The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century. Capital embodied in people—human capital—mattered. The United States led all nations in mass postelementary education during the “human-capital century.” The American system of education was shaped by New World endowments and Republican ideology and was characterized by virtues including publicly funded mass education that was open and forgiving, academic yet practical, secular, gender neutral, and funded and controlled by small districts. The American educational template was a remarkable success, but recent educational concerns and policy have redefined some of its “virtues” as “vices.”

Recent historical research tends to view the 1848 revolutions in Europe as caused by a surge of radical ideas and by long-term socioeconomic problems. However, many contemporary observers interpreted much of the upheaval as a consequence of short-term economic causes, specifically the serious shortfall in food supply that had shaken large parts of the Continent in 1845–1847, and the subsequent industrial slump. Applying standard quantitative methods to a data set of 27 European countries, we show that it was mainly immediate economic misery, and the fear thereof, that triggered the European revolutions of 1848.

This article examines the role of the agricultural crisis in the international transmission of the Great Depression and assesses the direct and indirect macroeconomic effects of the agricultural price decline. Using panel data for 16 countries, it is shown that the decline in agricultural prices adversely affected the general price level, consumption and investment. Furthermore, it is shown that the agricultural price decline was an important vehicle by which the Depression was transmitted internationally.

Credit cooperatives were widespread in nineteenth-century Germany, which is surprising given that country's highly developed banking system. One general explanation for the success of credit cooperatives emphasizes their ability to capitalize on superior information and to impose inexpensive but effective sanctions on defaulters. These features supposedly permit cooperatives to lend to individuals whom banks would spurn, and to tailor loan terms more closely to borrowers' needs. I use the business records of several German credit cooperatives to test this claim. The results show that real efficiency advantages are at least part of the explanation for their success.

The 1858 discovery of crude oil in Ontario led to the development of a refining industry initially composed of many small firms. Ontario's refiners relied upon generous tariff protection in order to compete with cheaper, higher-quality imports. We apply a regime-switching model to the pattern of monthly wholesale prices to find the extent to which trade policy affected collusive efforts. Tariff protection encouraged collusion, but ease of entry resulted in frequent price wars. An 1877 downward revision in tariffs, while reducing the gains to collusion, also reduced the likelihood of entry and supported efforts to rationalize capacity.

It is widely believed that one of the main causes of productivity decline in British coalmining in the late nineteenth century was that when wage rates increased, miners responded by reducing work effort and/or attendance. However, previous empirical studies have conflated behavioral responses with correlations between coal-seam quality and wage rates. Using individual panel data from a single mine, I show that the short-run wage elasticity of worker effort was in fact positive. The true elasticity of attendance is less clear, but there is no support for the idea that absenteeism increased when wage rates rose.

This article reexamines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire's slow adoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additional transport costs and technical complementarities reduced ring adoption rates, these supply-side constraints were not dominant. Instead what mattered most were demand-side factors. Lancashire produced far more fine yarns than other countries, and this yarn was better spun on mules. Furthermore, Lancashire had a sizeable export trade in yarn, a market again more suited to mule spinning. Low ring adoption rates were thus a rational response to demand patterns dominated by high-quality goods.

“It is impossible to say definitely what percentage of the movement of slaves to the lower South was comprised in the domestic slave trade.…”

