The article studies the evolution of the constitutional arrangements in seventeenth-century England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It focuses on the relationship between institutions and the behavior of the government and interprets the institutional changes on the basis of the goals of the winners—secure property rights, protection of their wealth, and the elimination of confiscatory government. We argue that the new institutions allowed the government to commit credibly to upholding property rights. Their success was remarkable, as the evidence from capital markets shows.

A widely entertained hypothesis holds that, in comparisons among countries, productivity growth rates tend to vary inversely with productivity levels. A century of experience in a group of presently industrialized countries supports this hypothesis and the convergence of productivity levels it implies. The rate of convergence, however, varied from period to period and showed marked strength only during the first quarter-century following World War II. The general process of convergence was also accompanied by dramatic shifts in countries' productivity rankings. The paper extends the simple catch-up hypothesis to rationalize the fluctuating strength of the process and explores the connections between convergence itself and the relative success of early leaders and latecomers.

Economic historians and economic theorists can make an interesting and socially valuable journey together, if they will. It would be an investigation into the sadly neglected area of economic change.

As anyone familiar with the history of economic thought will immediately recognize, practically all the economists of the nineteenth century and many of the twentieth have believed uncritically that all that is needed to explain a given historical development is to indicate conditioning or causal factors, such as an increase in population or the supply of capital. But this is sufficient only in the rarest of cases.

Economics textbooks invariably describe the important economic choices that all societies must make by the following three questions: What goods are to be produced? How are these goods to be produced? Who is to get what is produced? This way of stating social choice problems is misleading. Economic organizations necessarily do resolve these issues in one fashion or another, but even the most centralized societies do not and cannot specify the answer to these questions in advance and in detail. It is more useful and nearer to the truth to view a social system as relying on techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources rather than imagining that societies specify the particular uses to which resources will be put.

This article examines the economic institution utilized during the eleventh century to facilitate complex trade characterized by asymmetric information and limited legal contract enforceability. The geniza documents are employed to present the “coalition”, an economic institution based upon a reputation mechanism utilized by Mediterranean traders to confront the organizational problem associated with the exchange relations between merchants and their overseas agents. The the oretical framework explains many trade-related phenomena, especially why traders utilized specific forms of business association, and indicates the interrelations between social and economic institutions.

Technological change has come to absorb an increasing share of the attention of the economist in recent years. Several attempts have been made to assess the quantitative importance of technological change, as opposed to increases in factor supplies, in accounting for the secular rise in per capita incomes in the United States. It appears, in all these studies, that technological changes (shifts in the production function) have been far more important than has the mere growth in the supplies of capital and labor inputs, as conventionally measured (movement along an existing production function). In a sense, this should be cause for deep concern, since the comparative neglect of the process of technological change (with the major exceptions until very recent years, of the works of Marx, Schumpeter, and Usher) suggests a serious malallocation of our intellectual resources. If the studies of such people as Abramovitz and Solow are even approximately correct with respect to orders of magnitude, then the contribution of technological change to rising per capita incomes absolutely dwarfs the contribution from a rising but qualitatively unchanging stock of capital. It would appear that we have indeed been playing Hamlet without the Prince.

The Industrial Revolution as a historical concept has many shortcomings. A new concept—the “industrious revolution”—is proposed to place the Industrial Revolution in a broader historical setting. The industrious revolution was a process of household-based resource reallocation that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for market-supplied goods. The industrious revolution was a household-level change with important demand-side features that preceded the Industrial Revolution, a supply-side phenomenon. It has implications for nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic history.

Recent theory has predicted that if competing technologies operate under dynamic increasing returns, one, possibly inferior, technology will dominate the market. The history of nuclear power technology is used to illustrate these results. Light water is considered inferior to other technologies, yet it dominates the market for power reactors. This is largely due to the early adoption and heavy development by the U.S. Navy of light water for submarine propulsion. When a market for civilian power emerged, light water had a large head start, and by the time other technologies were ready to enter the market, light water was entrenched.

The purpose of this paper is to present, or more correctly, to revive, a hypothesis regarding the causes of agricultural serfdom or slavery (used here interchangeably). The hypothesis was suggested by Kliuchevsky's description of the Russian experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it aims at a wider applicability.

Many writers—some of them reputable scholars, others important public officials—have implicitly assumed or explicitly argued that economic growth leads toward political stability and perhaps even to peaceful democracy. They have argued that “economic development is one of the keys to stability and peace in the world”; that it is “conditions of want and instability on which communism breeds”; and that economic progress “serves as a bulwark against international communism.” A recent and justly famous book on revolution by Hannah Arendt ascribes the most violent forms of revolutionary extremism mainly to poverty.

