Germany in the 1830's gave few if any indications of its great industrial potentialities. The population was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian; Berlin was the only city containing more than 100,000 inhabitants, and the great majority of “cities” (in the legal sense) numbered less than 10,000. Nonagricultural production was carried on for the most part in the home or in small shops employing the old handicraft techniques. The pattern of foreign trade was that which has since come to be associated with “underdeveloped” agrarian nations: exports of agricultural products (grain, wool) and the output of artisanal industries, imports of manufactured goods and exotic wares. In those industries that were to lead the way in Germany's industrialization there were as yet no signs of growth. The few spinning factories that were set up in the 1820's and 1830's employed mainly English and Alsatian machinery, and sometimes foreign capital as well. Coal production lagged behind that of tiny Belgium, and was no greater than that of mineral-poor France. The small, dispersed iron industry was still almost universally conducted with the ancient charcoal technique, and the famed chemical industry was still to be born. The Zollverein was just beginning its great work of economic unification; the effective realization of its promise had to await more adequate means of transportation and financial institutions to provide capital; but by 1840 there were only a few short, isolated lines of railway and no modern credit facilities.

Forecasting developments in firm and industry studies during the next decade is a risky business. Students of firms and industries ask widely different questions about the causes, processes, and/or results of change, and they employ an equally wide variety of methodologies in seeking answers. As a result, objectives are more surrounded and enveloped than taken in accordance with a widely accepted and nicely articulated battleplan. This paper, then, is not offered as a battleplan for the next decade but as a survey of the fronts where the possibilities of advance seem most promising, with some effort to suggest targets and weaponry that are or might become relevant.

“Let those who will consult the spirit rappers to bring forth its ghost.”

Such was Professor Shannon's firm caveat as he laid Frederick Jackson Turner's safety-valve doctrine to rest after a post mortem performed with some gusto. The warning seems to have had the effect intended. Although Turner's frontier concept continues to influence the work of American historians and not a few economists the labor-safety-valve doctrine seems generally to have been accepted as dead and buried. We have little taste for ghosts or spirit rapping, but we would like to argue that die safety-valve doctrine, even if suffering from neglect, retains more than a spark of vitality.

My object in this article is to use the historical evidence of one man's life to raise questions concerning the way we have come to understand our technological history. Inventors and mechanicians have long occupied a prominent place in American history. However, the bases for selecting and certifying these national heroes have resulted in a curious record of achievement and considerable distortion in our understanding of the development of American manufacturing technology. The principal historical perspective that enshrined the names of Evans, Whitney, Perkins, etc. has been first, the emphasis on originality of invention or “dramatic newness,” and, secondly, the attempt by historians to confine mechanical genius or creativity within national boundaries—Slater and DuPont, of course, being the exceptions to this generalization. Thus we speak quite naturally of American inventors, British inventors, and so on.

The recent contribution by Knauerhase in this Journal raises some important issues regarding productivity change in ocean shipping in the late nineteenth century. The study is limited to the German fleet for the period from 1871 to 1887, but the findings do bear on the decline of freight rates after 1870. The traditional argument, which is now less in vogue, is that steam played the significant role in the last half of the nineteenth century and was the main source of advancing productivity. The novelty and importance of the findings by Knauerhase is that they support this hypothesis. The evidence given by Graham, on the other hand, points to the 1870's as a period when the sailing vessel underwent significant productivity change and experienced revived growth. This position has been buttressed by North, who argues that sail dominated the long-haul routes where most of the goods were carried and where the reduction in freight rates was most dramatic.

In A society operating completely on the principles of economic individualism, each adult person would be expected to make provision for his own needs and for those of his dependents. He would have to earn enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter, as well as develop the necessary frugality to lay by enough to care for himself and dependents during periods of illness and unemployment. He would likewise be expected to make provision for old age and for funeral expenses. The duties of an adult person in society would be looked upon as being not only economic but also moral in nature, requiring the constant making of choices in expenditure, not merely of what goods to buy but of the spacing of expenditures over long periods of time. If a person met with economic reverses and could not provide, he showed himself to be incapable of dealing with the problems of a responsible adult and ought not to look to others to get him out of his predicament. His condition would be considered to result from lack of the moral qualities required of a person who had taken upon himself the responsibilities of adult life.

