We explain the origins of the Panic of 1857, examine its spread, and compare state banking systems's responses. We describe the decline in western land and railroad investments and the consequent stress on securities brokers and banks in eastern cities, and trace the transmission of the shock to other regions. Bank performance depended not only on regional conditions and links to eastern banks, but on the ability to coordinate behavior. Southern branch banks and coinsuring banks in Ohio and Indiana were particularly successful.

This article provides a picture of economic inequality in northwestern Italy (Piedmont), 1300–1800. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and none has as long a timescale. The new data proposed illuminate little-known aspects of wealth distribution and general economic inequality in preindustrial times, supporting the idea that during the Early Modern period, inequality grew everywhere, independently from whether the economy was growing or stagnating. This challenges earlier views that explained inequality growth as the consequence of economic development. The importance of demographic processes is underlined, and the impact of the Black Death and other mortality crises is analyzed.

A sectoral analysis of comparative labor productivity levels over the period 1870 to 1990 suggests mechanisms of catching-up and forging ahead that are rather different from those found in the conventional literature. Both Germany and the United States caught up with and overtook Britain in terms of aggregate labor productivity largely by shifting resources out of agriculture and improving their relative productivity position in services rather than by improving their position in manufacturing. Although capital played some role, the changes in comparative labor productivity also reflected changes in comparative total factor productivity, related to technology and organization.

In The writing of economic history at present there is a tendency tofocus attention on the quantity of material goods and of people. This is not because economists seriously maintain that the chief end of man is to produce a maximum population, each member of which has at his disposal a maximum amount of material things. I do not think many economists or economic historians hold such a materialistic belief-why then would they choose to be professors ? We merely write as if we did, or at least we too often write so that we can be thus misinterpreted; and we are the more likely to be thus misinterpreted because the great political powers of the present, the United States and the Soviet Union, using different ideologies, each extols, paradoxically, its material productivity as proof of the force and validity of its ideals.

This article uses state and city level data to evaluate empirically Brinley Thomas's immigrant-as-deterrent view of the relationship between black emigration from the South and European immigration to the North. The article suggests a Todaro-like interpretation of the Great Migration, which emphasizes the importance of job availability to blacks in determining their expected wages. The combination of mass European immigration and hiring practices that favored white immigrants over blacks may have delayed the Great Migration by decades. The empirical work supports this view.

During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likelihood of premature dissolution. The upshot is that European enterprises grew larger than those of the Islamic world. Moreover, while ever larger enterprises propelled further organizational transformations in Europe, persistently small enterprises inhibited economic modernization in the Middle East.For useful comments on previous drafts, I am indebted to Scott Altman, Murat Çizakça, Avner Greif, Eric Jones, Daniel Klerman, Naomi Lamoreaux, ôevket Pamuk, David Powers, Kenneth Sokoloff, Jan de Vries, Dean Williamson, and three anonymous referees. Excellent research assistance was provided by Hania Abou Al-Shamat, Iva Bozˆović, and Sung Han Tak.

This article attempts to account for the exceptional stability exhibited by the banking systems of Britain, Canada, and ten other countries during the Great Depression. It considers three possible explanations of stability—the structure of the commercial banking system, macroeconomic policy and performance, and lender of last resort behavior—employing data from 25 countries across Europe and North America. The results suggest that macroeconomic policy—especially exchange-rate policy—and banking structure, but not lenders of last resort, were systematically responsible for banking stability.

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.

Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use until its abolition in 1917. This paper provides an economic analysis of the innovation of indentured servitude, describes the economic forces that caused its decline and disappearance from the British colonies, and considers why indentured servitude was revived for migration to the West Indies during the time of the great free migration of Europeans to the Americas.

Leland Jenks's article describing the pervasive impact of the railroad on the American economy first as an idea, then as a construction enterprise, and finally as a purveyor of cheap transportation, has become a classic of economic history. The particular contribution of the Jenks article was not the novelty of its viewpoint, but the neat way in which it summarized the conclusions both of those who lived during the “railroad revolution” and those who later analyzed it through the lens of elapsed time. Out of this summary the railroad emerges as the most important innovation of the last two thirds of the nineteenth century. It appears as the sine qua non of American economic growth, the prime force behind the westward movement of agriculture, the rise of the corporation, the rapid growth of modern manufacturing industry, the regional location of industry, the pattern of urbanization, and die structure of interregional trade.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centureis, the regions of the United States went from a set of relatively isolated regional economies to an integrated national economy. Economic integration, as we as long-run secular changes in the economic structure associated with economic growth, played an important role in determining U.S. regional industrial structures. Moreover, although differences in regional industrial structures do not explain all the variations in regional income per capita, they played an important role in causing U.S. regional incomes to diverge and converge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The rapid spread of Islam into three continents in the seventh and eighth centuries was followed by the diffusion of an equally remarkable but less well documented agricultural revolution. Originating mainly in India, where heat, moisture and available crops all favored its development and where it had been practiced for some centuries before the rise of Islam, the new agriculture was carried by the Arabs or those they conquered into lands which, because they were colder and drier, were much less hospitable to it and where it could be introduced only with difficulty. It appeared first in the eastern reaches of the early-Islamic world—in parts of Persia, Mesopotamia and perhaps Arabia Felix—which had close contacts with India and where a few components of the revolution were already in place in the century before the rise of Islam. By the end of the eleventh century it had been transmitted across the length and breadth of the Islamic world and had altered, often radically, the economies of many regions: Transoxania, Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, the Maghrib, Spain, Sicily, the savannah lands on either side of the Sahara, parts of West Africa and the coastlands of East Africa. It had very far-reaching consequences, affecting not only agricultural production and incomes but also population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labor force, linked industries, cooking and diet, clothing, and other spheres of life too numerous and too elusive to be investigated here.

