Amuch neglected topic in the economic history of Uganda is the contribution of fiscal policy to the inequality of income. While generalizations have been made about the heavy burden of taxation on Uganda's Africans and the bias in the distribution of government expenditure, no systematic analysis of these issues has been undertaken. It is my objective to rectify this shortcoming, and to provide estimates of the incidence of taxation on different races and sectors of the economy at different periods. This study should be of parallel interest to my earlier article, demonstrating the extent of inequality in Uganda, since it shows that the government's tax policy had a major effect on the distribution of income in the country. The present paper focuses particularly on the farmers, who have always been at the bottom of the distribution ladder, and attempts to answer the following questions. 1.) What were the major sources of tax revenue in Uganda, and what proportion of the revenue was derived from the farmers? 2.) What was the farmers' rate of taxation compared to that of other sections of the population? 3.) How was expenditure out of government revenue distributed?

Not long ago an authority on dyeing observed that “in the history of the dyeing industry indigo holds a unique place by reason of its irresistible rise to supremacy among dyestuffs and its equally rapid dethronement by the modern chemical colors. …” Among the sources of this once flourishing industry, one that has never been studied adequately is that of colonial Brazil. Commercial indigo production began there in the early 1760's, but after an impressive start the industry disappeared within less than two generations. Its beginnings occurred at a time when Portugal, like other imperial powers of that era, was seeking to diversify the agriculture of her colonies so as to make them more lucrative to the mother country. A study of the industry's brief tenure in Portugal's most important colony reveals some of the problems that confronted its planters, merchants, and royal officials as they attempted, with limited experience and inadequate supporting capital, to develop new sources of income during a period of keen international economic rivalry. The factors involved in the rise and decline of the Brazilian indigo industry can best be appreciated when it is examined as part of the global history of indigo production and trade between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Between 1550 and 1730, privileged investors in France—nobles, officers, and wealthy merchants—bought up enormous quantities of land from peasants. The transfer of property has attracted considerable attention from historians, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. The paper invokes the tax exemptions the privileged enjoyed to account for the transfer—an explanation that fits both the chronology of the land sales and the identity of the purchasers. The paper then examines how the tax system throttled growth in the agricultural sector.

The major purpose of this article is to measure factor-saving biases in technical change within the American and British textile sectors during the nineteenth century. This empirical attempt will be made within the context of the historical debate concerning the causes for the superiority of American industrial efficiency as compared with the British.

In 1942 the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve agreed to keep the interest rate on long-term government bonds below a ceiling of 2.5 percent. Assuming rational expectations, the ceiling on long-term interest rates can be viewed as a government commitment to low long-run inflation. The Fed also agreed to buy and sell short-term government bonds at a below-market rate of 3/8 percent. This policy did not result in long-run inflation because it was narrowly confined to 3-month Treasury bills.

David Greasley and Les Oxley provide an interesting but ultimately unconvincing chalenge to the perspective on the British Industrial Revolution that we have set out in recent articles1. We believe that the issues that they raise are important and deserve a full response. Thus, we take the opportunity to clarify ideas on growth theory and its implications for growth accounting, to review the econometrics of estimating trend growth in an economy undergoing structural change, and to reconsider the persuasiveness of different views of the nature of technological change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Twelve-hour days persisted in British and U.S. iron and steel after most industrial workers worked eight-hour days. When shorter hours finally came, sooner in Britain, they came abruptly. This article presents a model of working hours as public goods; when job attributes are shared there is a collective choice problem. In Britain, a collective bargaining mechanism reconciled the preferences of workers and capital owners and facilitated the move to shorter hours. In the United States immigrants had been willing to work long hours. When immigration was cut off, the government intervened.

Between 1880 and 1910, Japanese exports increased in volume, changed composition, and shifted from leading industrialized countries toward poorer Asian neighbors. Using a new dataset disaggregated by product and trade partner for the universe of Japanese exports, we find extensive margins accounted for 30 percent of export growth, with trade costs and market size associated with successful market entry. There was also considerable persistence in maintaining market presence and exit was rare. These stylized facts provide insight into both the country’s economic development, as reflected in its exported products, as well as the demand conditions of its trade partners.

Until the 1790s marine insurance in the United States was organized by brokers and underwritten by private individuals. Beginning in 1792, however, the private underwriters had to compete with newly formed marine insurance corporations. Each organizational form had advantages and disadvantages. This article uses archival data from a private underwriter and a corporation to study how the competition between these different organizational forms was affected by a powerful exogenous shock which substantially increased the risks to American merchant shipping in the late 1790s: the “Quasi-War” between the United States and France.

The farming practices of the Amish have differed in various ways from those of other farmers. I use the information from federal census schedules to examine the differences during the period 1850 to 1880 in light of Amish culture. Amish farmers did not resist technological change during 1850–80, but the evidence shows other systematic differences. They adopted distinct patterns in investment to ensure the survival of their religious culture, which in turn affected their relative performance.

