Urbanization of the United States in the nineteenth century has been described in numerous scholarly texts. As Eric Lampard, writing in 1961, pointed out, “… the urban-industrial transformation [has] now become part of the furniture displayed in every up-to-date textbook of U.S. history.…” Yet, as the same author had pointed out six years earlier, at that time “no systematic study has ever been made of the role of cities in recent [as opposed to medieval] economic development. We are still unable to counter the charge that cities are ‘abnormal’ and ‘costly’ with any account of the ways in which they have actually facilitated, let alone fostered, progressive economic change.” Obviously, since 1955 significant progress has been made towards filling this lacuna.

This paper investigates the decline and regional differential in antebellum southern white fertility using published census materials and the 1860 population schedules. Demographic analysis is conducted with a synthetic total fertility rate that has four components: age at first birth, age at last surviving birth, surviving-child spacing, and the proportion of women who eventually have surviving children. The socioeconomic analysis employs regressions and focuses on causes of the underlying changes in the components. Family limitation appears to have been unimportant in this population. The distribution of wealth was.probably an important factor shaping the time trend and regional differential in fertility.

The response of American merchants to the opportunities of neutral trade after 1793 was not limited to expanding the volume of their operations. Semi-annual reports on shipping submitted by American consuls to the Department of State provide a uniquely rich source of evidence about mercantile decisions. Analysis of the evidence from the port of Leghorn, Italy, between 1798 and 1820 reveals the growing productivity of American shipping and the characteristics of America's re-export trade to southern Europe.

Two events combined at the middle of the nineteenth century to draw the attention of British economists to Australia. The first was the grant of increased local autonomy through the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850 and subsequent legislation. The prospect of colonists, rather than the British Parliament, determining colonial affairs shifted the focus of economists' interest from London overseas and caused them to ponder seriously what Britain stood to gain or lose from this transfer of authority. British musings over the virtues of self-government and the value of the colonies were given a sudden impulse by a second event, the discovery of large quantities of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851.

Wage rate statistics are available for common labor, carpenters, masons, and “teamworkers” for a span of sixty years or more in the nineteenth century in the Erie Canal Papers now on deposit in the New York State Library in Albany. The data are abundant, the documents in which wage reports were made are well preserved, the wage record is for a well defined area and by 1828 the data are un ambiguous.Within three years of the completion of the canal theforeman of repairs had learned to write reports specifying clearly the kind of work each man in his gang performed, to distinguish between wage payments and wage rates, and to record the dates and continuity of employment. Over the fifty-four years covered by our series the operation of the canal did not greatly change, the kinds of work done were not altered from year to year, and this conservatism of the management of the canal had at least one merit from our point of view, it rendered our series homogeneous. Nor did the social environmentin which the wage bargains were determined show much modification; the nascent trade union movement was without perceptible influenceon wages on the canal and, though employment on the canal was a matter of interest to legislators in Albany, public regulation did little to influence the wage determination process.

We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using international market prices for coffee and sugar for predicting labor demands, addresses potential endogeneity concerns. Our estimates suggest that without the abolition of the Cultivation System average overall mortality in Java would have been between 10 and 30 percent higher by the late 1870s.

Until very recently scholars have been able to solve certain problems of historical interpretation to their own and presumably to their reader's satisfaction by merely uttering the magic words, “laissez faire.” Thus, much of what was done and most of what was not done, some of what was good and practically all of what was evil in nineteenth-century England and America have been accounted for by a facile reference to laissez faire. During the past few years, however, several studies have cast much doubt on the validity of this catchall interpretation. Laissez faire, it seems now, is a principle more easily imposed upon nineteenth-century data than found there; and in successive investigations supposed instances of this principle have dropped away one by one.

The economic distress and the new concern with social problems in England in the 1840's, which underlay the reformulations of political economy in that decade, had also an extensive and significant reflection in imaginative literature. While the novel with a thesis, even a social thesis, was nothing new, it was only in the forties that English literature began to deal on a major scale with the social problems raised by the industrial revolution. One can sense in the novels of this decade an increased urgency and pressure, a more daring and direct attack. This emphasis is so marked that one critic has attempted a correlation between literature and socialism, and has sought to find in the novels of Dickens the same type of social observation and emotional reaction that prompted the analyses of Karl Marx. While such a thesis goes too far and is almost certainly invalid, one can nevertheless find in these novels a historical meaning of a different sort, more complex, but also more interesting and suggestive to the historian.

