The paper develops a Marxian approach to economic history utilizing some recent, far-reaching reformulations of Marxist theory. On the basis of a new specification of class structures, the approach permits a nondeterminist analysis of the interactions of class and nonclass aspects of social change.

The year 1873 marked the zenith of the German free-trade movement, which had been gathering impact since 1818 when Prussia first established a tariff along free-trading lines. Promulgated at the peak of prosperity, the law of 1873 abolished immediately the duties on pig iron, raw steel, and ships, but, as a concession to the protectionists, only reduced the rates on other iron products and provided for their repeal on January 1, 1877. Despite the dissatisfaction of many free-traders, the latter provision opened the door for the repeal of other protective rates. Germany thus stood at the threshold of complete free trade.

This essay explores the state of economic knowledge regarding the development of household economic life in the United States since early industrialization by examining explanations for the low labor-force participation of middle-class married women prevailing until the 1940s. These explanations, including those emerging from fertility studies and resting on market forces, imprecisely specify the domestic roles of housewives. Interdisciplinary specification of these roles, drawing on social and cultural historians, and rigorous measurement of time allocation within the household would help resolve the various interpretations and assist in estimating the contribution of household work to social product.

While credit supply growth is associated with exacerbating financial crises, its impact on long-run growth is unclear. Market access similarly has ambiguous economic effects over time. Using regional variation in bond payments to samurai and the introduction of railways in nineteenth century Japan, we find that together they are associated with persistent redistributive effects between regions and sectors. Areas with higher bond value and railway access experienced tertiary sector growth and primary sector shrinkage, with analogous results in sectoral labor shares. This interaction between credit supply and market access facilitated structural transformation but had little long-run net growth impact.

The object of this dissertation is to analyze the role of the banking system in the process of industrialization in Spain from 1829 to 1874. The reasons for taking these two dates as starting and closing points in my investigation will be evident as the exposition proceeds.

The interest of economists in the nature and causes of economic growth has focused attention on demographic phenomena. For the economic historian, this has meant a reexamination of the historically unprecedented international population movements of the nineteenth century and their relationship to the process of economic growth.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.

Technological progress has long been widely recognized as a crucial source of economic growth. Many countries have, accordingly, devoted considerable resources to promote more rapid generation and diffusion of technology in their economies. Yet recent studies reveal a persistence of stark contrasts across countries and geographic space more generally, not only in productivity, but also in the generation of new technological knowledge. What accounts for these geographic disparities is not well understood.

We study the impact of the 1907 Panic, the most severe economic crisis before the Great Depression, on the selection of Mexican immigration. We find that migrants were positively selected on height before the crisis. This pattern changed to negative selection during the crisis but returned to positive selection afterward. Adjustments in selection were partially mediated by the enganche, a historical labor-recruiting system that reduced migration costs but only for taller laborers with above-average earnings potential. We document that labor recruiting contributed to maintaining the relatively constant height profile of the migration flow in the short run.

Economists who have studied the evolution of trade transactions between the two world wars have often stressed the existence of an obvious paradox: despite the disturbances brought about by the war period, the territorial changes, the monetary difficulties and the crises, international trade as a whole and particularly from a structural point of view, had a tendency, after a few years of complete disruption, to return to a pre-war pattern of evolution. Trade flows were returning to a distribution very similar to the one prevailing in 1913, and changes were occurring in the same direction as those of the 1896–1913 period. Certain countries endured great difficulties in the readaptation process, especially the United Kingdom, whose “structural crises” have often been cited. But the very changes that were sources of anxiety for English rulers were less a result of the transformation or the acceleration of pre-war tendencies than of their continuity.

When one reviews the literature that has appeared since 1945 relating to American economic history in the period from 1861 to 1900, the trends of scholarly interest and investigation are not entirely clear. The volume of output appears to have diminished and the incidence of interest to have shifted. Postwar publication seems more notable for the appearance, in diverse fields, of some distinguished monographs than for more general studies of the economy or its major components. It may be that the interest of scholars has shifted from this to other chronological periods, but it seems reasonably clear that research in the history of agriculture, public policies, financial institutions, and the relative status of major income groups has declined. There is evident, on the other hand, increased interest in the history of business enterprise, and this concern has been reflected in the appearance of numerous studies of entrepreneurship as well as of histories of individual corporations. It is perhaps significant that in this series of review articles the one exception to the chronological division of United States history is the article devoted to business history. This segregation operates to relieve me of the duty of reviewing the new literature in a field that was obviously of great significance in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. I should say, however, that it has seemed necessary to cite or discuss some few works of particular significance for my analysis.

Brazil is often cited as a developing country that has exemplified the trade-off between economic growth and equity. The basis for the claim was the rising inequality in the income distribution between the 1960 and 1970 censuses, combined with an increase in per capita income over the decade. Numerous scholars have analyzed the period, yet there is little or no agreement in the literature regarding either the causes or the extent of this apparent increase in inequality. Using a recently released sample of the 1970 demographic census, the empirical basis for the claim of deteriorating income distribution over the decade is examined here. Applying poverty lines defined for both 1960 and 1970 data sets, the correlates of income variance and poverty are analyzed. The results show that under most reasonable assumptions regarding data deficiencies and appropriate deflators, the fraction of the population in absolute poverty declined only slightly over the decade. Although the poorest households were found among the small farmers and sharecroppers in the rural areas in both 1960 and 1970, a large increase in the incidence of poverty in urban areas occurred over the decade.