary to popular myth it was housewives, along with African-American and older women, those with the fewest outside opportunities, who were more likely to be laid-off.