This paper explores a number of the unresolved issues posed by the debate on the social saving of railroads. The final section includes a brief summary of the main findings of the new economic history of transportation.

Soon after establishing political control, the British colonial administration in southern Nigeria attempted to replace the existing currencies of the country with British currency. The traditional currencies competently discharged the functions of money, however, and it required fifty years before the pre-colonial currencies, attacked by the colonial authorities and unrecognized as legal tender, gradually lost standing and proved worthless to their last holders. Theoretical implications of these developments are discussed.

The Saint Esprit was a merchant ship which sailed from the harbor of Marseilles in the spring of 1248, bound for Acre. One hundred and fifty contracts relating directly to this voyage are preserved in the notarial records. This article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding this venture and analyzes the statistical data available with regard to passengers, investors, and cargo. The general picture which emerges from studying the total venture offers a new perspective on medieval business.

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.

There is at present no series of crop yields available for early modern England. This paper describes a method for calculating estimates of grain yields in bushels per acre using data derived from English probate inventories. Results are presented of 10-year average yields for wheat, rye, barley, oats, and peas for the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk during 1587–98, 1628–40, and 1660–1735. These results are compared with other yield figures for the periods before and after these dates, and used to revise existing estimates of the progress of productivity changes.

In the late nineteenth century, when most of the world was on a gold standard, India was on a silver standard. Silver was used for coins, held in hoards, and worn as jewelry. Regression analysis confirms a positive relationship between prices and the money supply, and inverse relationships between prices and rainfall and prices and the combined influences of railroads and commercialization. The. influx of silver was not correlated with the money supply, apparently because hoarding and dishoarding by peasants and others caused the amount of money in active circulation to vary.

Labor costs historically have been decisive in determining the location of cotton textile production. Despite an apparent advantage in wage rates, however, the southern industry did not achieve sustained relative progress before about 1875. This study argues that in most times and places the region did not have “cheap labor” before this date. What matters is not just the level of wages in any year, but the quality of labor attracted at this wage and the geographic scope of the labor market within which firms operate. The scope of the labor market depends in turn on property rights and incentives toward recruitment activity.

Differences in regional prices and wages are examined for the United States in 1890, together with the relationship between the cost of living and city size, and the determinants of regional industrial growth. Results indicate that regional cost-of-liying differences were sufficiently large so that money wages cannot be used for purposes of comparing the economic well-being of wage earners across regions. Except for the South, money wages and the cost of living were positively correlated. The relative differences in money wages, however, were greater; consequently real wages in high wage-price areas were generally higher.

This paper attempts to explain the reasons for the shift of labor from agriculture in the United States from 1869 to 1899. It focuses on the effects of productivity growth in agriculture and industry, and of increases in the supply of land (safety-valve theory). A two-sector general equilibrium model is used in the analysis. Many of the results hinge on whether the economy is assumed to be open or closed to foreign trade. In order to determine the appropriate specification, each issue is analyzed in terms of its equivalent counterfactual-conditional proposition. An important conclusion is that increases in agricultural productivity and the level of supply of land likely reduced the proportion of workers in agriculture even though the United States economy was open.

This paper reports new calculations of foreign investment in Russia between 1881 and 1913. As the major recipient of foreign capital under the gold standard, Russia provides an ideal case study of capital flows among countries. The conclusions are that the influx of foreign investment into Russia following convertibility was much more substantial than the early estimates suggested and that the Russian growth rate was raised by about 0.5 percent annually as a consequence of the gold standard. The major cost of achieving convertibility was that two-thirds of official borrowing abroad between 1885 and 1897 was used to acquire gold reserves, but the ensuing growth benefits which are estimated far outweigh these costs. The Russian case confirms the standard portfolio theory of capital movements, and the relationship between the demand and supply of fiat money explains observed variations in the exchange rate.

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 standard modern model of married women's labor force participation is modified because turn-of-the-century families had the alternatives of substituting children for the mother in the labor force and of taking in paying boarders. The modified model explained 1901 participation rates quite well. Participation rates were significantly related (negatively) to the number of older children (potential workers) but not to the number of young children. In addition, the availability of jobs was more important than high wages in inducing women to seek work. Other family income, the male unemployment rate, and literacy also were significant.

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.

The South's failure to industrialize more rapidly in the antebellum period did not lead to its immiserization. The South's terms of trade improved over the antebellum period so that its consumption potential expanded more rapidly than did production. Specialization in cotton production promoted a favorable movement of relative prices facing Southern producers. A customs union analysis shows that the South might have industrialized to a greater extent and might have raised its consumption potential further had it been able to impose an independent tariff on imports from all areas, including the rest of the United States.

The theory of proto-industrialization holds that a major expansion of rural industry, primarily in textiles, formed a phase precursory to industrialization in many European regions. This phase was characterized by sweeping economic and demographic changes, including increasing population density, land subdivision, and agricultural intensification. Domestic industry boosted marriage rates and may have lowered the average age of marriage of rural dwellers. The present research examines the tenets of this theory for the case of Ireland, a country affected by rural industrialization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The data are cross-sectional and are drawn primarily from the 1841 census.

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.

During the nineteenth century the export of bulk commodities from West Africa expanded at the expense of slave exports. Research has focused on the political implications of the expansion of so-called “legitimate trade” rather than on its economic character. In the interests of an economic approach, new terminology and a conceptual framework are proposed, and then applied to a historical problem—the levels of competition prevailing in the African trader networks serving the coastal ports. The conclusions of this study are related to the issue of the historical origins of African underdevelopment.

In several recently published works Richard A. Easterlin has shown that per capita incomes as measured in current dollars have tended to converge over time. In this paper the per capita income estimates have been adjusted for interregional differences in prices. In adjusting the regional per capita income estimates for interregional differences in both urban and rural-urban prices it was found that no significant differences occurred in either the levels of differences or in the rates of convergence from the original estimates. In addition, no significant correlation was found between interregional per capita incomes and price levels.

It is widely accepted that the expansion of government spending in Eastern Europe was financed during the half-century before World War I by steady increases in fiscal pressure on the peasantry. For Serbia, a quantitative analysis indicates that, relative to their incomes, the fiscal burdens on farmers declined markedly, and that the growing revenue was provided mainly by the nonfarm sector. These trends were facilitated by the political strength of the peasants. A superficial comparison of the Serbian case with those of Bulgaria and Russia suggests that fiscal pressures on farm incomes may have been decreasing throughout Eastern Europe, despite the growth of aggregate taxation.