European technology, both practical and managerial arts, had an impact on the well-established cotton and handicraft textile industries of the Western Sudan during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule. But French efforts to shape cotton production for export did not always have the intended results. Indigenous historical processes as well as French colonial policy account for the changes in these industries.

This study looks at the valuation of U.K. investment trusts for the 50 years following their appearance as companies in the 1880s. Based on a large and unique dataset compiled from primary sources, our calculations reveal a huge variation between the ordinary share prices of investment trusts and their underlying net asset “fundamental” values. This mismatch is a well-known puzzle in modern financial markets and has attracted a large volume of research because it casts doubt on the concept of market efficiency. We investigate possible explanations for this pricing puzzle and shed light on U.K. investor behavior before the 1930s.

When imported slaves were first sold in New Orleans, buyers were unaware of the slaves’ unobservable characteristics. In time, the new owners learned more about their slaves and may have resold the “lemons.” Previous research suggests that buyers anticipated such adverse selection and reduced their bids for these slaves. Consequently, we should observe lower prices for resold slaves. We test this proposition by linking the sequential sales records of 568 slaves. Through a comparison of initial and resale prices, we find little evidence to support the hypothesis that adverse selection lowered the price of resold slaves.

This is frankly a paper with a purpose. It is a plea for the abandonment of that academic isolationism that marks our teaching of the economic history of the United States, and for at least an occasional glance at those other new countries to which Europeans flocked between the sixteenth century and the drying up of intercontinental migration less than two decades ago. The plea might be made on the high ground of promoting international understanding and of making our leadership in world affairs better informed. I am content to present it on the lower plane of improving our teaching of this country's economic and social development. If we examine the story of those areas that have had basically the same experience as ours, we begin to notice the significance of some things here that we have always taken for granted. Some of our problems lose their terror when we discover that other countries are also plagued with them; some of our ideas or methods may look better, or worse, when we contrast them with those of other regions; and some of our achievements may appear greater, or less, when we place them alongside the accomplishments of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Latin Americans, or Russians in Siberia. It used to be said that the study of the varied forms of government in the eastern Mediterranean made the Greeks good political scientists. Some comparative study of the quantity and character of material development among the peoples just listed might make us better American economic historians.

In the June 1977 issue of this Journal, Lewis R. Jones criticized my analysis of the diffusion of mechanical reaping and mowing machinery. Jones attempts to revive the threshold argument popularized by Paul David. In doing so Jones either confuses or ignores the main points I raised while concentrating on a peripheral issue of little significance.

I raised three major issues. First, and of least importance, I revised the values of some of the parameters David used to estimate the threshold acreage. Jones correctly notes that I erred by reporting that the revised threshold was more than twice as large as that previously estimated; the correct calculation is about 93 percent, as Jones notes. If I were to write the paper again, I would correct this mistake. Nonetheless, my major conclusions on this issue are unaltered. Revising two of the parameters used to calculate the threshold acreage so that they better conform with the actual historical situation generates a threshold about twice as large as that previously estimated. I felt this discrepancy was sufficient to cast reasonable doubt on previous estimates, and I noted that similar revisions could be made of most of the parameters and variables used for such estimations (p. 333). Anyone who doubts this assertion should see Robert Ankli's excellent work on the subject.

This article discusses the Russian private banking houses between 1870 and 1914. The author concludes that these enterprises played an important, and largely unregulated, role in the Russian credit system prior to 1914. Their conflicts with the Ministry of Finance testify to the growing influence of business circles in Russian life shortly before the war.

It is generally recognized that the Dutch played a major part in financing British government deficits from the 1720s to the late 1770s. This article argues that even though the Dutch continued to hold large amounts of British debt after 1780, they stopped supplying new capital to the British and started a modest repatriation of some of their previous investments. A comparative econometric study of 3 percent consol yields during the two deficit-inducing wars Britain fought between 1750 and 1795 shows that as a result British interest rates became much more sensitive to increases in government borrowing.

The literature of American economic history is replete with discussions of the crucial role of the ferrous industries in nineteenth-century economic development. Analysis of the internal wage structure in the industry, however, has been somewhat neglected in the historical treatment.

Agrarian reform has become a major subject of political discussion in Latin America. Its preeminence is due to developments within Latin America, to the late President John F. Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress which he sponsored; and to the Castro regime in Cuba. In this paper we shall discuss the background of the problem throughout the area, and then look in some detail at the four major agrarian reform efforts which have been undertaken so far: those of Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba.