We are right to see power, prestige, and confidence as conditioned by the Civil War. But it is a very easy step to regard the War, therefore, as a jolly piece of luck only slightly disguised, part of our divinely instituted success story, and to think, in some shadowy corner of the mind, of the dead at Gettysburg as a small price to pay for the development of a really satisfactory and cheap compact car with decent pick-up and road-holding capability. It is to our credit that we survived the War and tempered our national fiber in the process, but human decency and the future security of our country demand that we look at the costs. What are some of the costs? Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 49–50.

The successful demonstration of reaping machines by Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick in 1833 and 1834 inaugurated long series of events that eventually revolutionized the harvesting of small grains and grasses, drastically altering the lives and productivity of grain farmers. Given the ultimate success and widespread impact of the reaping machine, historians have long pondered why almost twenty years elapsed between the date when Obed Hussey sold his first machine in 1833 and the first wave of popular acceptance in the mid-1850's. Why did it take twenty years for a significant number of farmers to begin to exchange their cradles and scythes for reapers and mowers? What important economic and technological factors governed the initial diffusion of this invention? These are important historical questions, the answers to which can significantly influence our broader perceptions of the problem of technological diffusion.

The dominance of steam over sail was not finally established on long distance routes until the 1880's. When it came, steam's triumph was due primarily to the adoption of the high pressure compound engine, a marvel of its day and one of the major engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Yet within two decades experiments were being undertaken with two forms of marine propulsion—the steam turbine and the marine diesel—which were to render the compound engine uncompetitive over a wide range of uses. An experimental steam turbine was built by Parsons in 1884 and an improved design powered the Turbinia in 1894. The heavyoil or diesel engine was first adapted for marine propulsion in 1902. In 1910 a Dutch tanker, the Vulcanus, was fitted with a 450 BHP engine and in 1911 Burmeister & Wain began constructing the first ocean going cargo liner, the Selandia. By the early twenties steam turbine and diesel were replacing conventional steam vessels. Above all, the inter-war years witnessed the success of the marine diesel (motorship) which was adopted, particularly by European shipowners, for the propulsion of a wide variety of ship types and sizes.

Douglass North and Robert Thomas recently proposed a model of the rise and fall of the manorial system. There is much to be admired in this work, which explores an unusually broad historical vision with great analytical acumen; but my purpose here is to examine some of its less compelling features. In section II, I consider the nature of feudalism, and develop empirical arguments against the wholly voluntaristic and non-exploitative interpretation proposed by North and Thomas. Section III examines their analysis of the “classic” manor, which I believe errs both in limiting the feasible contracts to forms of direct barter and in attributing the lowest transaction costs to labor dues even within that restricted set. Section IV reviews the proposed explanation of the later evolution of the manorial system, disputing both the continued use of the transaction costs model and the extensions of it that consider custom as an institutional barrier to efficiency, and population growth and inflation as the exogenous motors of change. Section V provides a brief concluding summary and evaluation.

An issue of continuing interest in Canadian economic history is the lag between the formulation of policies directed toward settling the prairies and the appearance of any significant agricultural population. Proposals to develop the region preceded the union of the British North American colonies in 1867. By 1872 the first Homestead Act had been passed and a commitment made to construct a transcontinental railway linking the western provinces to Central Canada. Yet except for a brief speculative boom in the early 1880's, occasioned by the CPR reaching Winnipeg, the rate of settlement remained well below expectations. Homestead entries averaged under 3,000 from 1874 to 1896, and in many years there were nearly as many cancellations as new entries. In the same period adjacent American lands were filling up, in large part with emigrant Canadians. Settlement of the Dakotas, beginning in 1870 but depressed from 1873 to 1878, boomed from 1879 to 1886. Over the thirty years from 1870 to 1900 an estimated 120,000 Canadians chose the American prairies over the Canadian.

Few would deny that the U.S. economy is today dominated by huge corporations. Much recent writing has proposed that these corporations form a stable and monopolistic (or oligopolistic) “core” around which a more competitive “peripheral” sector exists. Firms in the core are said to be “eternal,” while firms in the periphery demonstrate the mortality and high turnover expected in competitive industries. In another context, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy emphasized the permanence of big corporations when they noted:

In a recent article in this Journal David Galenson presents an interesting hypothesis about the impact of changing relative prices on the cattle driving industry in the late nineteenth-century West. Briefly, he argues that movements of.cattle prices in the urban marketing centers relative to the local prices in the range areas affected the profitability of the industry and thus the quantity of cattle driven north from Texas. Unfortunately, in testing his hypothesis, Mr. Galenson has incorrectly interpreted the history of the southern Great Plains.

In responding to Mr. Dennen, I welcome the opportunity to clarify several points that may have been misunderstood by the readers of this Journal. Mr. Dennen makes three main criticisms, which I will deal with in the order he raised them.

There is an erroneous omission in Jacob Metzer's article, “Railroad Development and Market Integration: The Case of Tsarist Russia,” which appeared in the September 1974 issue of this Journal. The error, is the omission of Qd in the second term of the numerator of equation (1) on page 546.