Some neglected turn-of-the century American economists, who influenced or participated in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, argued that modern capitalism tended toward recurrent crises as a result of oversaving and surplus capital. These economists held that the construction of an international investment system offered a partial solution to the surplus-capital problem. Focusing on China, U.S. foreign policy at the outset of the twentieth century sought to install the gold-exchange standard in monetary relations between industrial and nonindustrial countries as a condition of such an international investment system.

Two series of the dollar-sterling exchange rate are presented for the 1791–1834 period, both series based on actual transactions and corrected for the component of interest in bills of exchange and for episodes of floating exchange rates. Expressed as deviations from a true parity measure and conjoined with existing data for 1835–1900, the series permit an examination of the stability of the gold points over the entire nineteenth century. The steady narrowing of metallic points, previously found for 1835–1900 and confirmed here, does not apply to the earlier period; but evidence suggests that movement to an integrated market in foreign exchange developed in the 1820s.

The Kentucky tax lists from 1800 to 1860 permit a study of both the trend in per capita wealth and the change in the relative distribution of wealth in this strategic state from the time of its inception to the Civil War. Real wealth per capita is judged to have increased 2.4 percent a year from 1800 to 1840, and 2.8 percent from 1840 to 1860. Relative inequality remained roughly constant, with the Gini coefficient .80 in both 1800 and 1860 for adult free males. The number of properties held by various individuals was surprisingly unequal in distribution in 1800 and 1820.

Throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century cane sugar was produced on plantations, most frequently with either slave labor or, after slavery was ended, with contract laborers brought in from other low-income countries. This paper details the diverse sources and recipients of nineteenth-century contract labor movements, relating them to political and economic factors. Shifts in the ethnic composition of the plantation labor force are indicated. Late nineteenth- century transitions in the nature of sugar production are noted, and questions raised about their implications for the study of the relations between institutional and technological changes.

This paper reexamines the well-known increase in cotton production in the postbellum American South, revealing a rather less well understood pattern. The shift to cotton was confined to the Piedmont area of Georgia and South Carolina; it was not a phenomenon of the entire South. The changes in cotton production between 1860 and 1880 followed patterns quite different from those shown in an analysis of 1880 alone. And the 1880 pattern is best explained by the racial composition of the inhabitants, as noted originally by DeCanio, not the tenure variables emphasized in much of the existing literature.

This paper analyzes the transition from agents to branch selling as alternative institutional modes for transacting abroad by pre-1939 British manufacturing multinationals. A model to explain the shift between alternative modes is specified in terms of transaction costs. Agent opportunism and contract monitoring costs are the major transaction costs. Besides transaction costs, the frequency of transactions and the accumulation of market-specific knowledge by the principal were found to be important variables.

Kikuchi and Hayami found that irrigation investments were undertaken in East and Southeast Asia when the costs of increasing output through irrigating were lower than through bringing more land under cultivation. In Thailand, however, despite the lower costs of irrigation, the investments were postponed for several decades. The delay was due to a divergence between national security and economic development goals and to a conflict of private versus public interests. The results highlight the importance of the returns to decision makers in determining the amount and timing of public investments.