This book is about the interplay of institutions, technology, and contracting. Though it is an example of the “new institutional economics,” there was no such well-defined approach when we started this project twenty years ago. In part, this accounts for the book's long gestation. Much of the scholarship on which we rely is the product of research undertaken by others in the new institutional economics over the last two decades. Like those scholars, we had to venture beyond the literatures in economics and history into political science and sociology to answer the questions that we posed. We hope that our work is better for these intellectual excursions.

The genesis for this book was Alston's Ph.D. dissertation. Our collaboration on this topic began in 1980 when Ferrie was an undergraduate in one of Alston's courses. He wrote his undergraduate thesis (which received the Wells Prize in Political Economy) at Williams College on the topic of paternalism and social security in the United States. In the course of our collaboration we had various detours, the most significant being Ferrie's completion of a doctoral dissertation in economics on an unrelated topic. Though the journey to complete this book has been a long one, we believe that the book is better for it – each time we returned to the project, we revised and added new material, often with the benefit of comments from colleagues and the appearance of new findings from scholars working in the field.