I suggest here that change in a number of social variables, including values, vertical mobility, political and social power, technology and law, appear to be associated with economic growth or decline and that the study of economic history would be enriched by investigations of the nature and timing of those linkages. Illustrative models of the linkages are drawn for the early Middle Ages in Western Europe and for the colonial and antebellum periods of American history.

This article examines the productivity of American watch manufacturing technology between 1850 and 1900 as representative of the industries collectively known as the American System of Manufactures. It then compares and contrasts products and responses to market events in British and American horology in the nineteenth century. Finally it weighs factor-substitution models which purport to explain the sharply different British and American responses to mechanization, specifically why the American System of Manufactures is indeed American.

The study of mass production has been strongly influenced in recent years by two dissimilar bodies of work—that of Alfred D. Chandler and that of Harry Braverman and others who argue that mass production helped managers “deskill” and “control” industrial workers. The history of the U.S. tire industry between 1910 and 1930 underlines the value of Chandler's analysis and the limited applicability of the deskilling and control hypotheses.

This article considers how and why American industry has supported research and development during the last century. It examines the differences in methods and results of Thomas Edison (inventor-entrepreneur), William Coolidge (General Electric engineer-scientist), and Irving Langmuir (General Electric Nobel Prize winner). The article concludes that Edison's effective use of organized research and development paved the way for scientifically trained people to use varied methodologies to advance science, technology, and commercial interests together.

Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, accomplished scientists and prominent executives in the BASF and IG Farben chemical corporations, were drawn together by mutual admiration and common technical interests. In the Nazi era, however, they came to embody competing liberal and nationalist conceptions of German political economy. This article examines their relationship, the reasons for their divergent stances, and their individual contributions to the economic and productive power of the Third Reich. Ironically, Bosch's understanding of his industry, his nation, and scientific progress led him to oppose the Nazis, but also to lay the basis for their recruitment of Krauch and the German chemical industry for their expansionist purposes.

New spatial patterns, with areas specializing by function rather than industry, reflect twentieth-century developments in industrial organization, the role of the state, and Britain's system of cities. In the short run, World War II and postwar regional policy increased factory-building and employment in formerly depressed areas. Longer-run effects of both helped concentrate research and development within the South near London and dispersed routinized production to other areas. Organizational links within firms and to government departments, intellectual and commercial contacts in London, and locational preferences of professional and technical workers influenced R & D location.

Tontine insurance, introduced in 1868, combined the features of life insurance with an unusual old-age saving plan. A portion of the annual premium was accumulated in a fund that was divided among the surviving policyholders after twenty years. By 1905, two-thirds of all life insurance in force was of this type. Despite consumer appeal, sales of tontine policies were prohibited in 1906 after the Armstrong Investigation charged the tontine business with corruption and extravagance. We argue that tontine insurance was actuarially sound and an attractive life-cycle investment. Prohibition was probably unnecessary.

The U.S. Constitution, by taking away the power of the states to issue paper money, removed a major source of flexibility in state public finance. In their search for new sources of revenue and fiscal flexibility, the states discovered that the banks they chartered could fill the gap. Investment earnings and tax revenues derived from banks soon became major elements of state public finance. We discuss the nature of these early business-government relationships and provide the first systematic assessment of their relative importance in state finance.

Three possible explanations for the emergence of the Canadian central bank in 1935 are examined: that it reflected the need of competitive banking systems for a lender of last resort, that it was necessary to anchor the unregulated Canadian monetary system after abandonment of the gold standard in 1929, and that it was a response to political rather than purely economic pressures. Evidence from a variety of sources (contemporary statements to a Royal Commission, correspondence of chartered bankers, newspaper reports, academic writings, and estimation of time series econometric models) rejects the first two hypotheses and supports the third.

Output per farm worker in the northern United States and Britain in the early nineteenth century was many times that inEastern Europe or in medieval England and wages were correspondingly higher. Technical progress explains little of the high American and British productivity in the early nineteenth century, nor, in the American case, does abundant land per worker. Instead, most of the difference derived from more intense labor in America and Britain.

For techniques diffusing as commodities, sales form a critical medium of technological communication which facilitates secondary invention. While sales may also influence the incentives to invent, I argue that the technical learning associated with selling provides a fuller account of invention for the case of the sewing machine in the United States. A study of some 3,500 patents and forty-eight city directories shows that as sales expanded in extent and location, so did patenting by first-time inventors. Moreover, patent use generated a flow of information back to inventors which increased the likelihood and extent of repeat patenting. In these ways, sales sustained technological change as a cumulative process.

The West Main Cree of northern Ontario adapted readily but selectively to the European technologies and institutions made available by the fur trade. Yet some basic cultural and psychological differences regarding the accumulation of wealth, attitudes to work, and dependence on relief and government transfers complicated Indian-European relations. In a rational attempt to compromise among today's complex choices, the Cree have abandoned their traditional bush pursuits for village life and wage employment, with hunting and trapping reduced to part-time or recreational activities.

European technology, both practical and managerial arts, had an impact on the well-established cotton and handicraft textile industries of the Western Sudan during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule. But French efforts to shape cotton production for export did not always have the intended results. Indigenous historical processes as well as French colonial policy account for the changes in these industries.

The introduction and diffusion of what Alfred Chandler called modern business enterprise had a profound capital-saving impact on the American economy. Given the availability of the railroad and telegraph, purchasing more managerial labor services paid off principally via increased speed of production and inventory turnover, which spread costs of holding capital over a larger volume of output. This article challenges the consensus that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century technological change in the United States was overwhelmingly labor saving and interprets the factor-saving bias of modern business enterprise as representative rather than anomalous.