This article presents somewhat-more-direct evidence than has been available on the supply price of labor during the Depression. The new data comprise wages asked from situations-wanted ads for female clerical workers. Between 1929 and 1933 annual average clerical wages asked fell nominally by nearly 58 percent, markedly lower than wages of new or existing employees. Neither changes in labor quality nor self-selection explains the decline. Clerical wages asked fell by roughly the same percentage as did wages paid in agriculture. The data are strongly inconsistent with the market-clearing view of Depression-era labor markets.

We investigate secular changes in the distribution of personal expenditure in Italy. To this end we present a new data set, consisting of 4,370 family-level budgets scattered over the years 1881–1961. Our methodology is innovative for this kind of study. Italy's secular trend proves to have been egalitarian, and to have accelerated in periods of fast output growth. Sectoral, residential, and demographic changes associated with “modern economic growth” account for a minor part of the observed changes in expenditure distribution, suggesting that other factors, such as wage differentials, play a dominant role in explaining the dynamics of inequality.

A large literature examines men's unemployment and their wives' labor-market participation. In response to her husband's unemployment, a woman may adjust her labor supplied to household production as well as to the market. This article tests for this effect and measures its impact using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost of Living survey of 1917–1919. Households altered both household-production decisions and the wife's labor supplied to the market in response to the husband's unemployment. But the household-production-response effect was smaller than the added-worker effect, in terms of women's labor hours and household consumption.

Mexico's initial industrialization was based on firms that were “grouped”: that is, linked to other firms through close affiliations with a common bank. Most explanations for the prevalence of groups are based on increasing returns or missing formal capital markets. We propose a simpler explanation that better fits the facts of Mexican history. In the absence of secure property rights, tangible collateral could not credibly be offered to creditors; but there remained the possibility of using reputation as a form of intangible collateral. In such circumstances, firms had incentives to group together for purposes of mutual monitoring and insurance.

Economic historians have traced the origin of the uniform property tax in the United States to the insertion of uniformity clauses into state constitutions in the Northwest and to efforts to tax commercial wealth. This article shows that the tax was created by legislation in the Northeast and that the first constitutional clauses were adopted in the South to protect slaveholders. It is time for historians of the U.S. political economy to abandon the dated paradigms of the “progressive history” tradition.

We estimate the extent of common land in England from 1475 to 1839, treating charity land as a sample. We find common was only 27 percent of land in 1600. Thus there was little common beyond what Parliamentary acts later enclosed. More tentatively, common was only one-third of land even in 1500. Further, common land in 1600 was mainly stinted, excluding those without formal property rights. Common waste, to which the landless poor did have access, constituted a mere 4 percent of land, and was mainly land of marginal value. Private property was thus the norm in England by 1600.

Like Europeans and colonists, eighteenth-century Native Americans were purchasing a greatly expanded variety of goods. As fur prices rose from 1716 to 1770, there was a shift in expenditures from producer and household goods to tobacco, alcohol, and other luxuries by Indians who traded furs at the Hudson's Bay Company's York Factory post. A consumer behavior model, using company accounts, shows that Indians bought more European goods in response to higher fur prices and, perhaps more importantly, increased their effort in the fur trade. These findings contradict much that has been written about Indians as producers and consumers.

Based on six sets of witnesses' accounts from the North of England and London over the period 1760 to 1830, new estimates of male labor input during the Industrial Revolution are derived. I present a new method of converting witnesses' activities into estimates of labor input, and derive confidence intervals. Working hours increased considerably. Moderate gains in per capita consumption during the Industrial Revolution have to be balanced against this decline in leisure. This adds further weight to pessimistic interpretations: I calculate that consumption per capita, adjusted for changes in leisure, remained essentially unchanged between 1760 and 1830.

The 1911 Canada–United States Reciprocity Agreement had a central role in the campaigns of the Liberal and Conservative parties in the 1911 Canadian General Election. Consequently, Laurier's defeat in 1911 has been interpreted as Canada's rejection of reciprocity and her commitment to tariff protection. This analysis shows that reciprocity bolstered support for Laurier in 1911. In the absence of opposition from pork packers, particularly in Quebec, Laurier would have retained his majority mandate. Thus, Canada was not committing to a path of protectionism after 1911.

