The factors regulating the production and distribution of material wealth cannot be reduced exclusively to market relationships. This being the case, the economic historian cannot limit his borrowings to economics alone. The present article uses meteorology both in its theoretical and historical dimensions to show the interaction between economic and meteorological fluctuations. The attempt of W. S. Jevons to find a theoretical connection between solar cycles and trade cycles is well known. Economic historians of preindustrial Europe have identified weather patterns as a primary independent variable determining prosperity or depression. The impact of meteorological fluctuation on economic activity has also been noticed for the nineteenth century, acknowledged by theorist and historian alike as one of the major variables inducing trade cycles. But in these accounts weather patterns are introduced as a run of good or bad luck, affecting essentially regional or national economies.

Up until the mid-nineteenth century Russia had an enserfed peasantry, a mere 1,000 or so miles of railways, and a small, almost insignificant market sector. When serfdom was abolished (1861) and the expansion of railroads started to occupy a prominent place in development policy toward the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was launched on a transformation from a state of preindustrial and pre-capitalistic backwardness into a path of modernization and industrialization.

The new economic history has been with us now for almost a score of years. Its practitioners have advanced from young revolutionaries to become a part of the middle-aged establishment; and by all the criteria of publication and training of graduate students, it has indeed transformed the discipline in the United States. From my quite subjective perspective, the new economic history has made a significant contribution to revitalizing the field and advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Yet I think it stops short—far short —of what we should be accomplishing in the field. Our objective surely remains that of shedding light on man's economic past, conceived in the broadest sense of those words; and I submit to you that the new economic history as it has developed has imposed strictures on enquiry that narrowly limit its horizons—and that some of my former revolutionary compatriots show distressing signs of complacency with the new orthodoxy.

This article addresses the issue of what made early mutual savings bank trustees tick. It explores two hypotheses: (1) trustees were trying to maximize their depositors’ “well-being” by maximizing the real rate of return on their banks’ portfolios given legal constraints; (2) trustees were trying to profit from their positions. These two hypotheses are tested using investment data drawn from the archives of several of New York's oldest mutuals. Besides offering insights into the objectives of early trustees, the analysis of mutual portfolios will also shed light on several broader issues dealing with capital market efficiency and the effect of legal constraints on resource allocation.

The rapid spread of Islam into three continents in the seventh and eighth centuries was followed by the diffusion of an equally remarkable but less well documented agricultural revolution. Originating mainly in India, where heat, moisture and available crops all favored its development and where it had been practiced for some centuries before the rise of Islam, the new agriculture was carried by the Arabs or those they conquered into lands which, because they were colder and drier, were much less hospitable to it and where it could be introduced only with difficulty. It appeared first in the eastern reaches of the early-Islamic world—in parts of Persia, Mesopotamia and perhaps Arabia Felix—which had close contacts with India and where a few components of the revolution were already in place in the century before the rise of Islam. By the end of the eleventh century it had been transmitted across the length and breadth of the Islamic world and had altered, often radically, the economies of many regions: Transoxania, Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, the Maghrib, Spain, Sicily, the savannah lands on either side of the Sahara, parts of West Africa and the coastlands of East Africa. It had very far-reaching consequences, affecting not only agricultural production and incomes but also population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labor force, linked industries, cooking and diet, clothing, and other spheres of life too numerous and too elusive to be investigated here.

The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.

The purpose of this paper is to examine cost-of-living differences among the various regions of the United States during a thirty-year interval of the nineteenth century. We do this by constructing regional price indexes for the years 1851–1880 using two different base years for pur calculations, 1860 and 1880. The results indicate that the cost of living differed substantially among regions, and specifically that it was lower in the American Midwest than in the East. Although one might have expected these differences among regions to narrow as regional and national markets developed and improved, we find no evidence that they did during this thirty-year period.

The possession of a few copper cents [in 1862] meant that the owner could ride [the street car] rather than walk…. It meant that he could buy a postage stamp without an altercation with the clerk, or a cigar without receiving in change a handful of the dealer's own manufactured currency.

Intuition tells us that the scarcity of space on the earth's surface should be closely tied both to population growth and to economic growth. Population growth should make land more scarce by raising the demand for food and private space and by raising the supply of labor, a factor of production that must cooperate with land. Intuition says that economic growth should tend to do the same, all things considered. The demand for food, a prime land-using product, would be expanded little by a rise in per capita incomes, but the rent on land should be bid up somewhat by the growth of other inputs into production, such as skills and man-made equipment. Intuition also suggests that land scarity should in turn retard the growth of population and per capita incomes. If space, privacy, and food are expensive, children should seem relatively costly. At the same time, higher space rents should mean slower economic growth than would be experienced if man could manufacture extra land cheaply.

Much of the confusion in the debate on slavery and technology derives from the belief that identifies technological change with progress. Not only the Awkwrights and Seniors thought this way; Marx and, from what I have heard from my colleagues at this conference, a fair proportion of economic historians maintain that the salvation of society depends upon changes in the techniques of production.

From the end of the Civil War down to 1900, the American agricultural sector was subject to continuous political and social upheaval. While the South and Far West were a part of this movement, the heartland of protest remained in the Midwest. The traditional view has been that this unrest and protest was at least partially based on the worsening economic position of the farmer. Farmers complained of being exploited by moneylenders, victimized by railroads and other middlemen, cheated by speculators and faced with prices received falling faster than prices paid, thus reducing real purchasing power. This last view is put forth by Faulkner: “While the prices of farm commodities declined, those of manufactured products, dominated by monopoly practices, remained high or did not decline proportionally.”

