Patent medicines in the United States played a pioneering role in marketing. The nostrum manufacturer, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, exploited a brand name and developed a distinctive symbol as a trademark. His wares were sold in a package of distinctive shape or design. He sought to achieve as national a market as transportation conditions permitted. His advertising appeared in newspapers of all regions, appealing to citizens to buy from local retailers an article made hundreds of miles away. In a highly competitive market, the remedy promoter was forced to explore in his advertising a wide variety of psychological lures.

The paper examines changes in the organization of the British cotton industry from 1825 to 1850 in its core region of Lancashire and northeast Cheshire, using new data to delineate patterns of integration, specialization, and the adoption of new technology. The industry is usually assumed to have progressed from a rather specialized structure in 1825 to a highly integrated structure in 1850; much of the literature is devoted to explaining this trend. No such trend occurred, however, and the explanations are incorrect. An alternative view, focusing on technical change and profitability in spinning and weaving, is outlined briefly.

This paper examines the workings of the Imperial Russian gold standard, presents annual estimates on money supply under three definitions, and compares changes in money with changes in gold reserves, finding no relation. The Russian monetary system was insulated from gold movements in at least seven ways, of which three were accidental and four were deliberate. The article concludes on a note of speculative skepticism about the macro-economic significance of the rate of monetary growth, and of the gold standard itself, during the period.

James Watt patented his improved steam engine in 1769 but, as is well known, lacked the capital and other facilities to exploit the patent. It was not until the commencement of his partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775, after Boulton had successfully obtained an Act of Parliament extending the patent to 1800, that the technical development and commercial exploitation of his engine could be effected. The first engines were all reciprocating ones operating pumping and, later, blowing machinery. But, partly in response to Boulton's insistence that demand for factory engines would escalate, Watt developed and in 1782 patented his rotative engine.

This article estimates biases to technical change in Canadian manufacturing from 1900 to 1929, and compares these to estimates of biased technical change in U.S. manufacturing. Significant differences are found between similar industries in the two countries, indicating that Canadian manufacturers did not use U.S. technology in unaltered fashion, but adapted it to be more cost efficient under Canadian factor market conditions.

Mercantilism is defined for this discussion as a policy of government that expressed in the economic sphere the spirit of nationalism that animated the growth of the national state in early modern times. The policy aimed to gain for the nation a high degree of security or self-sufficiency, especially as regards food supply, raw materials needed for essential industries, and the sinews of war. This end was to be achieved in large measure by means of an effective control over the external activities and resources upon which the nation was dependent. In turn, that urge impelled the mercantilists to prefer colonial dependencies to independent foreign countries in seeking sources of supply. If the state could not free itself completely from trade with foreign nations, it sought to control that trade in its own interest as much as possible. To realize such objectives, mercantilism embraced three subordinate and related policies. The Corn Laws fostered the nation's agriculture and aimed to realize the ideal of self-sufficiency as regards food supply. State aids to manufacturing industries, such as the protective tariff, sought to provide essential finished goods, including the sinews of war. The Navigation Acts were intended to assure that foreign trade would be carried on in such a way as to yield the maximum advantage to the state concerned.

Around 1900, an extraordinary number of stillbirths appeared in Japan's statistical yearbooks. This article investigates possible biological explanations but concludes that Japan's anomalous stillbirth rates were primarily the result of the deliberate misreporting of infanticides and abortions. On the basis of an international comparison spanning five centuries, it estimates that between 1886 and 1940, Japanese parents filed between 1.7 and 2.8 million false stillbirth reports.

Gregory Clark argued in A Farewell to Alms that preindustrial societies, including England, were Malthusian. Day wages show incomes were trendless: as high in Europe in the medieval era as in 1800, even in England. The opposed view is that England and the Netherlands grew substantially from 1200 to 1800. Early day wages overestimate living standards. Here we show that preindustrial farm employment shares can be estimated from probate occupation reports. These imply only 60 percent employed in farming in England in 1560–1579 and 1653–1660, consistent with the high incomes indicated by wages. Day wages do measure preindustrial living standards.

Several macroeconomic studies have found evidence of diminishing cyclical wage flexibility in the United States since the turn of the century. But the importance of wage reductions during downturns must be questioned even for the era of allegedly flexible wages. This article shows that during the severe contractions of 1893 and 1908 only a small minority of Ohio manufacturing workers experienced cuts in their wage rates.The apparent downward flexibility of average earnings in these data was largely the consequence of changes in the occupational composition of the employed work force rather than pay cuts for individual workers.

While definitions of terms must vary with the purposes of their use, several studies of American entrepreneurship might be started with the word entrepreneur confined to those business executives who are associated with (a) the organization of new business units, (b) substantial expansions of established units, and (c) strenuous efforts to adapt established units to a changing environment. Such a conception, which uses terms that would obviously have to be made more precise as a study progressed, excludes from the term entrepreneur those business executives who carry on more or less routine operations, and it directs attention to the dynamic activities of businessmen. It is a little broader than a strict interpretation of the term innovator and fits fairly well the idea implicit in many definitions of the term entrepreneur, namely, that the entrepreneur is the businessman who introduces new ideas and changes the rate at which the wheels of enterprise go ‘round. Moreover, it utilizes three types of business activity concerning which there are data available for studies of the policy-determining executive. I should perhaps add that those who attempt to organize, expand, or adapt business units should be called entrepreneurs as well as those who achieve these goals. Attempts often reveal new ideas that successors are able to put into operation.