The residual in equation 2 of Suchit Aurora's article in the September 2001 issue, “Health, Human Productivity, and Long-Term Economic Growth,” should have been shown as {\hat{\varepsilon}}_t to correspond to the notation used in equations 6 and 7. The corrected equation is \Delta\ln y_t = \mu + \xi\ln h_t + \sum\limits^{-m}_{i=m}\phi_i\Delta\ln h_{t+i}+\hat{\varepsilon}_t\qquad t=1,2,3,\ldots T

This book is a study of all aspects of private finance from ca. 300 BC to 300 AD. It is intended for students and more advanced readers; among the latter, economic historians of medieval and early modern Europe are included. In other words: Jean Andreau is an adept of the comparative study of the various phases of preindustrial European history, beginning with that of the Roman Empire. The focus of the book is on the late Republic and the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. Andreau discerns a three-tier structure in the Roman financial world. The top tier consisted of the imperial elite of senators and knights, who made loans either directly or through intermediaries. These loans financed a variety of operations: conspicuous consumption, tax obligations of provincial cities, and, to a lesser extent, also “some production and trade” (pp. 28, 148). These elite financiers did not call themselves bankers. They were basically wealthy landowners, not entrepreneurs, who cherished a “strategy of security, not of profit” (p. 24). This mentality “imposed limits on the Roman economy” (p. 28). This elite thought in terms of networks, not of commercial companies; and this complex is supposed to explain the absence of a bill of exchange (p. 26). One may wonder whether the behavior and mentality of a small group of Roman senators were representative of the economic strategies of all urban elites in the Empire.

To the vast and burgeoning literature on the rise, fall, and consequences of European empire-building, David Loades, a distinguished historian of Tudor England, adds this brief and stimulating book on the origins and course of the country's overseas expansion in the two centuries after 1490. He is not concerned with models or with the analysis of global balances of power. Taking a more modest perspective, he argues that between 1490 and 1690 England changed from being the decayed remnant of a once-formidable expansionist power on the Continent to a nascent oceanic and imperial state. By the mid-1500s, he claims, the foundations of the country's subsequent maritime and colonial achievements were already in place. He identifies the vital elements as the creation of a standing specialist fighting navy; the development, from the mid-sixteenth century, of an interest in long-distance voyages and trading ventures, sustained under Elizabeth I by an “enterprise partnership” between the queen and some of her subjects; and the emergence, in the years of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Republic, of the navy as an instrument of state rather than dynastic ambition. However, as the argument unfolds he admits the importance of other factors, not least the pursuit of profit and the desire of some of England's populace to escape from religious or political regimes they found intolerable.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, French historians composed some of the greatest rural history—indeed, the greatest history—ever written. Scholars such as Marc Bloch, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie produced extraordinary works of social history, which pioneered in borrowing techniques from other fields such as geography, demography, and anthropology. Many of their best books—such as Ladurie's Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974)—were local or regional studies; and although they were by and large uninformed by neoclassical economics, they created a consensus about the rural economy of Old Regime France. According to that consensus, French agriculture stagnated because rising population levels fragmented landholdings, and because the peasants' attitudes and village institutions blocked economic growth. The consensus endured for a number of years, but it has now begun to collapse under the weight of exciting new research conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of this research is cliometric; some is innovative social history. Nearly all of it is fascinating, but it is proliferating at such a rate that it is hard to keep track of, even for the specialist. It is even harder to see whether a new consensus is beginning to form.

This book offers a short account of the Great Depression in Europe, aimed at historians without a strong training in economics. The introduction sets out four key questions around which the book is organized: What were the origins of the Depression? Why was it so severe? How was recovery effected, and was it sustainable? and What were the implications of the recovery for political relations in and between nation-states?

Excess, we learned as children in Glasgow, was the defining characteristic of Americans: big country, big cars, food served by the bucket, big talk, Texas, CGE models. Eccentricity identified the English: bird watching, Bovril, train spotting, the Archers, bus spotting, Women's Institute Teas, the standard-of-living debate. This book represents an interesting merger of all that is American with all that is English. With 2,317 pages devoted to English agrarian history between 1850 and 1914, completed 44 years after the series was initiated, and published only after the deaths of two of the principal authors, it screams American-style excess. But the loving care devoted to duck decoys, the Large Black Pig Society, Church of England music, sand dunes, malaria, Cupiss's Constitution Balls, golf courses, agrarian utopianism, ruderal [sic] habitats, the Rational Dress Society, and much, much more betrays an endearing eccentricity that could only be English.

