The literature on French economic history generally dates the onset of the agricultural revolution in France from the midnineteenth century. However, the available empirical evidence on national agricultural trends, brought together in 1961 by Toutain, shows that the rapid, sustained growth in both total and per capita agricultural production comes earlier, during the period from 1815–24 to 1865–74. This article explores the sources of this rapid national growth by assembling and analyzing previously unutilized regional data on production and hectares of major field crops. The southern diffusion of mixed farming is identified as the change in the productive process which may account for the French agricultural revolution.

Increasing our knowledge of Tokugawa economic history is important for a better understanding of the causes of the rapid Japanese industrialization which followed, but as yet no attempt has been made to provide a theoretical framework with which to analyze the Tokugawa economy. The cost of neglecting to work out a new economic history of Tokugawa Japan is high. Many Western historians, economic as well as others, continue to make use of findings and interpretations provided by Japanese economic historians, most of whom are Marxist in their ideological and methodological orientations. Presented with the force of ideological conviction and repeated in book after book, the Marxist view of Tokugawa economic history is so deeply rooted in Japanese literature that it can claim many followers who make use of its interpretations and views without suspecting the ideological and methodological framework upon which they rest. Another increasingly serious cost is that many of the research findings contributed recently by a few Western scholars and a small group of Japanese economic historians continue to remain disjointed findings in search of an analytical framework which can accommodate them into a meaningful whole.

When I began to prepare this talk, I recalled that the first such address I ever listened to helped persuade me to become an economic historian. It was Herbert Heaton's delightful “The Making of an Economic Historian,” which began with a bit of elegant doggerel. If a discipline could produce such an address, I decided that this association was certainly worth joining. But alas, I was optimistic. I was to hear more erudite presidential addresses but few so witty and informative. Nearly all these rituals, in this association or others, have followed the traditional recipe so well summarized by Shepard Clough. In a systematic review of our past meetings Shep found that “most of our presidential addresses have been devoted to making suggestions for research (mostly to be undertaken by others), to delineating the broad ‘tasks’ of economic history, to defending the kind of work in which the speaker has been engaged, and to advocating some particular methodology in our discipline.” Mine is no exception.

Students of Russia's first phase of industrialization concentrate on the real aspects of growth—the growth of population, production, and the change in industrial structure. In this they follow the traditional approach to economic history, which usually emphasizes the real variables of the growth process at the expense of the money variables. I do not propose to question the assumption that the study of the production aspect of an economy is a sine qua non of the analysis of industrialization. Yet the exclusion of factors that affect aggregate demand may lead to a failure to observe some important dimensions of growth. In any case, the relevance of money in Russia's first “Industrial Revolution,” which was underway in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was considerable. Therefore, in what follows, I concentrate on the monetary developments and policies of this period. After a short survey of the quantitative information on the trends of the real variables, monetary developments and their impact on economic activity are studied. I then treat Russia's foreign trade and balance of payments and their links to monetary phenomena, and finally, make an attempt at a critical evaluation of the trade, monetary and fiscal policies of the Russian government in this period.

During the second half of the nineteenth century important technological changes in shipping and shipbuilding resulted in the practical disappearance of an important shipbuilding industry in North America and the concentration of most of the world's shipbuilding in Britain. This shift of shipbuilding activity was quite clearly the result of the adoption of metal in place of wood as the structural material in shipbuilding. The adoption of metal was a slow process and the old and new techniques coexisted for decades. By the mid-1850's, British shipbuilders had developed the building of iron ships to a routine process and further improved their techniques in the following decades, but wooden shipbuilding in North America remained an important industry until the mid-1880's.

This article is an essay in both historical synthesis and in the theory of growth. It seeks to explain the process at work in Europe which led up to the surge of British industrial expansion at the end of the eighteenth century as the result of three distinct, partially related, converging forces: public policies induced by the endemic international struggle for power; the expansion of international commerce and of the world trading area; and the complex impact of the scientific revolution. This historical view is then related to the concept of the preconditions for take-off and take-off, as well as to the case of increasing returns.

Economics textbooks invariably describe the important economic choices that all societies must make by the following three questions: What goods are to be produced? How are these goods to be produced? Who is to get what is produced? This way of stating social choice problems is misleading. Economic organizations necessarily do resolve these issues in one fashion or another, but even the most centralized societies do not and cannot specify the answer to these questions in advance and in detail. It is more useful and nearer to the truth to view a social system as relying on techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources rather than imagining that societies specify the particular uses to which resources will be put.

A survey of the financial history of France in the years from 1781 through 1787 reveals two interrelated developments: an unprecedented series of loans opened by the state in an effort to meet growing war and postwar expenses and to service a burdensome debt, and a speculative boom which thrived on the confusion of public and private finance which the French revenue system allowed. Both developments are of central importance in any inquiry into public finance in the decade, and thus in any explanation of the financial origins of the French Revolution. Both were fed in part by the unprecedented volume of capital and credit available on the Parisian Bourse as on other European capital markets in this decade. But to an extent too little comprehended, both the increase in public indebtedness and the speculative boom were assisted by investments from abroad, investments which helped to obscure the enormous and onerous public debt in a mask of apparent soundness by responding readily to repeated calls for credit, and which likewise helped sustain the speculative mania through the extension of credit to the speculators themselves. It is known that Genevan, Genoan, and Dutch credit played some role in these events. Indeed, Genevan commitments have, to a degree, been clarified. But the Genoan and Dutch roles have remained vague, always cited but never detailed. What will be attempted here is an analysis of the Dutch role, of the structure and method of Dutch investments in France during this period in which such investments made some contribution to maintaining the appearance of public solvency while assisting Bourse expansion.

