AS Hugh Aitken explained in our September issue, the editorship of this, the spring number of THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, which in memory of Edwin F. Gay is entitled also THE TASKS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, falls now on someone involved in preparing the program for our annual meeting. Except in our business meeting and in the session devoted to discussing doctoral dissertations, we met last fall with the International Economic History Association. Accordingly we are presenting here, in addition to the summaries of dissertations, a few of the papers which were prepared for the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association and which were discussed at its meeting at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10–14, 1968. This issue of THE JOURNAL may be considered a kind of supplement to the volume containing the proceedings of the Congress, a volume which is in the process of publication by the University of Indiana Press. In order to minimize delays in the publication of those proceedings, the Executive Committee of the International Economic History Association approved restricting its content to the rapports and brief summaries of the communications. Other outlets are being found for the full texts of the many valuable communications presented for discussion at Bloomington.

Since the time of Malthus and possibly earlier the prevailing theory of the birth rate has connected births to the’ mother's age at marriage, which in turn is related to current economic and social conditions. In this manner changes in the economy are tied to changes in the birth rate and thus, even more indirectly, to changes in the rate of growth of the population.

The article entitled “Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues,’ published in the March 1969 issue of this Journal, was written by R. M. Hartwell(Ronald Max, if Christian names are required) and not by Richard M. Hartwell. The Editor regrets the error and any misunderstandings that may have resulted.

Alexander Gerschenkron has suggested that certain characteristics of development during a country's initial period of industrialization, or “great spurt,” can be better understood if reference is made to that country's degree of relative backwardness just prior to the spurt. Referring to the European countries which began their rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, Gerschenkron stated that the greater a country's relative backwardness on the eve of its spurt (1) the more rapid was the subsequent rate of manufacturing growth, (2) the greater was the stress on bigness of the size of plant and enterprise, (3) the greater was the stress on producers’ goods as opposed to consumers’ goods, (4) the less rapid was the increase in the level of consumption, (5) the greater was the role played by special institutional factors designed to speed industrialization, and (6) the less the agricultural sector contributed to economic growth, as measured by the rate of increase in agricultural labor productivity.

The Purpose of this article is to clarify some historical features of Brazilian economic development in order to gain some insight into the process of long-term growth. The recent extension of the principal macroeconomic time-series to 1920 and the publication of several specialized monographs provide the material for such an analysis. We will begin with a consideration of the timing of Brazilian industrialization and, more important, of the conditions in which it took place. Such a discussion is all the more necessary since it appears that some of the stock ideas concerning Brazilian economic development before 1939 require revision.