In the midst of the Great Depression, California engaged in a massive restructuring of its tax system, reducing reliance on the property tax and introducing sales and income taxes. Our analysis suggests that this restructuring, which included a voter referendum, was primarily driven by a desire to change the mix rather than the level of taxation. Nonetheless, by introducing new taxes that had a higher revenue elasticity than the existing taxes, California created a revenue system that allowed the rapid growth of spending to continue.

Governments often respond to crisis situations with radical economic policies. The Shipping Act of 1916 created a government-owned shipping company. This significant departure from prior policy arose in the atmosphere of crisis surrounding the war in Europe. The Wilson Administration was able to use political institutions to its advantage and ensure that alternative, more moderate proposals would not be considered by the legislature. Initially thwarted by a filibuster, the administration was forced to compromise in order to maintain party loyalty and pass the bill in 1916.

The pioneers' trek across the land has long been taken as a central element in American social history. But that redistribution of resources has been no less vital in fueling the advance of productivity, in supporting the varying pattern of final outputs. Because migration both caused, and was a consequence of, these massive changes there has long been an interest in measuring the scope and detail of population redistribution.

A persistent problem in American economic history is the explanation of the failure of the South to mechanize cotton production. Summarily, the following argues that the failure to mechanize was due to a southern economic structure which operated to reduce the effectiveness of the factors in society conducive to invention and innovation.

Historically, the forms of modern economic life were first extended to new areas from the small zone of Western Europe where they developed by two major means: the direct action of individuals and economic organizations from that zone, and the measures of innovating rulers intent upon modernizing the economic life of their countries. In Russia the outside action came first, beginning with the Chancellor expedition in the sixteenth century and expanding gradually over the subsequent century and a half. Only from the early eighteenth century did the monarch's initiative become the primary factor in economic innovation, but the combination of Muscovite autocratic power and the formidable will of Peter the Great made it from the beginning an irresistible force for change. By the late eighteenth century a new force was evident—the entrepreneurial initiative of Russian tradesmen and manufacturers. The prime movers of Russian economic modernization during the following century were now assembled.

Perhaps the most important methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence, often have markedly different interpretations of a particular historical event. Why, for example, in a world in which there is almost unquestioned belief, even by Marxist historians, that industrialization is the grand remedy for the economic and social ills of poor and underdeveloped countries, do some historians, and especially the Marxists, still argue about the goods or ills bestowed on the worker by the first great experiment in industrialization, the industrial revolution in England? The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the “moral risk” involved in the transformation of life by industrialization.1The historians, however, while concerned also with this possible moral risk, are not all certain that the industrial revolution in England before 1850 did cause the average standard of living of the worker to rise. This uncertainty might be resolved by finding out what actually happened, but in the meantime interpretations differ, and have differed, on the basis of some evidence, of much confusion, and of differing value judgments. It is the specific aim of this article to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them.

On the whole we don't treat old people well in this country, but old scholars probably fare better than most. We let them use our libraries and come to our annual meetings. Occasionally we have them chair a session on some not-too-current topic. We refer to them in footnotes and we thank them in prefaces. We donét, in other words, completely depersonalize them, cut them off from our lives and banish them from our ceremonies, as happens too often with other people of advanced age.

Economic development and “modernization” have certain universal consequences for the structure and organization of the labor force. The history of each advanced country shows a shift of population out of agriculture and the replacement of family enterprise and particularistic employment relationships by large enterprise and wage labor. But the pace and completeness of these inevitable changes have varied widely among different countries.

The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which grew up as markets for the millions of Texas Longhorns driven on the hoof as much as a thousand miles from their native ranges. Few today are unaware of the grim gunfighters who once faced each other at high noon on the dusty streets of Dodge City, or of the hardy cowboys who herded Longhorn steers over endless trails fraught with peril.