The Industrial Revolution as a historical concept has many shortcomings. A new concept—the “industrious revolution”—is proposed to place the Industrial Revolution in a broader historical setting. The industrious revolution was a process of household-based resource reallocation that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for market-supplied goods. The industrious revolution was a household-level change with important demand-side features that preceded the Industrial Revolution, a supply-side phenomenon. It has implications for nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic history.

Although the late medieval Commercial Revolution is considered to be a watershed in the economic history of Europe, the analysis of the interrelationship between political and economic systems in bringing about this period of economic growth has been neglected. This article conducts such an analysis with respect to the city of Genoa during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Viewing political institutions as self-enforcing agreements rather than as exogenous rules, I present and analyze the nature and evolution of Genoa's political systems and the relations between these systems and economic growth.

Using a complete enumeration of credit contracts for a rural area in Burgundy, this article examines how credit markets functioned and what role they served. Credit markets distributed funds to a large fraction of the population, and they were organized to mediate problems of asymmetric information. A central constraint on credit markets, however, was the threat of government intervention. Because of this threat, capital markets remained relatively isolated from one another.

In the interwar period, Japanese textile firms were able to greatly increase labor efficiency and become the world's main exporter of cotton textiles. Meanwhile, the Indian industry stagnated and was forced to retreat behind tariff walls. This paper argues that the flexibility of the Japanese work force stemmed from its high turnover; the Indian laborers were collectively inflexible in defending lifetime careers against technical changes that reduced labor demand. As the industry requires only a few easily acquired skills, a committed work force was actually a disadvantage to Indian management.

This article asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits, and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our principal findings are (1) interest rates paid on deposits were generally higher in Canada; (2) interest income received on securities was generally slightly higher in Canada; (3) interest rates charged on loans were generally quite similar; and (4) net rates of return to equity were generally higher in Canada than in the United States.

This article investigates the feminization of poverty prior to 1960 by focusing on three factors that contributed to the increase in the propensity to form female-headed households and to the poverty rate among such households. Compared with 1939, households headed by prime-age women in 1959 included fewer adults, thereby reducing earnings potential. The earnings level at which such women formed independent households was lower relative to the poverty line; and although higher earnings allowed more women to form independent households, the increase was not large enough to lift some of these households out of poverty.

The gap between the mean wages of black men and white men in the United States narrowed substantially between 1940 and 1950. There was, however, almost no change in this wage gap between 1950 and 1960. Some of this discontinuity in the path of black progress can be explained by general changes in the wage structure—wage compression in the 1940s and slight expansion in the 1950s. However, most of the gains of the 1940s were driven by race-specific factors, including increasing relative wages controlling for worker characteristics. These race-specific gains ceased in the 1950s.

In both northern and southern cities of the United States, African-Americans faced a web of social constraints on such activities as housing, shopping, and everyday interpersonal interactions. These constraints had implications for the labor market as well. In particular, norms against white subservience to blacks played an important role in determining the racial composition of occupations. Close attention to the operation of such social norms can add much explanatory power to conventional economic analyses of discrimination based on human capital and taste for discrimination.

This article makes use of nearly one thousand patents to trace the origins and evolution of professional invention in the midwestern harvester industry. These data indicate that professional inventors had become integrated into the industry by the 1870s. This unity of business and invention made firms loci of learning and fostered the rise of a market in technology through which patents and patentees became available.

Existing output series that cover both the antebellum and postbellum periods are inconsistent and unsuitable for comparing cyclical patterns across the nineteenth century. More consistent data show that output in cyclically sensitive sectors was no less, and probably more, volatile before the War Between the States than after it.