L. C. GrayGray, History, p. 658.

Between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves moved from the exporting areas to the importing areas of the United States South.Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics, p. 47. Gutman and Sutch (“Slave Family,” p. 99) estimate “more than a million slaves entered the interstate migration between 1790 and 1860.” For other estimates of the net migration of slaves (or blacks) within the United States, see Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 61–67; Bancroft, Slave-Trading, pp. 382–406 and sources therein; Lang, Effects, pp. 57–72; Sutch, “Breeding,” pp. 178–80; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, pp. 159–64; and Tadman, Speculators, pp. 237–47. These slaves either moved with their owners as whole plantations or were bought by interregional traders and shipped to the lower South. Until recent years historians had no way of estimating the share of sales in the interregional movement of slaves. Consequently, most of the early quantitative estimates of the interregional slave trade were vague or deliberately imprecise.According to Weld (Slavery, p. 13), “perhaps four-fifths or more” of the slaves were transported through the interregional slave trade. For the period 1820 to 1850, Collins (Domestic Slave Trade, p. 62) estimated that less than two-fifths of the migrants were carried south through the trade. According to Phillips (“Racial Problems, p. 223),” The conjecture of about 25,000 per year which has often been made for the interstate slave trade is probably as just an approximation as can be had.…” Bancroft (Slave-Trading, p. 398) “supposes that” the slave trade accounted for 70 percent of the slave exports. Stampp (peculiar Institution, p. 239) suggests that the slave trade accounted for “perhaps a majority” of the slave exports. According to Miller (“Note,” p. 182), “Estimates indicate that from two-fifths to one-half of these [slaves] may have been sold by their owners and moved by slave-traders to newer regions. Presumption lies in favor of the lower estimate,…”

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Editor-in-Chief, Wm. Roger Louis.

Volume I: The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxx, 553.

Volume II: The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 639.

Volume III: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 774.

Volume IV: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 773.

Volume V: Historiography. Edited by Robin W. Winks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 731.

The historiography of the British empire has long exuded a somewhat musty air, like a relict of glory preserved in faded regimental standards, hanging forlornly in English cathedrals or expressed in the overblown Edwardian baroque of the imperial capital. Even the names of the leading academic posts—such as the Rhodes professorship of Imperial History—now seem retrograde. The initiative has clearly moved elsewhere: as the empire's former subjects would scarcely wish to see their history written through the eyes and institutions of the colonizer, the history of India or Australia, Jamaica or Canada have forsaken the view from Whitehall and the governor's mansion, to become national history.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.This dissertation was completed in September 1999 in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Russell R. Menard and Steven Ruggles. Financial support was provided by a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians.”

The development of real income series that are comparable both over time and across countries significantly expanded the possibilities for research in quantitative economic history and long-run economic growth.This dissertation was completed in 2000 in the Department of Economics at the University of Miami (FL) under the supervision of Professor John Devereux. Professor Luis Locay also contributed significantly to this work's progress. This dissertation re-examines the long-run GDP estimates that span over 100 years (henceforth, long-span GDP estimates). While these estimates are used extensively in the literature, their reliability has received limited attention.For example, this data are central to the large body of work on catch-up and convergence. The seminal papers in this area are Abramovitz, “Catching Up”; and Baumol, “Productivity Growth.” Elsewhere in the growth literature they have been used to test competing growth theories in papers such as Kocherlakota and Yi, “Is There Endogenous Long Run Growth.” My findings are first, that there are persistent discrepancies between the long-span GDP estimates and alternative benchmark estimates of comparative GDP. Second, the long-span GDP estimates may result in the mismeasurement of economic performance for individual countries and the forces of catch-up and convergence across countries.

The United State has experienced tremendous improvements in its standard of living over the past hundred years, as have most nations in the developed world.This dissertation was completed at Ohio State University under the supervision of Richard Steckel. We now accept as necessities many things that our grandparents would have considered to be luxuries; we also enjoy countless goods, devices, and services completely unknown a century ago. Far fewer workers are required to produce the necessities of life that we now consume, and therefore an increasing number of us have time to devote to leisure activities, such as entertainment and recreation.

Social revolutions are a major historical feature of twentieth-century world history. For those countries in which they occurred, they became the axis on which their postrevolutionary histories revolved, acquiring a mythical character.This dissertation was completed at Harvard University under the supervision of John Womack. That these revolutions had created a better and more equitable world, that they had been a step towards progress, that without them, tyranny and injustice would have prevailed, became some sort of a religious faith difficult to question without being accused of heresy.

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that enhanced mobilization of capital and risk-sharing in late-medieval Venice.This disssertation was written at the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The funding of long-distance risky trade in late medieval Venice could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Institutions for contract enforcement were thus required to mitigate this commitment problem and enable welfare-enhancing financial exchange.Institutions are constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif, Historical Institutional Analysis; and North, Institutions. Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an optimal allocation of risk?