In the extensive literature of British economic and social history, much less attention has been given to merchants and trading companies than to manufacturing and banking enterprises, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is because the British Industrial Revolution was long thought to have been about production rather than trade or finance. The present generation of researchers has sought to redress the balance, but has often been handicapped by a paucity of records, and by an unwillingness on the part of the handful of surviving firms to release information. Geoffrey Jones has succeeded in assembling a large volume of evidence from diverse sources, but high-quality archival evidence is only available for a small number of long-lived and probably untypical enterprises.

This book comprises two parts: a discussion of about 100 pages on the origins and growth of the London trade in scientific instrument making between 1540 and 1610, and on its main protagonists, serving as an introduction to a catalogue raisonné (c. 200 pages) of all recorded instruments by Elizabethan makers, including unsigned ones. For the latter the author wisely inserted an appendix (“The Attribution of Unsigned Instruments”) explaining a script-based methodology for making attributions of unsigned pieces. Comparative tables of letters and numbers from signed and unsigned instruments are put side-by-side, providing a more or less scientific foundation for an otherwise subjective exercise.

This volume represents the proceedings of a conference held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1995. It consists of five parts. In part 1, “Meanings of Material London,” David Harris Sacks explores the 1601 Essex Rebellion and finds its failure in the primacy that commercial relationships now held over older patron–client bonds. Will Kemp's Morris dance from London to Norwich, meanwhile, seemingly illustrates the way in which market capitalism corrupted civic virtue and traditional hospitality. Derek Keene's richly documented survey of the London economy reinforces the value of a long-term perspective on the capital's growth. The roots of London's consumption patterns can be traced back as far as 1300, and much of its skilled trades and mercantile expertise derived from Continental rather than native sources. Part 2 examines “Consumer Culture: Domesticating Foreign Fashion.” The title of Joan Thirsk's thoughtful essay “England's Provinces: Did They Serve or Drive Material London?” is an accurate guide to its content. Existing provincial skills could be exploited to develop new industries or crops catering either to the London market, or to gentry and aristocracy intent on creating islands of metropolitan taste in the provinces. Jane Schneider shows how the accession of James I ushered in a world in glorious technicolor, a welcome relief to the relative drabness of high Elizabethan fashion, and relates this sartorial revolution to familiar changes in England's overseas trade. Color is of concern also to Anne Jones and Peter Stallybrass, who describe the growing popularity of yellow “mantles” in the early seventeenth century, an enthusiasm that ignored their criminal and, worse, Irish associations. Jean Howard analyses Westward Ho, in order to explore attitudes to foreigners. Ian Archer's rewarding essay “Material Londoners?” begins part 3 of the volume. He explores the limited extent to which “new,” “acquisitive” commercial values conflicted with traditional Christian personal and communal values. This is followed by Gail Paster's examination of that age's peculiar fashion for ever more violent purges and evacuations. Patricia Fumerton contributes an essay notable for its wrongheaded conflation of the experience of vagrancy with that of London's servants and apprentices.

Until now, the Montgolfier family's best-known historical legacy has been the name they lent to the hot-air balloon, whose development they sponsored in the 1780s. Leonard Rosenband's achievement in this book is to elucidate the industrial enterprise that laid the foundation for that adventure. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Montgolfiers owned and operated one of the most important papermaking manufactures in France, centered in Vidalon-le-Haut in northern Languedoc. As Rosenband acknowledges, the Montgolfiers were hardly representative of the French papermaking industry. The scale of their operations, concentration on high-quality paper, and determination to compete with superior Dutch products all clearly distinguished them from their lesser brethren. Nonetheless, Rosenband claims that in their reliance on the same production techniques, division of labor, and well-organized journeymen, the Montgolfiers have much to teach us about the papermaking industry as a whole and, indeed, about the overall process of industrialization in France.

Proving again their mastery of both detail and synthesis, Barbara and Stanley Stein have done a masterful job of compression, packing into one mid-size book material that could easily have filled two. Silver, Trade, and War is more than a discussion of the role of silver in the evolution of the Spanish Empire: it addresses the role of Spain and America in the making of Early Modern Europe. The first half of the book outlines the emergence and consolidation of the system of political authority and silver flows that linked America, Spain, and the rest of Europe by 1700. The second half explores the efforts (and ultimate failure) of early and mid-eighteenth-century Spanish economist–bureaucrats to purge Spain of the its entrenched patterns of immobility, dependency, and self-interest.