The significant place of credit in everyday business is not a new phenomenon. If the last few centuries have witnessed a rapid development in the character and extent of credit facilities, it is still far from certain that the relative importance of credit is today greater than it was in the medieval period, or during the intervening centuries. In any case it is undeniable that the business affairs of men, from paupers to princes, have frequently required credit in one form or another. The king with his wars and splendid court, the noble with his extravagant ways, and the merchant with his speculative ventures have been the colorful debtors of history and fiction alike. The Jew, the Lombard, the Medici or Fugger, the goldsmith, and finally the modern professional banker have appeared as the masters of credit. But credit transactions have not been limited to these groups alone. As R. H. Tawney has pointed out, such a society as that of Elizabethan England was composed largely of small property holders, chiefly farmers and artisans. These yeomen, artisans, and small businessmen were often in need of loans to expand or retrieve their estates. Where did they find the credit they required?

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.

The influence that short-time economic fluctuations in western Europe presumably had on the development of the Swedish timber trade during the latter half of the nineteenth century must, to an American audience, seem to be a rather specialized subject, and I think a few introductory words giving a background might be useful.

I present estimates here of the geographic persistence of estate owners and managers in Barbados during 1673–1723. The estimates are based on evidence generated by the functioning of an economic market; the evidence was produced by tracing the names of purchasers over time through the invoice accounts of slave sales held by the Royal African Company on the island.Estimated rates of out-migration from Barbados were low during the 1670s, comparable in magnitude to those found in colonial New England towns, but the rates rose considerably during the following decades. The initially low rates of out-migration might have been the result of the great profitability of sugar planting in early Barbados, while the subsequent increase might have been due to the development of methods of plantation management that allowed estate owners to earn profits as absentees.

In the neoclassical-cliometric view of historical events, earlier concerns with economic change over time are now “out of bounds.” This narrowing has been justified by the supposed demands of scientific rigor, but a new model of science suggests that this need not be so. Science does not have any single goal or method. Science demands that economic historians develop whatever tools are needed to solve the problems they face. Examples of this already exist.

Anumber of economic historians, including Charles Beard, C. Vann Woodward, and others have argued that southern economic development during the nineteenth century may have been significantly hindered by the South's political and economic relations with the North. Certainly the best known of such arguments is that of Charles Beard. Beard thought that the “normal” workings of the pre-Civil War political economy would have resulted in the relative eclipse of the southern economy even in the absence of the Civil War. Wartime devastation plus such northern policies as the tariff, the Homestead Law, the National Banking Act, and emancipation of the slaves, merely hastened and worsened the South's economic decline.

The application of the notion of learning by doing to account for the measured input efficiency growth of an aggregation of production units admittedly creates worrisome ambiguities about exactly what was being “learned,” how, and by whom. (David, p. 562)

Understanding industrial decline is important from both historical and policy perspectives. The United States was the world's leading producer of gum naval stores in the early twentieth centuiy, but by the late 1970s production had all but ceased. Evidence presented here indicates that changing relative prices induced forest owners, the key stakeholders, to shift production towards other forest products. Nevertheless, the federal government continued to provide transfers to this industry even as political support for it vanished. The demise of this once-great American industry lends support to the received notion that once instituted, transfer programs tend to persist.

The year 1886 was destined to be a crucial one in the history of the American labor movement. The eight-hour crusade, the numerous strikes, the Haymarket bomb, the entrance of workingmen into the political arena at the state and national levels, and the mushroom growth of labor organizations all contributed to the agitation and excitement of the year. Yet the importance of these events was overshadowed by a development that was to have such far-reaching implications that it would determine the future of the labor movement for the succeeding half century. That development was the declaration of war by the trade unions against the reform unionism of the Knights of Labour.