This dissertation is a study of the Jamaican sugar economy and slave society on the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade.This dissertation was completed in the Department of History at the university of Minnesota (December 1999), under the direction of Professor Russell R. Menard. Published work based on this dissertation can be found in Ryden, “Does Decline” and “‘One of the Fertilest pleasentest Spotts.‘” Its most significant finding focuses on the “Decline Thesis,” as laid out by Eric Williams more than 50 years ago in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery, according to Williams, was doomed to failure because it encouraged planter absenteeism and plantation mismanagement, resulting in the tendency to overproduce. Thus, planters were increasingly saddled with steadily rising input costs while facing falling revenue. Williams explained that the first cracks in the sugar economy appeared with the loss of the North American colonies. From this point on, the British West Indian planters saw a fall in their profits. This late-eighteenth-century decline of the slave mode of production culminated in Parliament abolishing the slave trade in an attempt to cut production levels and thereby revive West Indian fortunes.Williams, Capitalism.

My assigned task is to discuss the three fine dissertations chosen as finalists for the Allan Nevins Prize. But, I want to start by mentioning the eight other dissertations that I read as part of the competition. I found it truly inspiring that so much good work is being done in American economic history. All 11 dissertations submitted were truly first rate and all of them deserved a chance to be recognized. So, to all who submitted, I want to say congratulations on a job well done. And, to the three who were chosen as finalists, I want you to realize just how special your dissertations really are. There were not only the best; they were the best of a very impressive group.

I feel especially honored to be handling the Gerschenkron prize for these meetings on the American Century because I have concluded that the Gerschenkron prize is a quintessentially American beast. This may seem an odd statement; the prize is named for a man who was bron in Russia, trained in Austria, and spoke more than a dozen languages. None of these traits sound quintessentially American. But the prize we have named for him reveals some profound national characteristics. To see my point you have to recall that a dissertation is eligible for the Gerschenkron prize only if it is not eligible for the Nevins prize. We often say that the Nevins prize is for North American economic history, but if you check the precise definition it is really for the economic history of the United States and Canada, thus illustrating our characteristically weak grasp of geography. North America, my encyclopedia tells me, includes all the lands north of the Isthmus of Panama. There is a very large country well to the north of Panama and just to the south of the United States, but for some reason dissertations on this country do not qualify for our prize in North American economic history. But the most revealingly American feature of the Gerschenkron prize is the way it is defined as “not American.” The prize is not for European, or Latin American, or Asian economic history; it is for the rest of the world, or as one of my uncles would put it, “them foreigners over there.”

Differences in institutions are thought to be a key part of the explanation for large cross-country differences in per capita income. Unfortunately, recent empirical research suffers from severe endogeneity problems. In this paper we provide both a theory of why different countries have different institutions and a way of measuring this, which does not suffer from endogeneity. We focus on economies that were colonized by European countries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Institutions in these countries were shaped by their colonization experience and we can use the differences in these experiences as an exogenous source of variation in institutions. We focus on differences in state institutions that depended crucially on settlement patterns. We use data on the mortality of settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an instrument for current institutional differences and show that institutions are a major determinant of different income levels. In our basic empirical model, once we instrument for institutions, two-thirds of the variation in current per capita income is explained by them.

This paper presents a detailed accounting of the sources of African-American economic progress in the labor market over the twentieth century. We examine the received literature and demonstrate the sensitivity of conclusions stated in it to choices of samples used to measure wages and to specifications of earnings functions. We present a quantitative assessment of the contributions of migration, schooling choices, schooling quality, and social activism to both absolute levels and relative levels of African-American earnings.

Modern political economy stresses “society's polarization” as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common forms of social conflict are class polarization and ethnic polarization. The paper links the existence of class polarization to exogenous country characteristics such as resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative economic-history thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff that tropical commodity exporters are more unequal than other societies. This hypothesis is confirmed with cross-country data. This makes it possible to use resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war and ethnic minorities at risk, more social “modernization” and more democracy.