The organization of a commercial firm or a corporation is usually J. determined by the nature of its business. We must, therefore, know the meaning of the word “bank” which appears in the title of this study. Today this word has a variety of meanings. There are all sorts of banks: central banks, commercial banks, member banks, and so forth. In the fifteenth century, there were not so many kinds of credit institutions. But still the word “bank” had more than one meaning. What kind of a bank was the Medici bank?

From the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, the major countries of Western Europe—England, Holland, France, and Spain—can be viewed as a single entity in terms of overall economic growth. Population and output rose in all until the early fourteenth century when famine and then plague caused population and production to decline for over a century. Again in the sixteenth century there exist clear indications of a general expansion of population and output levels. In the seventeenth century, however, this uniform pattern is broken. Holland and England continue to expand; France falls relatively behind; and Spain absolutely declines. A simple Malthusian model appears to go far in explaining the general contours of the pre-seventeenth-century growth pattern. The differential pattern of the seventeenth century, however, has proven less amenable to unique explanation. This paper will not provide a unique explanation of the seventeenth-century growth pattern. It will, however, attempt to focus the search for such an explanation by arguing that the source of the differential growth lay in a single sector of the economies under discussion. Specifically, it will be argued that given the relatively constant technology of the period, growth, both extensive and intensive, can be explained by population increase in conjunction with economies of scale; that the source of the economies of scale lay in the transactions sectors of the economies under study; that only England and Holland had institutional structures that allowed the population growth beginning in the sixteenth century to give rise to large market areas and thereby allow realization of the economies of scale inherent in the transactions sector; and that the productivity increases brought about through realization of these economies of scale made it possible for Holland and England in the seventeenth century to support continued population increase and to evidence an increasing standard of living. This explanation of growth will necessarily remain incomplete because no attempt will be made to explain why Crown policies, and therefore institutional structures, differed between the countries.

The dominance of steam over sail was not finally established on long distance routes until the 1880's. When it came, steam's triumph was due primarily to the adoption of the high pressure compound engine, a marvel of its day and one of the major engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Yet within two decades experiments were being undertaken with two forms of marine propulsion—the steam turbine and the marine diesel—which were to render the compound engine uncompetitive over a wide range of uses. An experimental steam turbine was built by Parsons in 1884 and an improved design powered the Turbinia in 1894. The heavyoil or diesel engine was first adapted for marine propulsion in 1902. In 1910 a Dutch tanker, the Vulcanus, was fitted with a 450 BHP engine and in 1911 Burmeister & Wain began constructing the first ocean going cargo liner, the Selandia. By the early twenties steam turbine and diesel were replacing conventional steam vessels. Above all, the inter-war years witnessed the success of the marine diesel (motorship) which was adopted, particularly by European shipowners, for the propulsion of a wide variety of ship types and sizes.

Despite its wealth of economic data, Domesday Book, complied almost nine hundred years ago, has been surprisingly neglacted by quantitative economic historians. In analyzing one of the central issues in Domesday book—namely the relationship between manorial resurces and income—we here provide a first step in the attempt to redress the balance, by employing recently developed statistical techiniques. The result of the analysis constitutes strong grounds for rejecting the traditional interpretation of the relationship. It also suggests that the English economy of 1086 can be reconstructed more completely than previously thought possible.

This article surveys the history of tourism in America from colonial times to World War II. In that time there were substantial increases in the numbers of tourists, in the extent to which middle-income classes participated, and in the number and type of tourist destinations; but most of that growth may have been confined to the period after World War I. The growth of income and reduced costs of travel no doubt explain most of the growth, but some cultural factors helped to shift out the demand curve. The industry also possesses characteristics that should make further study of interest to economic historians. “I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind.”Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, p. 488.Mark Twain

The railroads in the American West were constructed in a few concentrated building booms. This timing of construction resulted from the alternate creation and collapse of imperfect property rights to rights of way in partially settled areas. These “property rights” arose from strategic behavior within the railroad oligopoly. When enforcement costs of cooperative action were low, the railroads were able to create rents by avoiding construction ahead of demand. When enforcement became difficult, however, construction was the only way to capture rents on unbuilt lines so a construction boom ensued.

This article proposes a unified framework for studying the greenback-gold price during the U.S. suspension of convertibility from 1862 to 1879.The gold price is viewed as a floating exchange rate, with a fixed destination given by gold standard parity because of the prospect of resumption. This perspective is tested using daily data for the entire period, and the effect of news during and after the Civil War is measured. New evidence of a decline in the volatility of gold returns after the Resumption Act of 1875 provides statistical support for the importance of expectations of resumption.

The return of growth theory to center stage in mainstream economics provides opportunities for historians to reconsider the forces shaping longer-term economic development. A key motivation for developing new growth modeling strategies lay in the desire to reestablish contact between theory and the empirics of economic growth. By postulating diminishing returns to capital, the traditional neoclassical paradigm precludes the sustaining of per capita growth in the absence of exogenous technological progress. Since historical records of economic development offer scant evidence for declining per capita growth, disenchantment grew with a theoretical perspective that leaves the crucial part of the empirical record unexplained, prompting a search for alternative modeling strategies.