The shift from steam to electric power in manufacturing is recounted. Between 1880 and 1930 the production and distribution of mechanical power rapidly evolved from water and steam prime movers with shaft and belt drive systems to electric motors that drove individual machines. The use of electricity reduced the energy required to drive machinery, but more important, enabled industry to obtain greater output per unit of capital and labor input.Reduced energy needs and increased productivity in manufacturing influenced the relationship between energy consumption and gross national product in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Some neglected turn-of-the century American economists, who influenced or participated in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, argued that modern capitalism tended toward recurrent crises as a result of oversaving and surplus capital. These economists held that the construction of an international investment system offered a partial solution to the surplus-capital problem. Focusing on China, U.S. foreign policy at the outset of the twentieth century sought to install the gold-exchange standard in monetary relations between industrial and nonindustrial countries as a condition of such an international investment system.

The essay challenges Karl Polanyi's position—that ancient Near Eastern economies knew state and temple administration but not price-making markets. It is found that the prerequisite functions of a market economy listed by Polanyi—the allocation of consumer goods, land, and labor through the supply-demand-price mechanism; risk-bearing organized as a market function; and loan markets—were all present in the ancient Near East. Although Polanyi criticized stage theories with their “predilection for continuity” he imposed his own version of continuity on history in lumping together many thousands of years under the rubric of “archaic society.” This perspective prevented him from recognizing that ancient Mesopotamia experienced lengthy and significant periods of unfettered market activity as well as periods of pervasive state regulation.

During the period 1910–1940 some changes were occurring in the production practices of the Corn Belt. Three of the most important were the substitution of the tractor for horse power, the introduction of hybrid seed corn, and the development of viable mechanical picker-huskers for harvesting corn. This paper examines the background of those innovations, evaluates current assumptions about them, presents data concerning the relative per acre savings or additional income involved in adoption, and notes the possibility that assumptions about the economic rationality involved in corn improvement research, as well as the implications of the “dry hole effect,” may require some revision.

This paper examines the evolution of the per capita income gap between developed and developing countries. Landes and Kuznets suggest that Western countries already had a big lead before their economic growth accelerated, but Bairoch has recently claimed that European living standards in the mid-eighteenth century were lower than in the rest of the world. I think the existing evidence supports the Landes-Kuznets position, and that Bairoch probably overstates the contemporary income gap and understates per capita income growth in the developing world. But there are contradictory elements in the evidence, on which further research is needed.

The paper quantifies the relative manpower costs of the public building programs of the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome from 29 b.c. to a.d. 68. We used both literary and archaeological sources for obtaining our data. Upon charting the data we discovered that the manpower needs show two peaks, one between 12 b.c. and 3 b.c., the other from a.d. 38–51.

Prevailing theory regards subsistence or pastoral agriculture as a prerequisite for the spread of proto-industry. Commercial agriculture and proto-industrialization are viewed as incompatible. The expansion of the cotton industry in the pays de Caux, a fertile cereal-producing region in Normandy, contradicts the theory and indicates that seasonal unemployment and landleness, not subsistence agriculture, were the distinguishing features of proto-industrial regions. When these regions were located near market towns, the peasants' need for off-season work complemented the growing demand of eighteenth-century merchants for a large labor supply and determined the location of proto-industries.

Two series of the dollar-sterling exchange rate are presented for the 1791–1834 period, both series based on actual transactions and corrected for the component of interest in bills of exchange and for episodes of floating exchange rates. Expressed as deviations from a true parity measure and conjoined with existing data for 1835–1900, the series permit an examination of the stability of the gold points over the entire nineteenth century. The steady narrowing of metallic points, previously found for 1835–1900 and confirmed here, does not apply to the earlier period; but evidence suggests that movement to an integrated market in foreign exchange developed in the 1820s.

Statistics on crop yields for the period 1268–1430 from 62 demesnes in the eastern half of Norfolk are used to demonstrate a new method of measuring arable productivity. The method takes into account seeding rates, the frequency of cropping, and the relative importance of the different crops grown, and it acknowledges the existence of different farming regions. Within eastern Norfolk two such regions are shown to have existed, which cut right across estate affiliations and had radically different productivities. The wider implications of these findings are then discussed.

