This topic was discussed by a panel consisting of D. L. Kemmerer, JL University of Illinois; William B. Gates, Jr., Williams College; Broadus Mitchell, Rutgers University; and Thomas C. Cochran, New York University. The chairman was Edward C. Kirkland, Bowdoin College. In essence, the discussion was a criticism and evaluation of a paper by Mr. Kemmerer, the only formal presentation in the proceedings.

This workshop addressed a question of concern to medieval economic history for over a generation. Frederic C. Lane called for a theory of consumption, and Carlo Cipolla and Robert Lopez have encouraged a more thorough investigation of the role of demand. Because demand is sometimes understood in terms of needs and of taste, it is often subsumed under the heading of social history, which characterizes and describes, while economic analysis has centered on studies of supply, with their more precise and quantifiable parameters.Will the largely descriptive tools at our disposal help us to understand how demand affected the early-modern economy? The workshop considered demand for goods and services and demand for money. The first three papers addressed the Mediterranean south, and the last three focused upon Europe north of the Alps.

This paper attempts to shed new light on the proximate determinants of domestic investment in Victorian Britain by focusing on the relationship between asset markets and investment behavior. It demonstrates that Victorian investment fluctuations were associated with divergences between the valuation of installed capital as determined in asset markets and the supply price of new capital as determined in commodity markets. After showing how investment fluctuations in Victorian Britain were related to real equity prices, the paper concludes with a summary of findings on the determinants of real share prices.

By the 1820's, New England was in ferment. Unitarianism had shattered the old religious orthodoxy and, while the Dedham case provided a material dowry for the new religion, the sermons of William Ellery Channing furnished a theology and creed. In politics the dogmas of regional Federalism were weakened and soon Daniel Webster was to celebrate the virtues of an embracing nationalism which Pickering and his fellow conspirators of an earlier period would have found incomprehensible. Along the Merrimack were arising the cotton-mill towns, symbols of a new industrialism. An old order was giving way to a new. Once begun, change accelerated and touched one by one the institutions and ideas of the region. Of the economic factors that gave momentum to this transformation, the railroad was the most important. For it was the railroad that after 1830 tied New England into the nation. No longer was it to be a fringe of Hanseatic ports communicating with the rest of the world and with America by sea; it was to become a section in a developing nation. When Emerson wrote of Massachusetts, “From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State,” he should have added that there was not a railroad. For the railroad, even though it may not have opened wider prospects, at least revealed different ones.

Anyone interested in the historical anlysis of the emergence of a wage labor force in the early stages of industrialization will find much of interest in Rashin's study of the Russian case. The value of this study, an expansion and elaboration of a work published in 1940, lies in both over-all and sector estimates of the growth and composition of the work force, and in detailed data on specific aspects of the movement from the land to the factory.

Susan Linz and I are fascinated, if somewhat puzzled, by Edward Saraydar's comments on our research note “The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People” (this Journal, 38 [Dec. 1978]). His comment demonstrates what we ourselves discovered: that there are many ways to measure war costs. We are pleased to note that Saraydar apparently accepts the fundamental conception that we presented of the cost of the war to the population. We are also pleased to see that, despite his criticisms, the range we presented for the cost of the war (that is, 3.2 to 7.4 years' earnings of the 1940 Soviet labor force) stands up quite well as lower and upper bounds.

The publication of a new volume of the Cambridge Economic History is itself an historical event. Like a great freight train, bursting out from its dark tunnel, it rattles across our landscape, loaded high with gold and spices, coal and lumber—a few peasants, merchants, silk-hatted bankers, officials, and businessmen clinging to the roofs of the cars. Livestock are terrified and students astonished; but as happy economic historians we line the tracks and wave our greeting, and then, as the noise and smoke fade away, we return to our firesides to tell each other stories of what we have seen.