Apprenticeship was, at one time, the foremost means of acquiring skill in North America and Europe. Today it is rare in North America for reasons that are not well understood. I draw on the population of apprentice contracts signed in Montreal over a 50-year period to pinpoint the start of the decline and explore its origins. I find that the decline began around 1815. During its first phase masters responded to greater difficulties in contract enforcement. A direct effect of the rise of larger establishments on the market for apprentices appears later, in the late 1820s and 1830s.

In this article I develop a taxonomy of financial practices based on whether financial activity is intended to fund new capital investment or to create new financial structures to accommodate planned changes in the structure of an industry's existing capital stock. The taxonomy is then applied to the financial development of the U.S. sugar-refining industry between 1875 and 1905. The taxonomy provides an explanation of the rise of the large, widely held industrial corporation in the United States that is more consistent with the historical record than are the conventional “financial strain” or “asset liquidation” hypotheses.

In an earlier issue of this Journal, M. E. Sushka criticized the methodology of such “revisionists” as Peter Temin in their evaluation of the impact of the Bank War on the Jacksonian economy. Sushka characterizes the work of the revisionists as the “use of descriptive statistical tools in an attempt to analyze developments empirically.” Sushka, on the other hand, applies “modern econometric techniques” to “an economic framework drawn from contemporary monetary and macroeconomic theory.”

The daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France, are examined here. Based on the comments of pioneer manufacturers, historians have been led to believe that early industrial work was irregular and unpredictable. The Montgolfiers as well complained of undependable workers. Yet their own output registers reveal a pattern of regular productivity unaided by advanced machinery or steam power.

From the 1830s on Syria and Palestine exported monetary metal to pay for an import surplus. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a concomitant inflationary process. The apparent contradiction is resolved by a theoretical argument and by reference to the dual nature of the Ottoman monetary system. Government-induced inflation in terms of the domestic (token and paper) money reinforced the rising price of full-bodied coins, caused by the adverse balance of trade.

In 1914 I was a student in college and according to our textbooks the nature and operation of the gold standard was a subject that presented few difficulties. Countries, we learned, were on the gold standard if they selected as a unit of account a certain weight of gold of a certain fineness and made their currencies convertible into gold at the rate fixed by this definition. If, in addition, such countries placed no restrictions on the export or import of gold they were on an international gold standard. When the major trading countries of the world simultaneously adopted arrangements of this kind, we had what was, in effect, a sort of international convention concerning the treatment of gold which we described as the international gold-standard system.

Capitalist relations do not develop “naturally,” nor are the preconditions for capitalism assured by the rise of markets alone. This paper takes seventeenth–century Massachusetts as a case in point. Class relations there were noncapitalist. A brief exploration of these class relations as well as their economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence will show how complex interaction between classes produced the conditions necessary for capitalism.