The comparative method will accomplish great things. … The historical specialist asks for a method which is a technical instrument, generally used, easily manageable and capable of giving positive results. The comparative method is precisely such an instrument. … I believe that this method can and must penetrate monographic studies. Marc Bloch

The period 1880–1910 saw great improvement in the health of city dwellers. Life expectancy at birth for males in Boston rose from 37 in 1880 to 46 in 1910; in New York City it rose from 29 in 1880 to 45 in 1910. The improvement in the state of health came largely from a decline in the incidence of infectious disease. Recent studies have suggested that most of this decline is fairly attributable to improvements in the standard of living—especially as reflected in diets and housing—and, for cities, to new public health measures—especially the installation of sanitary sewers and the provision of central supplies of pure drinking water. Government installation of public health projects in the United States was a part of the “sanitation movement,” which began some time around 1880. During the thirty-year period 1880–1910 there was a rapid increase in the fraction of the urban population served by sanitary sewers and improved water systems. For example, in 1875 fewer than 30,000 urban citizens were supplied with filtered water. By 1910 the figure had risen to over 10,000,000. That the improved health resulting from these public health measures must have been regarded by its recipients as an increase in their well being is clear. What is not clear is whether the recipients of improved health would have been even better off if the resources used in constructing and maintaining public health projects had been put to alternative uses unrelated to health. In this article I shall estimate the social rates of return on the cumulated investments in public health projects as could have been perceived by their builders and show that it may have exceeded the market rate of return on capital by several times.

Historians of slavery and the slave trade have often left us with the impression that the slave trade was fantastically profitable. The view that it was the profits from the slave trade which financed the British Industrial Revolution and the first industrialization of the United States appears to be gaining adherents. These interpretations seem plausible enough on the surface; indeed, the latter provides part of the historical foundation for the claim by black militants for reparations. Black slaves, whether shipped directly from Africa, or born in the New World into slavery, served their masters against their wills in return for the subsistence allowed them. Surely there was a substantial difference between the value of what they produced and the value of the consumption goods allotted to them to allow survival.

Improved techniques of production have been an important part of the history of agricultural change in all modern economies. The search for policies to bring about the rapid introduction of improved techniques of production in traditional or less developed agricultural sectors has been a central focus of development agencies for the past two decades. It has proven to be a very difficult task, however, to develop policies which actually achieve the transfer of new techniques. The record of success in development efforts towards this end in agriculture has been, on the whole, rather poor.

As evidence has accumulated on the prosperity of the American South under slavery prior to the Civil War, attention has turned to a search for explanations for the apparent stagnation of the southern economy after the Civil War. One class of explanations involves the argument that the South experienced special difficulties in recovering her place in the international cotton market during the late 1860's and 1870's. In one version of this hypothesis, the presence of “new” sources of supply, stimulated by the cotton famine of 1861–65, acted to displace American cotton in world markets during this period. A second version, recently proposed by Mark Aldrich, argues that appreciation of the dollar resulting from capital imports and northern economic expansion forced American cotton to compete with the rest of the world on unfavorable terms prior to the resumption of specie payments in 1879.

What accounts for the “epochal” changes in capital formation shares and capital goods' prices during the 1860's? The pages following document an epochal rise in American gross saving rates centered on the Civil War decade. They also establish a symmetrical episodic shift in the relative price of manufactured durable investment goods. Not only did the American investment share in GNP rise dramatically (and permanently) between the 1850's and 1870's, but the relative price of capital goods declined sharply over the same period. This relative price change was pronounced and it was never again repeated in a subsequent century of development.

The causation of the American Civil War has been one of the largest issues in the historiography of this nation's past. Explanations for the question have been offered, debated, and reinterpreted ever since the time of the war; indeed, even before 1860 some individuals were setting forth reasons why an “irrepressible conflict” must come. Furthermore, the debate among scholars does not appear to be diminishing or approaching any consensus of interpretation. New hypotheses and critiques appear to be emerging as fast today as during preceding periods. Some of these proffered explanations prove to be more popular than others but none has won substantial favor to the exclusion of others and few have been completely discredited. As a result, there now exists a large inventory of previously suggested interpretations building upon such diverse mechanisms as slavery, sectionalism, political ineptitude, a slave-power conspiracy, economic conflicts and abolitionist activism. Many of these explanations have been thoughtfully prepared and then further polished by cross-examination, yet when all these efforts have been objectively considered they yield few definitive conclusions.

Racial discord, political violence, and agrarian unrest are integral to the history of the American South from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. The economy of the region had undergone traumatic changes during the war, not the least of which were the destruction of large amounts of physical capital and the transition of the black agricultural labor force from slavery to freedom. The disruption of production during the war was followed by attempts to reorganize agriculture through a variety of institutional arrangements, including wage labor, cash renting, and widespread use of the sharecropping form of land tenure. Many of the legal and cultural manifestations of the racial prejudice which has long outlived chattel slavery made their appearance during these years. Both contemporary observers and modern historians have recognized possible connections between the economic conditions and the political or institutional developments of the period, yet certain basic characteristics of the post-bellum southern economy have never been adequately determined. Consequently, the influence of economic forces in southern society and political life has remained obscure.