In following the paths of historical development … the analyst finds himself … engaged in the rather thankless task of trying to derive known from unknown or, at least, better-known from less well-known facts. Would it not be much more efficient to reverse this procedure? By establishing the base of his operations, that is, the principal store of primary factual information in the present or a very recent past, and then moving on backward with the help of theoretical weapons step by step toward the more and more distant past, the analytical historian could make most effective use of the limited amount of direct factual information to which he usually has access.

European economic history has always been concerned with the grand theme of the rise of the Western World. Sometimes this is put in terms of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, if a Marxian dialectician is present, eventually to socialism. The literature is essentially the product of historians and as such is particularistic. No consistent theoretical foundation runs through it, except perhaps the Marxian one. The result is a chaotic output for which generalization is difficult, and in which bits and scraps of evidence are proffered for almost every specific explanation. This has helped the Marxist explanation to survive since, despite its evident shortcomings, it does provide a single path through the wilderness of medieval and modern European economic history.

Economists who have studied the evolution of trade transactions between the two world wars have often stressed the existence of an obvious paradox: despite the disturbances brought about by the war period, the territorial changes, the monetary difficulties and the crises, international trade as a whole and particularly from a structural point of view, had a tendency, after a few years of complete disruption, to return to a pre-war pattern of evolution. Trade flows were returning to a distribution very similar to the one prevailing in 1913, and changes were occurring in the same direction as those of the 1896–1913 period. Certain countries endured great difficulties in the readaptation process, especially the United Kingdom, whose “structural crises” have often been cited. But the very changes that were sources of anxiety for English rulers were less a result of the transformation or the acceleration of pre-war tendencies than of their continuity.

There is some speculation that there was more economic egalitarianism in the United States among free men in the period from 1776 to 1790 than there was at any time in the following seventy years until the abolition of slavery. One would like to believe the speculation since it is known that there was extensive inequality of wealth in I860 and one would like to believe that the formation of the nation took place within a context of economic equality. This would be produced from a condition where aggregate wealth is shared fairly equally rather than being owned by a few. Let us give this ideal, this proposition relating to wealthholding for the Revolutionary era from 1776 to 1790, a title of romantic equality.

A distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century international economy was the mass movement of people out of Europe. Between 1840 and 1914 over forty million persons permanently left Europe and settled in the New World, Asiatic Russia and Oceana. In contrast with contemporary population transfers, nineteenth-century international migration occurred within an international political framework which placed few restrictions on geographic mobility. Within this institutional context there were substantial country by country differences in the participation of European populations. This article is concerned with the secular determinants of intercountry differences in emigration.

One problem with which economic historians always contend, to which they usually give acknowledgment and with which they occasionally think they have dealt successfully, is that of the representativeness of their empirical answers. As Clapham said,

Every economic historian should, however, have acquired what might be called the statistical sense, the habit of asking in relation to any institution, policy, group or movement the questions: how large? how long? how often? how representative?

Between the years 1860 and 1913 approximately twelve million people took passage from the United Kingdom to extra-European countries. The bulk of the migration stream (about 125,000 people per year) was directed toward the United States; it is this movement of population that is the subject of our article. The flow of individuals from the United Kingdom to the United States in this period ranged from 38,000 in 1861 to 202,000 in 1887 with marked cyclical fluctuations. For example, in 1873 the flow was 167,000 and by 1877 it was only 45,000. Variations of this magnitude pose the interesting intellectual question of whether or not they can be explained. This is not a new question; there are frequent references in the literature to the possible causes of this movement and the emigration from the United Kingdom that it implies. Studies focus on various economic influences on emigration. There is little in this period in the socio-political environment of the United Kingdom that would prompt individuals to emigrate in order to flee intolerable religious or political persecution.

The scarcity of quantitative evidence on economic growth in the nineteenth century is a strong incentive for the use of representative indicators, instead of compound indexes or supplemented by them. Consumption series of coal, iron, and cotton are prominent candidates to serve this purpose, due to the central roles played by these materials in European industrialization. A further point in their favor is the relatively high availability and quality of mining and foreign trade statistics. The specific functions and link-ages of those three staples, however, were quite different, and thus their growth paths represent different aspects and processes. For the overall modernizing transformation of an economy, coal consumption evidently suggests itself as the best single indicator, at least until the end of the century. Its growth reflects the increasing output of industry, transportation, and even agriculture, inasmuch as they relied on coal for heat and/or for motive power. This means that coal stands for a broad cross-section of the economy, and furthermore, for a growing one. The substitution of mineral fuel for wood or charcoal and of steam for water power was not only the most general component of industrialization, in the wider sense of the term. It also was a prerequisite for the growth potential of firms and industries in many instances, among them such strategic sectors as iron and steel or overland transportation. Similarly, the introduction of steam engines was a characteristic of the innovating firm in agriculture and in land reclamation. On these grounds one would expect the growth of coal consumption to represent the pace of transition to modern economic growth, rather than the growth of industrial product only.

Much of the federally owned public lands in the American South to the west of the Appalachians was sold to private interests between 1820 and 1860. Land sales' policy remained a great political issue during the nineteenth century because of its perceived effects on the distribution of wealth, sectoral economic growth, and the geographic location of political power. In this essay we consider the marginal impact of Southern land sales on national income. Like all models, our model is only as good as its underlying assumptions. Our aim is less to provide the last word on an important historical issue than to place the problem in a context in which analytical tools can be employed.