We apply disjoint principal components analysis to study institutional influences on the course of poverty in the nineteenth century. Classificatory data summarize varied facets of economic and noneconomic institutional structure and change.Four sets of countries are distinguished by characteristics of the course of poverty. The components models show that the impact of economic and demographic changes (export expansion, marketization, industrial expansion, immigration) have consequences for poverty that vary greatly between and within country sets, depending on the character of institutions: above all, land systems, dependence relationships, and political institutions.

Data from the manuscript census of Social Statistics and the Parker-Gallman sample are used to investigate (1) the role of yield fluctuations (the crop year) in both the growth of cotton and corn output from 1849 to 1859 and (2) the observed relative agricultural total factor productivity relationships in the antebellum South in 1859. The major conclusions are: (1) More than 20 percent of the growth in cotton output from 1849 to 1859 can be attributed to differences in the relative crop years; (2) The 1859 cotton crop year for the New South was much better than that in 1849, but the cotton crop year in the Old South was relatively poor; (3) Adjusting for the relative crop year eliminates much of the observed productivity advantage for slave agriculture; (4) The issue of whether the crop-year-adjusted or crop-year-unadjusted results are more representative of antebellum southern agriculture remains unresolved.

The Kentucky tax lists from 1800 to 1860 permit a study of both the trend in per capita wealth and the change in the relative distribution of wealth in this strategic state from the time of its inception to the Civil War. Real wealth per capita is judged to have increased 2.4 percent a year from 1800 to 1840, and 2.8 percent from 1840 to 1860. Relative inequality remained roughly constant, with the Gini coefficient .80 in both 1800 and 1860 for adult free males. The number of properties held by various individuals was surprisingly unequal in distribution in 1800 and 1820.

My archival studies in Egyptian banks reveal that nominal interest rates charged by foreign financial capital in Egypt fell strongly as compared with European rates throughout the period 1882–1914. Interest differentials declined by 2 to 2 ½ percent. This is explained by the increasing confidence of European investors with British occupation and policies. To explain the large inflow of financial capital after 1900 a sharp decline in real interest rates, related to the upsurge of agricultural prices, is posited. The case offers interesting parallels to present-day problems of excessive indebtedness in Third World countries.

Throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century cane sugar was produced on plantations, most frequently with either slave labor or, after slavery was ended, with contract laborers brought in from other low-income countries. This paper details the diverse sources and recipients of nineteenth-century contract labor movements, relating them to political and economic factors. Shifts in the ethnic composition of the plantation labor force are indicated. Late nineteenth- century transitions in the nature of sugar production are noted, and questions raised about their implications for the study of the relations between institutional and technological changes.

Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these propositions, and explores their interrelationships through the use of a linear model inspired by the writings of David Ricardo.

This paper reexamines the well-known increase in cotton production in the postbellum American South, revealing a rather less well understood pattern. The shift to cotton was confined to the Piedmont area of Georgia and South Carolina; it was not a phenomenon of the entire South. The changes in cotton production between 1860 and 1880 followed patterns quite different from those shown in an analysis of 1880 alone. And the 1880 pattern is best explained by the racial composition of the inhabitants, as noted originally by DeCanio, not the tenure variables emphasized in much of the existing literature.

Farm foreclosures in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s reached heights never previously or since exceeded. In this paper hypotheses are proposed and tested to account for the cross-state variation in farm foreclosures during the interwar period. Foreclosures are modeled to depend on depressed farm earnings throughout the 1920s and 1930s, optimistic agricultural expansion brought on by World War I, and cross-state variation in mortgage debt structure. The empirical results are consistent with the proposed multiple causal model.

This article examines the role of capital-deepening technical change in promoting the growth of large firms and concentrated markets in the late nineteenth-century United States. Translog production functions allowing nonconstant returns to scale and biased technical change are estimated in pooled cross-section time series for 16 major industries over the period 1850–1890 based on Census data. It is shown that substantial increases in optimal firm size, dictating natural monopoly or tight oligopoly market structures, occurred in some but not all of the industries experiencing substantial increases in concentration over this period. In a number of markets high concentration levels did not appear to have been compelled by changes in technology.