It is lovely to see attention to this critical episode in the Great Depression. Isabel Schnabel repeats the familiar argument that bank behavior was a primary cause of the German crisis. We have argued elsewhere that the German crisis clearly began as a currency crisis, not a banking crisis. The purpose of this comment is to examine the data that Schnabel's article brings to bear on this question and evaluate the evidence it presents in support of its hypotheses.

The article uses recent exchange-rate data to explore the progressive integration of early eighteenth-century, West European financial markets. The process climaxed in 1719 and 1720 with the Mississippi Bubble in Paris, the South Sea Bubble in London, and the insurance bubbles in Hamburg and throughout Holland. Only Paris failed to integrate permanently into the new multinational network.

More than forty years have passed since Catteral's monograph on the second Bank of the United States was published, and, though that account has never been superseded, it antedates all recent literature on central banking and therefore presents inadequately the public purposes of the bank. Furthermore, it includes nothing about the bank's Pennsylvania successor, which failed, and thus omits the denouement of Biddle's conflict with Jackson. The inevitable effect of the failure, in the rough justice of history, was to make Jackson seem right and Biddle wrong; and this impression, especially in the absence of attention to the purpose and functions of the bank, seems in recent years to have been strengthened. I think it needs correction.

This Article summarizes the main findings of a detailed. study of the changing occupational and industrial structure of Mexico's non-agricultural labor force from 1895 to 1930 and from 1930 to 1950, based on a comparison of population censuses, especially those of 1895, 1930, and 1950. Structural changes in Mexico's labor force have never been adequately studied, and the results of the present research shed considerable new light on Mexico's development. The findings also suggest important paradoxes and discontinuities in the early stages of industrialization that merit systematic recognition in models and measurements of structural change over the course of development.

Defense of a historical survey of the business corporation in this country seems hardly necessary. Students of its place in the present economy, even students of the well-recorded “trust” movement of the 1890's and later decades, need this background, if only to test the hypothesis, not infrequently encountered, that the business corporation of pre-Civil War days was largely confined to the fields of banking, insurance, and public utilities.

No source of agricultural distress in the post-bellum South was more frequently alluded to by nineteenth-century observers than the “overproduction” of cotton. The anonymous author of the opening quotation was merely expressing, in characteristically metaphorical terms, a widely-held view that was to persist for years among southern reformers. Even writers who conceded the peculiar advantages for cotton culture derived from the South's climate and soils often argued nevertheless that crop diversification was the order of the day.

Malthusian models occupy a central position in the interpretation and analysis of long-term economic and demographic change in preindustrial societies. The models are logically plausible and attractive, but ultimately they will have to be confronted with systematic evidence before being accepted. In this paper results are reported that cast some doubt on these models in the case of prefamine Ireland. The results indicate that the evidence supporting Malthusian views is not strong, and that the modus operandi of the nexus between economic and demographic variables is probably far more complex than is implied in standard Malthusian models.

In 1829 Zachariah Allen, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, published his book, The Science of Mechanics. Neither the title nor a casual glance at the contents of the book suggests that it contains material of major interest to economists or economic historians. Allen's book was intended as a manual for American mechanics and manufacturers. It summarized that portion of the industrial arts of its day which the author considered most useful and relevant for the edification of his American readers. The book contains elementary tables of conversion, arithmetic and geometric rules and formulas, a good deal of simple physics, and extensive descriptions of the workings of machinery—especially water wheels, steam engines, and millwork generally. In particular, Allen attempted to summarize much of what he had learned during a recent tour of the major manufacturing districts of England and France, so as to bring Americans up to date on the “latest improvements in mechanical invention in those countries.’ Unobtrusively placed in the back of this book, however, is a chapter, “Comparative View of the Relative Advantages Possessed by England, France and the United States of America as Manufacturing Nations,’ which records his more strictly economic impressions of his tour, taken in 1825. His observations in this short chapter, often trenchant and occasionally pungent, invite comparison with some of the better known European travelers to the United States. Anyone who can write, as Allen does (p. 355), that “An industrious New-England mechanic commonly appears to take pleasure in his business; but the French mechanic is rather inclined to make a business of his pleasures,’ is obviously entitled to a sympathetic hearing.

This article offers a new interpretation of the low level of investment in Germany during the interwar period. Earlier contributions attributed the slow expansion of capital stock either to excessive wages due to state intervention and unionization or to the high cost of capital. These hypotheses are tested by estimating a cointegration model of investment. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that lower wages would have lowered investment still further and that high interest rates acted as the main brake on investment during the second half of the 1920s.

The rate of urban growth in the United States reached its highestlevel in the twenty years before 1861. Nevertheless in the five preceding decades, 1790 to 1840, those coming just before the railroad age, the cities of the nation grew at a remarkably rapid rate. It is true that during one 10-year period of relatively slow growth, 1810–1820, the city population increased at a pace slightly below that for the total population. But in the other four decades, 1790–1800, 1800–1810, 1820–1830, and 1830–1840, the rate of increase in the number of people living in cities was almost double that for the whole population and exceeded the urban growth rate attained in any post-Civil War decade. This study makes available detailed statistics on urban population changes from 1775 to 1840, directs attention to the differing contributions to urbanization made by four city groups, and notes some of the influences affecting urban population expansion in the years before the railroad became a dominant influence.