The Program Committee prepared for the thirty-first Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association in a somewhat unorthodox way. In recent years it has been the custom first to choose a central theme for the conference, and then to solicit only those papers which amplify the theme. This year the program committee decided to forego the attempt to produce a unified set of essays. Instead we wrote to approximately 250 members of the Association and other scholars in the United States and abroad, inviting suggestions for papers without preconditions as to topic, time period, or methodology. Over 150 papers were proposed, from which the committee chose 15. All but one of these are published here. Herbert Gutman's, “Marriage Licenses and Registers Among Freed Men and Women, 1865–1866: New Light on the Family and Household Conditions of Slaves and Free Blacks,” will be published at a later date.

On this occasion it seems wise to take a leaf from Wassily W. Leontief's book as President of the American Economic Association. He discussed a problem of his organization. His presidential address was a plea for economists to limit their creation of models, especially those difficult of empirical testing, and to test some of those susceptible of verification. My remarks will also deal with a problem, one in the Economic History Association, how it came about, and what we might do about it.

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This study of Indian behavior in the fur trade is offered more as a report of a study in progress than a completed piece of historical research. In fact, the research has barely begun. But in spite of its unfinished state, the tentative results of the work I have done to this point may be of some interest as an illustration of the way in which the recent revival of analytical interest in institutions may be used to develop an approach to the economic history of the fur trade.

The role of law in relation to social change is not well understood. One reason for our ignorance is the lack of evidence on the causal role of legislation. Too often the efforts at social reform and the intended consequences of legislation are accepted as proof that behavior has been significantly altered. A case in point is legislation that compels children to attend school. Although it is commonly believed that such laws have been effective in increasing the participation of children in schooling systems in the United States over the last 100 years, there is little evidence to support or reject this belief. Some persons have questioned whether these laws have been the cause or the result of observed increases in school attainment. Still others have doubted the degree to which compulsory schooling laws have been enforced. Reports of widespread truancy in urban schools today call into question not only present enforcement difficulties but also whether these laws were effectively enforced from their inception in the nineteenth century. Yet, in spite of the contemporary and historical interest in compulsory school attendance laws, the basic question remains unanswered: what has been the effect, if any, of these laws on school enrollment and attendance?

The purpose of my studies is to estimate the total and per capita wealth of the thirteen colonies in the early 1770's and something of its composition and distribution. The estimates for New England presented here add another building block to the accumulating evidence that a rather high level of living was reached in the American colonies at the close of over 150 years of economic development. They also show that wealth was unequally distributed among the population in this transitionally commercial era, well before the onset of industrialism. They yield quantitative evidence as well on size of wealth in relation to such characteristics of wealth holders as their age and sex, occupations, urban or rural residence and testacy, that is whether or not they left a will at death.

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings and contentions of our forthcoming study of shipping, distribution, and overseas trade in colonial America from the middle of the seventeenth century to the American Revolution, with emphasis upon the later years. In order to provide an explanation of the contribution of overseas trade to colonial growth, we begin the study by proposing a simple theoretical framework for viewing economic development in the colonies. Then, to provide some perspective for the study, we examine the long-term trends in output, population, and overseas trade (subject to fairly severe data limitations, which allow us to make only tentative statements about these long-term trends, and which largely limit us to the eighteenth century). Next we examine the costs of shipping and distributing commodities in overseas trade and show that these costs declined over the long run. The increased productivity in shipping is explicitly measured, and the sources of these advances analyzed. Finally, a balance-of-payments study is presented for 1768 through 1772, the only years in the colonial period for which we have statistics of all legal overseas trade.

As economic historians delve more deeply into the economy of the Continental Colonies, they become increasingly aware of its sophistication. Good Englishmen in every way, the colonists' economic development closely paralleled that of a Mother Country which, of course, by the 1770's, was on the eve of an industrial revolution. The British themselves constantly complained of colonial competition in most every sphere of activity. Yet any claims for a highly developed colonial economy by historians, or complaints about competition by British merchants, have, until recently, sounded more like puffery or self-pity. Facts have been few. Even so major an element in the process of economic growth as the accumulation and productive mobilization of colonial domestic savings remains to be examined. It is now possible to say something about at least this topic for a significant colonial enterprise, the shipping industry.

