In his classic paper on the significance of railroads to American economic development, Leland Jenks distinguished three principal avenues of influence: (1) The railroad was what Jenks called an “innovating idea” with important psychological impact “manifested in a wave-like profusion of new enterprise of many sorts.” (2) The railroad and railway construction and maintenance were a stimulus to the industrial and financial sectors of the economy. The railroad not only stimulated the iron and steel, timber, and other industries directly but “encouraged innovations in financial enterprise.” (3) Finally, the railroad contributed directly to the generation of national income through the rendering of transportation services. Although on this last point Jenks despaired that, “There appears to be no satisfactory technique for giving a precise measure to the extent of this contribution.”

The purpose of my studies is to estimate the total and per capita wealth of the thirteen colonies in the early 1770's and something of its composition and distribution. The estimates for New England presented here add another building block to the accumulating evidence that a rather high level of living was reached in the American colonies at the close of over 150 years of economic development. They also show that wealth was unequally distributed among the population in this transitionally commercial era, well before the onset of industrialism. They yield quantitative evidence as well on size of wealth in relation to such characteristics of wealth holders as their age and sex, occupations, urban or rural residence and testacy, that is whether or not they left a will at death.

Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, accomplished scientists and prominent executives in the BASF and IG Farben chemical corporations, were drawn together by mutual admiration and common technical interests. In the Nazi era, however, they came to embody competing liberal and nationalist conceptions of German political economy. This article examines their relationship, the reasons for their divergent stances, and their individual contributions to the economic and productive power of the Third Reich. Ironically, Bosch's understanding of his industry, his nation, and scientific progress led him to oppose the Nazis, but also to lay the basis for their recruitment of Krauch and the German chemical industry for their expansionist purposes.

This article examines the impact of gold mining on slavery in colonial Brazil. Crown policies, economic pressures, and gold's role as an instrument for social mobility had demographic repercussions—affecting sexual imbalance, the ratio of slaves to freedmen, the availability and distribution of labor. Economic factors determined ethnic origins, slave trade patterns, and the assimilative capability of blacks as illustrated by the slave family. Differences between slavery in mining and plantation societies are emphasized. The transfer of technical skills is signalled as a major African contribution to the New World. The article concludes by assessing the psychological and administrative impact of a black majority.

This note contrasts the familial origins of 136 Jewish American entrepreneurs with those of 187 American non-Jewish entrepreneurs described in a previous study of mine. Information on both groups was drawn from published biographies. In addition, manuscript biographies were used to gather information on Jewish entrepreneurs.

This study investigates the relationship between income and fertility in Nuits-Saint-Georges, a small Burgundian town. Nuits offers a rich location to study fertility because of its broad range of occupations, income, and literacy. I constructed a data set that linked fertility through 1792 for couples married between 1744 and 1779 with fiscal records tracking the families' tax payments. Controlling for occupation and literacy, my principle findings were that wealthier families had more births, changes in fertility were positively correlated with increases in income over the life cycle, and marital fertility in Nuits steadily declined over the latter eighteenth century.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. This article is part of a thesis written under the supervision of Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. The author would like to thank Jean-LaurentRosenthal, Kathleen McGarry, Duncan Thomas, Pia Orrenius, Rosemary Hyson, George Deltas, Aileen Thompson, Shawn Ulrick, three anonymous referees, and two editors at this JOURNAL for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.

I use rice prices in three cities to analyze the efficiency of the marketing system and the institutional framework of Javanese agriculture, 1823–1853. I show that imperfections in rural capital markets caused the extreme fluctuations in rice prices and that the segmentation of the capital market modifies the McCloskey and Nash interpretation of the relationship between seasonal fluctuations of grain (or rice) prices and interest rates. I argue that these fluctuations proxy peasants' stress. Finally, I hypothesize that institutional and market failures explain the “noneconomic” behavior of Javanese peasants in Boeke's theory of dualistic economic development.

In early public land privatization, governments in New South Wales and Buenos Aires provided for de jure transfer of public lands. In New South Wales the government lost control; squatters rushed out unlawfully and seized de facto frontier claims. But in Buenos Aires privatization was accomplished by de jure transfers. Why did British settlers reject de jure transfers from a government, most able to secure property rights and rule of law, while settlers of the pampa frontier, where property-rights security was doubtful, complied with de jure transfers? We find that the revenue objective and violence on the frontier explain this puzzle.

Revisiting an old debate between “traditional” historians and “New” economic historians about the short-run monetary effects of President Jackson's war on the Second Bank, I offer new arguments for the traditionalists. I develop a framework accounting for growth in commercial bank credit based on the “investment club” characteristics of antebellum state-chartered banking and apply it to state bank balance sheet data for 1830–1836. The removal of the Second Bank indeed magnified the boom in commercial banking, and the replacement of Second Bank branches with state-chartered banks as lenders and federal government depositories amplified the boom in frontier lands and state debt.

The debasement of the Byzantine gold coin during the reign of Constantine IX Monomachus (1042–1055) marked the end of more than seven centuries of near stability and the beginning of a sharp fall in the coin's gold content. I reject a widely accepted view that the debasement was caused by the increase in the number of transactions in an expanding economy. I explain the debasement as being a measure undertaken to finance the protracted war against the Pechenegs in the latter half of Constantine's reign.I would like to thank Judith Herrin for her help and encouragement and for first suggesting that I look at this problem. I would also like to thank this JOURNAL's editor and three anonymous referees whose comments and recommendations significantly improved this article. Finally, thanks are also due to Richard Brealey, Ian Cooper, Michael Crawford, Julian Franks, Jonathan Goodman, Mervyn King, Michael Metcalf, Robert Mundell, Anthony Neuberger, and Gabriel Stein.

