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 integration of women into formal labor markets was one of the most salient changes of the twentieth century. The “female century,” in the words of The Economist, witnessed an extraordinary transformation of women's opportunities and outcomes both in and outside the household. My dissertation explores both the causes and the consequences of women's move from home to market in the United States during three episodes of rapid change. It begins by documenting demand-side shifts during the 1940s that increased the earnings and occupational choices of African-American women; then demonstrates the impact of contraceptive technology on the extent and intensity of women's participation in the formal labor market after 1960; and, finally, estimates the consequences of shifts in women's labor supply for the growth of earnings inequality in the United States during the 1980s.

External revenues blunt investments in fiscal capacity. But how do external revenues affect investments in legal capacity? In a simple model of state capacity investment, external revenues should be positively correlated with investments in legal capacity. But this implication could flip if fiscal capacity lowers the cost of legal capacity investments. I test the model by looking at Haiti in 1942 when U.S. mobilization caused a negative shock to external revenues. Contrary to the basic model, the shock led to an increase in legal capacity. This puzzle is explained by institutions that tied fiscal and legal capacity investments.

We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis suggests that non-agricultural income, urbanization, and opportunities for skilled employment are important mechanisms, while agricultural income is not.

A debate has recently been re-ignited over the pace of long-run productivity growth in nineteenth-century agriculture. Before 1966 the view was one of accelerated productivity over the course of the century, and this view was confirmed by the statistics on farm gross product published in 1960 by Marvin Towne and Wayne Rasmussen. The appearance in 1966 of Stanley Lebergott's labor force series changed this traditional perspective. When combined with Towne and Rasmussen's output figures, Lebergott's figures suggested that productivity growth was slower after the Civil War than before, calling into question the more plausible pattern of postbellum increases. A few historians were skeptical of these new findings, but were unable to dispute the seemingly solid foundation upon which they were built. Finally in 1993, Thomas Weiss argued that the skeptics were in fact correct to be wary of Lebergott's revisions.

In his rejoinder in the September 1983 issue of this JOURNAL to our comment on his article that appeared in December 1981, J. E. Inikori claims that we fail to address effectively any of the six major points raised by his article. We confess that we did not respond to his arguments about temporal fluctuations and interfirm variations in profit margins, largely because we regarded such arguments as commonplace and the subject of little debate among historians. We do have doubts, however, about Inikori's attempt to relate profit margins to the size of firms in the trade, as we indicate below. The main concern of our comment was with several more questionable assertions made by Inikori about the market structure and general profitability of the slave trade, and we sought to challenge these. Our criticisms centered on Inikori's classification of British slaving firms, his analysis of the elasticities of supply of trade goods and export credit, his method of calculating profits, and his interpretation of the career of one Liverpool slave merchant, William Davenport, for whose ventures we have exceptionally detailed accounts. Inikori's Rejoinder rejects all of our criticisms, but the arguments he advances remain conceptually unsound and rely upon questionable interpretations of slender evidence. We propose to deal only with the main points of our criticisms that Inikori either misunderstands or still fails to meet.

It is my purpose in this paper to sketch briefly one heretofore ignored facet in American economic history: the influence of British capital, knowledge, and livestock in the growth, development, and eventual decline of the Western range-cattle industry during that colorful, though all too frequently disastrous, period between the American Civil War and the end of the century. Although the locale of this story would seem to confine its interest and importance largely to the West, it was, in fact, an incident of profound national and international importance. It filled the press of the United States with glowing descriptions of great baronial estates teeming with hundreds of thousands of head of cattle; it brought about long articles of analysis, praise, sharp criticism, and denunciation in the British press; it resulted in an internationalbattle of words involving at least three American secretaries of agriculture, presidents of the Board of Trade, ministers of agriculture, and chancellors of the exchequer. There were rude questions in the House of Commons and pointed inquiries in Lords. There were even letters to The Times!

It is argued in this article that the labor market disequilibrium produced by the American Civil War was substantially eliminated through the process of interregional migration of population over the interval 1870–1920. This migration caused the system of regional labor markets to converge toward a “steady-state” equilibrium. It is estimated that the efficiencies introduced by this migration process explain 6 percent of per capita income levels in 1920.

Agrarian growth was related to overall development in Regierungsbezirk Oppeln in Germany between 1846 and 1913. Oppeln was characterized by an ethnically mixed population (Polish and German) as well as by both agricultural and industrial development. Using new estimates of agricultural output, acreage, and yields, agrarian growth and its sources are described and its linkages to the nonagrarian sector are explored. Variation among subdistricts (Kreise) is also studied. Agriculture experienced uneven growth, but it supported overall growth through rising incomes, provision of labor to the nonagricultural sector, and helping to restrain growth in food prices.

William H. Dean, Jr. argued the development of a commercial agglomeration at any site is a function of three interrelated variables: trade routes, position, and nodality. Industrial agglomerations follow commercial ones. Dean's theory is discussed and applied to Chicago's growth before the Great Fire of 1871. The initial development of Chicago's transportation infrastructure is described. Data for the balance of receipts and shipments of selected items and growth rates for receipts and shipments from 1854 to 1871 are presented.

This article examines the effects of the Victorian Factory and Shops Act, the first minimum wage law in Australia. The Act differed from modern minimum wage laws in that it established Special Boards, which set trade-specific minimum wage schedules. We use trade-level data on average wages and employment by gender and age to examine the effects of minimum wages. Although the minimum wages were binding, we find that the effects on employment were modest, at best. We speculate that this was because the Special Boards, which were comprised of industry insiders, closely matched the labor market for their trades.

Historians in general are rather suspicious of theories—and who is to blame them? The temptation to do violence to historical reality is strong, and must be resisted with might and main. However, bad company will sooner or later corrupt even the best of manners; and the economic historian, owing to his long and intimate association with that bold and reckless crowd, the theorists, has finally learned to overcome his scruples and inhibitions. Like the children of Israel, he goes a whoring after Baalim: he tries to develop a general theory of economic growth.

Since the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay, historians have implicitly recognized the significance of community characteristics on levels of economic opportunity. Nevertheless, even though the last two decades have witnessed the publication of a number of occupational mobility studies of a wide variety of communities, the nature of the community under examination has been largely overlooked. Thus, while the authors of these studies have frequently found different levels of mobility, the practical necessity of focusing on one community in these undertakings has precluded any systematic attempt either to explain variances among communities or to measure precisely the impact of community characteristics on levels of opportunity.