The central fact of the demographic history of early North America is rapid growth. Both Canada and the white population of the English colonies experienced increases of 2½ percent per year during the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century rates, beginning from a low base and more influenced by immigration, were even higher. In contrast, the expansion of population in early modern Europe rarely exceeded 1 percent per annum over an extended period. Since Franklin and Malthus, interpretations of early American demography have centered on the high fertility associated with near universal marriage for women at a low average age. The extremely youthful population, high dependency ratio, and one of the largest mean census family sizes ever recorded all follow from the high level of fertility.

The study of mortality rates and trends in the United States before 1860 has been rather unsystematic to date. Most scholars have been content to estimate the mortality rate at some point in time and only a few serious efforts have been made to ascertain the long-term trends in mortality. Particularly lacking are efforts to relate estimates of mortality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to those of the nineteenth century. In addition, the few studies that have attempted to discuss long-term trends in American mortality have been forced to rely on estimates of mortality gathered from different sources and based on different techniques of analysis. Unfortunately, almost no efforts have been made to estimate possible biases introduced when comparing mortality data from different types of records.

France has been well characterized by Raymond Aron, following de Tocqueville, as Immuable et changeante. Nowhere does variability (across space) combine more strongly with stability (in time) than in the economy of rural France in the nineteenth century. Judging again by titles, we must give higher marks to the author of The Eternal Order of the Fields than to the man who argued that Capitalism and Agriculture were growing ever closer, to the advantage of the former.

Well before the beginning of machine industry, many regions of Europe became increasingly industrialized in the sense that a growing proportion of their labor potential was allocated to industry. Yet, that type of industry—the traditionally organized, principally rural handicrafts—barely fits the image one has of a modernizing economy. There is, however, cognitive value as well as didactic advantage in thinking of the growth of “pre-industrial industry” as part and parcel of the process of “industrialization” or, rather, as a first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper.

In studies of the late medieval economy, the dominant position of the textile industry has long been recognized. Since the opening decades of this century however, scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively toward the luxury industries of silk and fine woolens, which involved a complex financial and commercial structure geared to the satisfaction of the needs and desires of a wealthy and select clientele. Relatively neglected is that branch of the textile industry devoted to the production of low-priced cotton cloth for popular consumption. This neglect is all the more surprising in view of a rich if somewhat dispersed documentation attesting to the importance of this industry in numerous towns of Northern Italy. The large-scale production of cotton cloth posed problems of financing and organization not unlike those of silk and wool and gave rise to similar entrepreneurial forms. At the same time a study of the organization of cotton manufacture provides a number of unique insights into aspects of economic organization in Northern Italy. In the period covered by this paper, the cotton manufacturing centers of this area formed a single production zone characterized by a high degree of economic interdependence and a marked tendency toward the standardization of products.

I shall confine my comments to the papers by Messrs. Mendels and Hohenberg, which lie within my period of interest and competence. First, regarding Mendels: I found this a very useful survey, wide-ranging in space and time, with very strong coverage of the literature. One of its many virtues is that it tries to grapple with some of the serious difficulties of analysis and explanation, especially in the statistical realm. Despite, or perhaps because of, these general merits, however, there are a number of points of detail that are open to criticism. Let me take these seriatim:

Protection of a domestic manufacturing industry to encourage its expansion through import substitution is equivalent (in the absence of equal protection for agriculture) to a “tax” on agriculture to support the development of the industrial sector. To call this policy of biasing the intersectoral terms of trade to favor industry a typical strategy of underdeveloped countries would be, if anything, to understate its universality. The arguments for and against such a strategy are well known, and an approximation of the benefits to the industrial sector can be gleaned from the national accounts of many countries. What remains hidden in the accounts, however, is the cost to the agricultural sector as a result of its being forced to trade at less favorable terms of trade than those provided by the world market. The purpose of this paper is to work out a simple methodology for measuring this cost and then to attempt an estimate of the cost in a particular case.

There are few words whose mere employment is capable of throwing American listeners into such paroxysms of righteous or offended indignation as the words “American imperialism.” This reaction is largely a reflection of the fact that “imperialism” is one of those words whose implicit domain of meaning is very large and even encompasses mutually contradictory elements as revealed by single user's notions of the world let alone different users' notions. In addition, the word conveys a strong connotation of ethically undesirable behavior to almost all users and readers.

… for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting …. They withdraw from the struggle and become an aristocracy, which if it again plays a part in the course of affairs does so in a passive manner only, assuming the role of silent partners. In their place arise new men.…