This volume is the second of a two-volume work in which are brought together my writings on topics in the economic history of Western Europe and the American South, Northeast, and Middle West. Is there, one may ask, a central meaning and significance of this body of work, sufficient to justify its publication under a single title?

The mind, I fancy, always looks for “structures” in history, for patterns, for explanations, for the intuitively appealing synthesis. I wrote the individual pieces in these volumes with the feeling that they exhibited such syntheses on specific topics, episodes, and aspects of the European and American experience. One essay in Volume I (Chapter 12) sketched out the lines of a three-part sequence underlying Western development. I labeled the “stages” Malthusian, Smithian, and Schumpeterian and introduced what I considered a novel element in trying to trace out in some detail how and why the transition from one stage to the next had been accomplished. This was followed by an examination of Europe's chaos between the wars (Chapter 13), which made the link from the economic events to the political, social, and economic structures based on specific sources in human behavior. But economic history, set as it is in a society's political, social, and cultural development, does not admit of simple formulation.