In the past decade the question of the degree of mutual economic dependence among the three major regions of the antebellum United States—Northeast, South, and West—has received considerable discussion. Good indicators of the degree of dependence would be ratios of the interregional trade flows of particular commodities to the amounts of those commodities produced locally in each region. Trade data are available, however, only in limited series for major cities or commercial areas. Since comprehensive trade flows cannot be measured directly, various indirect approaches to the question have been employed.

Municipal involvement in the finance of fine arts museums raises the question: Just which market failure serves to rationalize this public subsidy? Two contenders are prominent in the literature: decreasing costs and education externalities. The relationship of price to marginal cost provides an operational test to distinguish among the two rationales. Scattered data from the 1880s and 1890s as well as contemporary discussion indicate that, implausible as it may seem now, education externalities constituted the operational justification for the public subsidy.

This paper is concerned with the semipiratical entrepreneurs who roamed the United States virtually unchecked before 1903, save for who the opposition of a few publicists and some short-lived vigilante committees. Contemporaries, following Henry Demarest Lloyd and Carl Schurz, likened businessmen of this type to the nobles who infested the Medieval Rhine. The term “robber barons” has stuck to them through the years despite occasional attempts at rehabilitating one or another who stood out above the throng by virtue of his accumulations or philanthropy. Only recently, for example, Howard Mumford Jones distinguished between the “cruelty” and the “culture” of these magnates whose behavior in the commercial-political and the artistic-literary fields he prefers to liken to the “commercial tyrants” of the Renaissance. No one to date, so far as I know, has attempted to distinguish from their strictly buccaneering activities the permanent contributions made by these businessmen as a group to American business practices. Such is the purpose of this paper.

This paper re–examines the naval reserve oil leases issued by Interior Secretary Fall in 1922 that led to the Teapot Dome controversy. The analysis shows that the leases were the only efficient oil rights arrangement on federal lands through 1930. They were superior to either the naval oil storage policy practiced prior to 1922 or to the general leasing practices found on other federal land. Nevertheless, they were attacked by conservation groups and small oil firms and cancelled in 1922. To explain the opposition to the leases, this paper examines interagency and interest group rivalries for control of federal land. During the period preceding Teapot Dome, the federal government began withholding title to vast tracts of land, and issues of agency jurisdiction and interest group access had not been resolved. The paper concludes that Teapot Dome had little to do with oil conservation and more to do with settling jurisdictional disputes over federal land. The Teapot Dome controversy led to the establishment of the Federal Oil Conservation Board.

We examine the impact of rigorous trade suppression during 1550–1567 on the sharp rise of piracy in this period of Ming China. By analyzing a uniquely constructed historical data set, we find that the enforcement of a “sea (trade) ban” policy led to a rise in pirate attacks that was 1.3 times greater among the coastal prefectures more suitable for silk manufactures—our proxy for greater trade potential. Our study illuminates the conflicts in which China subsequently engaged with the Western powers, conflicts that eventually resulted in the forced abandonment of its long upheld autarkic principle.

We approach the issue of the economic effects of democracy by examining which expectations investors held about the effect of democratization in the Kingdom of Saxony in 1896 and 1909. We do this by linking their investment behavior on the Berlin Stock Exchange to political events in Saxony. Here the electoral law was changed twice: In 1896 a very restrictive franchise was introduced, which was abolished in 1909 and replaced by a more democratic electoral law. Our study reveals that the Berlin Stock Exchange reacted to political changes and elections in Saxony. This is an important finding since historical research has claimed that the increased democratization in the German Kaiserreich measured in a larger participation of the population was not accompanied by a larger political influence of the parliaments. Furthermore we can show that for capital owners the possible negative effects seemed to outweigh possible positive effects of democratization. This is the first time that it has been possible to provide quantitative evidence for such antidemocratic sentiments.

The active opposition to technical change has frequently impeded economic growth. This article examines the widespread resistance to government-led campaigns to use new tuberculin testing technologies to eradicate bovine tuberculosis in the United States. We explore three issues: the political economy of opposition; the role of earlier scientific controversies in the discourse; and the techniques used by the opponents. Over time, the protests shifted from challenging the scientific merits of the testing technology to more nuts-and-bolts distributional and administrative issues.

In recent years a number of papers have appeared offering explanations of the long-noted, long-unresolved note issue paradox in both the free and national banking eras. Some have argued that previous profit calculations overstate the true cost of note issue because they fail to account for risks and costs that are not easily modeled. Others have argued that profit calculations are reasonably accurate and demonstrate that the bankers acted irrationally in failing to reap easily gathered profits. Yet another approach radically modified the basis of the calculation and found potential profits to be quite small. This note offers an explanation overlooked by most previous studies: that although note issue was profitable, a more profitable avenue existed. Because of legal and institutional restrictions, banks found it more profitable at the margin to create deposits rather than issue notes in extending credit.

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the rates of industrial A growth in various periods of Russian history from the middle of the eighties until the end of the interwar period and to describe briefly the specific factors that promoted or obstructed the process of industrialization of the country. While no definitive conclusions are reached, some of the similarities and differences between industrial developments before and after 1914 are pointed out in the last section of this paper. History in the conditional mood is an enticing pastime. However, I have successfully withstood the temptation to concentrate on estimates of the relative level of industrial output that Russia might have attained in the absence of a revolution.