The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels reflect contemporary diets rather than historical diets.

We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile nineteenth-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities to shed light on potential determinants: economic growth and migration are positively correlated with mobility, consistent with the patterns observed across countries.

This article reviews recent literature on American growth before 1840 and compares it with estimates derived from the Philadelphia region. The estimates indicate that national output per capita rose no less than 0.S to 1.0 percent per annum in the period 1810-1840 and that growth exhibited trend acceleration. Relatively modest growth was accompanied by extensive development, initiated by sharply lowered transport costs. Faced with higher returns for exports and diminished costs for imports, regional producers increasingly specialized. Heightened intraregional trade fostered a pervasive reallocation of resources among sectors and among subsections of the region. This development helped ensure rapid, post-1840 growth.

The untimely death of Raymond de Roover in March 1972 removed one of the major figures from the field of medieval economic history. Now there has appeared a collection of eleven of de Roover's articles, one of them not previously published, to remind us of the magisterial quality of their author's contributions to our knowledge of medieval business and banking techniques and the milieu in which the medieval man of business operated.

Jeffrey Williamson's provocative discussion opens up a range of questions that surely will be of concern to students of industrial growth in the antebellum United States. Three distinct empirical prongs are advanced by his probing critique of my study of the nature and implications of the production function characterizing the manufacture of powerloom cotton cloth.

Industrial expansion depends upon the state of the industrial arts. If we are to explain the rise of “modern industry” we must know precisely what the technological developments were in particular industries during those periods that are recognized as having been extremely important in the development of modern industrial techniques. This study, therefore, deals with the growth, structure, and technology of the French glass industry during a critical period (1640–1740).

As the United States became more urbanized in the nineteenth century, local-government expenditures increased as local governments expanded their services in response to their growing populations. Expenditures at all levels of government increased substantially in the nineteenth century, but local governments grew more than either the states or the federal government. Total local-government expenditures increased along with the growing urban population, but expenditures per urban resident also increased substantially. The major expansion in local-government expenditures began in the 1830s. This study examines the period of transition to local-government growth from 1820 to 1870.See Davis and Legler, “Government”; Legler, Sylla, and Wallis, “U.S. City Finances”; and Wallis, government expenditures only back to 1880, 1850, and 1840 respectively. The first two used less comprehensive data than the present note, and Wallis (“American Government Finance”) gives summary data on local expenditures without discussing how they were calculated.

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.

Based on the mercantile model of urban growth, I analyze the formative development of Atlanta during the antebellum period. Located at the intersection of three railroads, Atlanta's early growth and economic structure reflected its nodal position in the transport system. Subsequent railroad construction, however, eroded its initial locational advantage, while creating the opportunity for its emergence as a regional metropolis. This transformation was delayed until after the Civil War because of the marginal political and economic position of Atlanta and the Upcountry region, as a whole, within the state.

Differential treatment of men and women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor markets casts doubt on the common practice of adding male and female labor to create a single “labor” variable in the production function. This article shows that men and women must be disaggregated in the production function, and investigates the effects of inappropriate aggregation on the debate over the Habakkuk-Rothbarth labor scarcity hypothesis. With disaggregation, a female-using bias and an overall labor-using bias is found for the period 1850 through 1919. Technical change was male-neutral through 1900 and male-using thereafter.

Students of the Five Year Plans are familiar with the overreach. Sing ambitions, the inflated claims, die disputed accomplishments, die misleading statistics, and the appalling human costs of “socialist industrialization” in Soviet Russia. They have generally ascribed these phenomena to Bolshevik dieory and practice. It comes as a surprise then to find die criticism of die early Five Year Plans foreshadowed, in almost identical terms, in die attacks made upon die earlier policy of rapid industrialization in Russia which is linked with the name of Sergei Witte, the Czarist Minister of Finance, 1891–1903. He, too, paraded seemingly impressive results and dubious figures, and he, too, was forced to exact dire sacrifices from popular welfare: Despite the profound dissimilarities between the Soviet system and die Witte era (they must go unstated here) there exists, it would seem, an underlying continuity, pointing to more fundamental necessities and profounder tragedies that backward countries widi strong nationalist and imperialist tendencies must face in die precipitous development of their resources. One special difference, however, should be noted in diis context. The distaste for die bitter fruits of forced industrialization, muted in Stalinist Russia, could frankly, although not entirely freely, be expressed in die eighteen nineties, when Witte's policies attained their full effect. The subsequent discussion of Witte's policies and their consequence is drawn from that public protest.

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?