The wars which raged almost continuously from 1792 to 1815 and which are generally, but not quite properly, called in English the Napoleonic wars, are the longest period of warfare which Europe has known since the early eighteenth century, and as they took place at a crucial stage of economic development, when the Industrial Revolution had just taken off in England and when its preliminary stirrings were showing in various places of the Continent, their impact upon the growth of industry in Continental Europe was quite serious. Unlike the twentieth-century world wars, the Napoleonic wars were not marked by large-scale physical destruction; though the productive potential of some towns or districts suffered from military operations or civil disturbances, such destruction was quite limited in space and time. On the other hand, most European countries suffered during the wars from bouts of paper-money inflation, which had undoubtedly serious consequences—especially in France during the Revolution, when the working capital of many merchants and manufacturers was destroyed through the combination of a sharp rise in their costs, of price control under the maximum, and of payment of government orders in depreciated assignats. Also, the diversion of resources to military purposes and the heavy burden of taxation and exactions must not be underestimated.

This paper examines the evolution of the per capita income gap between developed and developing countries. Landes and Kuznets suggest that Western countries already had a big lead before their economic growth accelerated, but Bairoch has recently claimed that European living standards in the mid-eighteenth century were lower than in the rest of the world. I think the existing evidence supports the Landes-Kuznets position, and that Bairoch probably overstates the contemporary income gap and understates per capita income growth in the developing world. But there are contradictory elements in the evidence, on which further research is needed.

The article derives a new monthly index of industrial production for the United States for 1884 to 1940. This index improves upon existing measures of industrial production by excluding indirect proxies for industrial activity, using only component series that are consistent over time, and not making ad hoc adjustments to the data. Analysis of the new index shows that it has more within-year volatility than conventional indexes, has relatively unimportant seasonal fluctuations, and has cyclical turning points that are grossly similar to but subtly different from existing series.

The banking crisis of 1930 is one of the central events of the Great Depression. The causes of this wave of bank failures are examined using individual bank balance sheet data. Both real and monetary factors are found to have forced the closure of banks, many of which were already weakened by regulatory constraints and regional economic difficulties. The bank failures in this crisis do not seem to have been different in character from failures in previous years, suggesting that the rise in the number of failures may have marked only the beginning of a recession rather than a depression.

Using data on New Deal grants to each U.S. county from 1933 to 1939, we estimate how relief and public works spending and payments to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration influenced retail consumption. On a per capita basis, we find that an additional dollar of public works and relief spending was associated with a 44 cent increase in 1939 retail sales. In contrast, the AAA seems to have had a negative effect on retail sales, suggesting that nonlandowners in the farm sector suffered disproportionate declines in income as a result of the AAA.

New water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eliminate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We examine how this affected human capital formation using early-life typhoid fatality rates to proxy for water quality. We merge city-level data to individuals linked between the 1900 and 1940 Censuses. Eliminating early-life exposure to typhoid fever increased later-life earnings by one percent and educational attainment by one month. Instrumenting for typhoid fever using typhoid rates from cities that lie upstream produces results nine times larger. The increase in earnings from eliminating typhoid fever more than offset the cost of elimination.

If employers make so much money, why don't workers hire machines and expertise and make the money instead? This question has generated a large body of writing, including Stephen Marglin's much-cited article “What Do Bosses Do?” Marglin draws on history to argue that the employer, who added nothing to technical efficiency, used specialization of tasks to divide labor and impose himself as boss, thereby creating an artificial, unproductive role. These arrangements were embodied in domestic industry and were reinforced when employers turned to the factory system as a more effective disciplinary mode. This article argues that such a thesis misreads history and is essentially ideological.

Utilizing a large volume of archival documents, this study establishes for the first time the long-term trends in real wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, from the second half of the fifteenth century until World War I. A detailed consumer price index and nominal wage indices are constructed for the city of Istanbul for this purpose. These price and wage series are then inserted into a larger framework of price and wage trends in European cities during the same period.