This article deals with agricultural innovation in early nineteenth-century France. The core of the argument advanced is that the diffusion of the new intensive mixed husbandry in northern France was delayed by the slow growth in demand for meat and dairy products before 1840, which reduced the advantages to be gained from adopting forage-intensive crop rotations. Because the climate of southern France precluded large-scale adoption of the northern varieties of mixed husbandry, this study confines itself to the part of France lying north of the Loire, and east of the Breton peninsula. This region contained 39 percent of France's people in 1840, raised 48 percent of its wheat and 64 percent of its fodder, and produced more than 75 percent of the value of its animal production. It was already the most industrialized and wealthy section of the country.

Much of American legal activity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries centered on the transfer of a continent of natural resources—agricultural land, water, timber, mineral deposits—from public to private control. That transfer was crucial for the development of an economic system based largely on private incentives and market transactions. Legal policy at both the state and federal level regarding natural resource ownership and use has been the focus of work by Paul W. Gates, Willard Hurst, Harry Scheiber, and others. Those studies have generally been aimed at describing the nature and impact of governmental support for private economic activities. This paper is concerned with a somewhat different question—the timing and emergence of particular legal institutions (laws and governments). The framework for the study is that offered by Lance Davis and Douglass North in Institutional Change and American Economic Growth. There they hypothesize that institutions develop in response to changing private needs or profit potentials: “It is the possibility of profits that cannot be captured within the existing arrangemental structure that leads to the formation of new (or the mutation of old) institutional arrangements.” Essentially the same model of institutional change is used by some American legal historians, notably Lawrence Friedman and Willard Hurst. They argue that the law can only be understood by examining the surrounding economic, political, and social conditions. Those conditions mold the law, and as they change, they force legal institutions to change. Friedman ties this view closely to the Davis-North model in A History of American Law, where he argues that competing interest groups are the primary determinants of the nature of the law at any one time. This view of legal institutional change is in sharp contrast to the common law tradition of legal history which sees the law as an autonomous institution passed on from generation to generation—an institution that molds the economic, political, and social inputs from society.

James Watt patented his improved steam engine in 1769 but, as is well known, lacked the capital and other facilities to exploit the patent. It was not until the commencement of his partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775, after Boulton had successfully obtained an Act of Parliament extending the patent to 1800, that the technical development and commercial exploitation of his engine could be effected. The first engines were all reciprocating ones operating pumping and, later, blowing machinery. But, partly in response to Boulton's insistence that demand for factory engines would escalate, Watt developed and in 1782 patented his rotative engine.

This paper offers a revised series of nineteenth-century Anglo-American foreign exchange rates. The new series is based partly on the reinterpretation of data presented earlier by other scholars and partly on a recently rediscovered source of continuous information on sterling-dollar rates after 1869. The pioneering work in this area was done by Lance Davis and Jonathan Hughes. They published in 1960 a quarterly dollar-sterling exchange rate series (1835 to 1895) based on the actual prices paid for approximately 3,000 sterling bills by Nathan Trotter's Philadelphia-based metals importing firm.

Amuch neglected topic in the economic history of Uganda is the contribution of fiscal policy to the inequality of income. While generalizations have been made about the heavy burden of taxation on Uganda's Africans and the bias in the distribution of government expenditure, no systematic analysis of these issues has been undertaken. It is my objective to rectify this shortcoming, and to provide estimates of the incidence of taxation on different races and sectors of the economy at different periods. This study should be of parallel interest to my earlier article, demonstrating the extent of inequality in Uganda, since it shows that the government's tax policy had a major effect on the distribution of income in the country. The present paper focuses particularly on the farmers, who have always been at the bottom of the distribution ladder, and attempts to answer the following questions. 1.) What were the major sources of tax revenue in Uganda, and what proportion of the revenue was derived from the farmers? 2.) What was the farmers' rate of taxation compared to that of other sections of the population? 3.) How was expenditure out of government revenue distributed?

Since 1925 a number of scholars have conducted studies of the general business elite in America. Their studies have concluded that the American business elite has been predominantly native born, urban, better educated than the general population, and has originated disproportionately from higher economic classes. These conclusions are not surprising. It might have been surprising if the business elite were found to have emerged predominantly from the poor and less educated, and the immigrant, farm or working-class populations. Such origins would infer a rapid displacement of elite members, the possibility of rapid and massive disaggregation of family fortunes, and the loss of family aggrandizement as a motivating consideration in the minds of aspiring businessmen. This, however, was apparently not the case.