In this article we argue that during the period from 1870 to 1914 adherence to the gold standard was a signal of financial rectitude, a “good housekeeping seal of approval”, that facilitated access by peripheral countries to capital from the core countries of western Europe. Examination of data from nine widely different capital-importing countries, using a model inspired by the Capital Asset Pricing Model, reveals that countries with poor records of adherence were charged considerably more than those with good records, enough to explain the determined effort to stay on gold made by a number of capital-importing countries.

This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.

Currency depreciation in the 1930s is almost universally dismissed or condemned. This paper advances a different interpretation of these policies. It documents first that depreciation benefited the initiating countries. It shows next that there can be no presumption that depreciation was beggar-thy-neighbor. While empirical analysis indicates that the foreign repercussions of individual devaluations were in fact negative, it does not imply that competitive devaluations taken by a group of countries were without mutual benefit. To the contrary, similar policies, had they been even more widely adopted and coordinated internationally, would have hastened recovery from the Great Depression.

Well before the beginning of machine industry, many regions of Europe became increasingly industrialized in the sense that a growing proportion of their labor potential was allocated to industry. Yet, that type of industry—the traditionally organized, principally rural handicrafts—barely fits the image one has of a modernizing economy. There is, however, cognitive value as well as didactic advantage in thinking of the growth of “pre-industrial industry” as part and parcel of the process of “industrialization” or, rather, as a first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper.

The patent system has lately been subjected to investigations by committees of Congress, and reforms have been proposed to meet some of the most serious criticisms. In recent publications commenting on these discussions it has been suggested that opposition to the patent system is a new development. A writer of a “history of the patent monopoly” asserted that “there never has been, until the present time, any criticism of this type of exclusive privilege,” and he attributed the allegedly new attitude to “modern witch-hunters,” “hungry aspirants to public office,” and, by innuendo, to enemies of all private property.

It has often been claimed that money was to be found in much of the African continent before the impact of the European world and the extension of trade made coinage general. When we examine these claims, however, they tend to evaporate or to emerge as tricks of definition. It is an astounding fact that economists have, for decades, been assigning three or four qualities to money when they discuss it with reference to our own society or to those of the medieval and modern world, yet the moment they have gone to ancient history or to the societies and economies studied by anthropologists they have sought the “real” nature of money by allowing only one of these defining characteristics to dominate their definitions.

The fundamental conclusion of this paper is that technological progress is intimately dependent on economic phenomena. The evidence suggests that society may indeed affect the allocation of inventive resources through the market mechanism somewhat as it affects the allocation of economic resources generally. If this is true, then technological progress is not an independent cause of socio-economic change, and an interpretation of history as largely the attempt of mankind to catch up to new technology is a distorted one. Cultural lags undoubtedly exist in social history. The automobile—to use an obvious example—rendered obsolete many pre-existing social arrangements and behavior patterns. But the reverse is also true. New goods and new techniques are unlikely to appear, and to enter the life of society without a pre-existing,—albeit possibly only latent—demand. Even a longstanding demand may have been intensified shortly before a technique to satisfy it is invented. In addition to cultural lag, there exists technological lag—a chronic tendency of technology to lag behind demand.

New estimates of nominal earnings and the cost of living are presented and used to make a fresh assessment of changes in the real earnings of male and female manual workers in Britain from 1770 to 1870. Workers' average real earnings are then adjusted for factors such as unemployment, the number of their dependants, and the costs of urbanization. The main finding is that the standard of living of the average working-class family improved by less than 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s. This long plateau is shown to be consistent with other economic, political, and demographic indicators.

The worldwide spread of modern economic growth has depended chiefly on the diffusion of a body of knowledge concerning new production techniques. The acquisition and application of this knowledge by different countries has been governed largely by whether their populations have acquired traits and motivations associated with formal schooling. To judge from the historical experience of the world's twenty-five largest nations, the establishment and expansion of formal schooling has depended in large part on political conditions and ideological influences. The limited spread of modern economic growth before World War II has thus been due, at bottom, to important political and ideological differences throughout the world that affected the timing of the establishment and expansion of mass schooling. Since World War II there has been growing uniformity among the nations of the world, modern education systems have been established almost everywhere, and the spread of modern economic growth has noticeably accelerated.