English growth experience from the 1860's to the 1890's has been the source of continued research and debate. Judged by the recent contributions of McCloskey, the intensity of the debate has diminished little over the past seventy-five years. The period has long been identified in the literature as the “Great Depression.” It has been well established that the decades up to 1896 were characterized by declining general price levels, declining nominal interest rates, and serious retardation in aggregate real output growth. These are not merely figments of historical research since they were subjects of contemporary observation as well.

The economic development and decline of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile has been the subject of considerable research in the last few years, and it has long been assumed that the rise of Madrid played an important role in dislocating the economy of the region. Yet little direct attention has been paid to the actual processes whereby a distinctive type of urban growth, the development of a political capital, undermined the relationship between town and country which was the basis of the economic activity of sixteenth-century Castile. The rapid growth of Madrid, in fact, coincides with the equally spectacular decline of Toledo, the largest urban center in the region until 1600. The interaction between the two cities, and between the urban sector and the countryside, during the period of prolonged economic stress at the close of the sixteenth century, helps to explain the severity of the crisis which Spain experienced in the seventeenth century.

Anumber of economic historians, including Charles Beard, C. Vann Woodward, and others have argued that southern economic development during the nineteenth century may have been significantly hindered by the South's political and economic relations with the North. Certainly the best known of such arguments is that of Charles Beard. Beard thought that the “normal” workings of the pre-Civil War political economy would have resulted in the relative eclipse of the southern economy even in the absence of the Civil War. Wartime devastation plus such northern policies as the tariff, the Homestead Law, the National Banking Act, and emancipation of the slaves, merely hastened and worsened the South's economic decline.

This paper is concerned with the old economic history which developed in Britain before World War I. It would be more appropriate to call it “the very old economic history,” to distinguish it from “the old economic history” of the inter-war years and beyond, and “the new economic history,” a fragile offshoot of American enterprise only now being propagated successfully. To avoid terminological clumsiness, and to indicate clearly that the history of economic history in Britain divides into three stages, I will refer throughout this paper to Economic History I (EH I), Economic History II (EH II) and Economic History III (EH III), stages which divide chronologically at 1910–1920 and 1960–1970, and which are characterized by quite distinctive methodological features. My particular aim will be to show that EH I seems to the economist, and to the new economic historian, to be modern in content and method compared with EH II. In particular EH I had a major interest in the conditions of freedom and restraint, especially those embodied in legal institutions controlling property rights, which limited individual economic action, and devoted much effort to investigating the origins of property rights and the development of custom and law as they affected property rights. EH I, also, was more strongly motivated than EH II, both because of a belief in the power of “the historical method” for the understanding and analysis of social processes, and of participation in the great socio-economic debates of the day, especially that which attempted to define the role of the state in economic life. In contrast, EH II seems to have had no particular methodological bias, and, although often politically motivated, was not involved in contemporary debate or in the determination of current policy.

In the three months after his inauguration—the now famous 100 days—Franklin Roosevelt proposed a veritable barrage of programs that were passed by Congress—programs which were to have a profound effect on the American economy. From this beginning sprang forth the economic policy of the 1930's which was aimed at returning the nation to prosperity and changing its social and economic structure. The programs were directed toward specific as well as general problems and affected differently the various geographic areas of the nation.

No source of agricultural distress in the post-bellum South was more frequently alluded to by nineteenth-century observers than the “overproduction” of cotton. The anonymous author of the opening quotation was merely expressing, in characteristically metaphorical terms, a widely-held view that was to persist for years among southern reformers. Even writers who conceded the peculiar advantages for cotton culture derived from the South's climate and soils often argued nevertheless that crop diversification was the order of the day.

This paper is concerned with the rapid growth of the trucking industry during the period 1900 to 1920. Our purpose is to examine the frequently asserted proposition that motor trucking was able to grow rapidly in competition with a well-established railroad industry because of the hidden subsidy provided by public expenditures on highways. Though this is a popularly held notion there has been little empirical evidence presented to support or refute it.

During the eighteenth century various methods existed for obtaining shipping tonnages; Most official records of shipping throughout this period record a vessel's “registered tonnage” which was the figure which appeared in the vessel's certificate of registration. This registered tonnage was less than a vessel's “measured tonnage.” The latter was the basis for building, buying, and selling vessels and was computed by means of a given formula. Registered tonnage was then estimated at roughly two thirds of measured tonnage and the figure rounded down to the nearest large whole number. This practice was encouraged by ships' captains and ship owners who wanted to minimize lighthouse and port duties that were based on tonnages. Thus only when the registration of measured tonnages became compulsory did shipping tonnages in the records become reasonably accurate.

In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that “the material basis of the planters' power was giving way,” the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.

The existence of property rights affects the allocation and distribution of economic resources. The exclusive rights to ownership and control over assets leads to a different level and pattern of economic activity than would occur if these assets remained unowned or “common property.” While property rights are frequently subject to various constraints imposed by law or custom, within these bounds owners are free to use their resources to achieve their desired ends. Resources may be sold in an exchange of property rights, rented for a specified time period in exchange for some quid pro quo, or employed (or kept idle) by the owner himself. The owner's welfare function will include the income (or other utility) derived from use of the resource, while, for purposes of measuring national income, the final consumption of the entire population would be included.

Economic historians have always recognized the importance of changes in population to any investigation of economic growth or well-being. The payments to labor in every economy, even the highly industrialized modern economies, always constitute the bulk of national income when figured via the factor payments method. Hence what happens to the size and rate of compensation of the labor force is crucial to any economic history. With this in mind we present below new decade population and labor force estimates as a first step toward understanding the overall growth of seventeenth-century New England.