The familiar transaction-costs model is extended to allow for the varying costs and benefits of supervision and pain incentives on the one hand, and ordinary rewards on the other, in differentially effort- and care-intensive activities. Applied to unfree labor, this model accounts for the observed patterns of slave governance and manumission in extractive, industrial, agricultural, and service activities in antiquity and in the New World. Applied to free labor, it accounts for wage work on large estates in labor-surplus medieval England or modern Italy, the choice between bonuses and penalties in industrial contracts, and the growing paternalism of our own time.

Climatic and dietary changes may have reduced the incidence of mold poisoning in England and France, 1750–1850, thereby stimulating fertility and reducing mortality. Because mold poisons developed in cereals, the staff of life was often the scepter of death. When people ate less rye and more wheat or less wheat and more potatoes, even without increasing their caloric intake or improving their nutrient balance, their chances of survival improved.

Although it has been labeled the “First Industrial Revolution,” British growth and industrialization was slow between the 1760s and the 1820s. The explanation seems to lie with low capital formation shares in national income, low rates of accumulation, and thus little change in the capital-labor ratio. What accounts for the modest investment rates? Lack of thrift? Weak investment demand? This paper argues that the answer is to be found in the enormous debt issues used, to finance the French Wars.

Colonial economies suffered from a scarcity of specie that traditionally has been attributed to a chronic external drain. An analysis of the Canadian currency in the early nineteenth century suggests that the explanation for the specie scarcity lies in the multi-coin monetary standard imposed by the currency laws. Gresham's Law accurately predicts the coins that circulated in Canada, and it is concluded that the colonists suffered from a lack of quality rather than quantity of specie.

The turn of economic events in the early 1970s correlates with a revival of ideas about the existence of long swings in economic development. The subject of Kondratieff cycles has attracted the pens of social scientists of very different persuasions. This paper draws on Walt W. Rostow's interpretation—with its emphasis on the role of exporters of food and raw materials in the world economy—to explore Australian long waves over the last 110 years. I conclude that the case for their existence is not confirmed and moreover that Rostow's cycle-mechanics offer a doubtful explication of movements in the Australian series.

When blacks began to leave the South, one of their first stops was the West Virginia coal fields. There they met with reasonable success. Until the Depression, high-paying machine jobs were open to them and job segregation had almost no impact on their wages, but management positions were off-limits with a few exceptions for all-black workforces. The findings suggest two patterns worth more attention in studies of other industries.

Technological changes in the U.S. pulp and paper industry between 1915 and 1940 are chronicled, and three patterns—evolutionary bias, output-increasing innovation in response to technological disequilibria, and differences in the timing of innovations between the 1920s and 1930s—are identified and explained by means of a theoretical framework for induced innovation. The framework conceptualizes technological change as a means for growth-seeking firms to overcome barriers to accumulation and provides a general explanation of induced innovation that is situated in historical time.