“Imperialism is no word for scholars.” I quote my own printed words of ten years ago. The bewildering changes of content and color of that chameleon word throughout the brief century of its existence are. now being explored by R. F. Koebner of the University of Jerusalem. Here indeed is a fit task for scholars—to take a key word such as imperialism or despotism, to trace the history of its usage and abusage, to fit it into its true context of ideology, propaganda, and political warfare throughout successive historical phases. What a scholar can NOT do with these emotionally reverberant words is to make them reliable instruments of scientific exploration and explanation.

In a long list of publications since 1923 Harold Innis with industry and insight set a pattern for the study and interpretation of Canadian economic history. The University of Toronto, the Dominion Government, and Canadian learned societies in their various fashions paid tribute to the high quality of this achievement. His career, moreover, was a refutation of his own generalization, perhaps playfully formulated, that no Canadian scholar could secure recognition in the United States. He was a charter member of the Committee on Research in Economic History, the second president of the Economic History Association, and at the time of his death president of the American Economic Association.

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures “played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita” in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

Endogenous growth theories suggest that market integration will be more conducive to economic development when the previously isolated regions have large stocks of human capital. This paper uses the level of per capita patenting in nineteenth-century Virginia to measure this human capital. By the end of the 1870s, the rail network of the Old Dominion was rapidly being integrated with the rest of the nation. Inventiveness spread throughout northern Virginia, but the former plantation areas of the state fell behind.