Nearly seventy-five years have elapsed since Henry Carey complained that the term laissez faire had become a meaningless symbol, an object, as he put it, of “word-worship.” If the task of definition seemed imposing in his time, it is not less so in ours. The concept has been used with abandon on various levels of political and economic discussion. It belongs to a whole category of catchwords in our social thought whose connotations, if they ever were precise, have become blurred through constant and polemical usage. They are dangerous labels for the historian. This paper seeks to analyze the ideas developed in Pennsylvania to oppose governmental action in economic life during the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. For the present purpose it is not a matter of significance whether one chooses to believe that any of these ideas are genuinely laissezfaire in character or not.

Every economist must be pleased to start some hares; it can become embarrassing, however, when they begin to breed like rabbits. In the ten years since we first tried our slavery model in public, in Professor Gerschenkron's history seminar, more than thirty published arguments addressed to that model have come to our attention. We don't pretend to know whether that represents an increased output over preceding decades. Besides, in our youthful enthusiasm we gave the impression that we were disposing, once and for all, of a piece of intellectual game that was already rather high. In any event, the apparent egocentricity that turned up all those papers and articles may be explained, if not justified, by Ralph Barton Perry's dictum that every reader looks up two references in an index: sex, and his own name.

In this paper I shall limit myself to various comments on integration narrowly conceived, that is, within the discipline of economic history itself, and to a few historical cases used to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of comparative method as a means to this end. Comparative study, as Miss Thrupp has stressed, scarcely represents a new departure in economic thought. The novelty seems to be rather in the almost universal appeal it now has for those who would explore the mysteries of change. This interest appears to be a consequence of the impact of recent developments in backward-area studies and the closely related pursuit of a general theory of growth; these tend to focus attention on different kinds and rates of growth and comparison becomes inevitable. In turn, accumulations of knowledge about economic change in very different contexts lead to the need for some means of correlating diese, partly for aesthetic reasons but also because a synoptic view of the landscape of change has its very practical use. Unless the whole field can be surveyed from a single point of view, and by this I do not mean the same point of view, it is very difficult to know where the need for more intensive exploration is greatest.

During the two decades prior to 1900, electrical manufacturing companies grew from small, single-plant firms, producing only a few items and employing several hundred workers, to large, multiplant organizations, with hundreds of products and thousands of employees. This change in the scale of operations required the invention and application of new organizational forms and new administrative procedures. The men who were responsible for these developments were among the first to recognize and solve the administrative problems of large industrial corporations. The work of these men is the subject of this paper.

Any advance in our knowledge about the growth and development of the American colonial economy must first start with a balance-of-payments study. The trade of the thirteen colonies with other areas— principally Great Britain, Ireland, southern Europe, the Wine Islands, the West Indies, and Africa—certainly must have formed, together with the coastal trade between the colonies, a large share of the total market activity. My conclusions from such a study are that the description given of commodity trade by colonial historians has been accurate but that once services as well as goods are considered the picture changes to one where there are only small positive or negative balances remaining on current account for the various regions. As a result, I would conclude that long-term capital flows from Great Britain to the colonies were either small or nil during this period.

Our task here is to inquire into the relations between two familiar sets of phenomena—the economic development of the Western Hemisphere and the involvement of British investors, financiers, engineers, contractors, and financial groups in railways in that area. As a matter of convenience we shall look chiefly at the United States and Argentina, and at the time span of three quarters of a century preceding the First World War. It is no secret that during that period both countries underwent rapid development, whose contours included such matters as the effective occupation of new areas of vast extent; the growth of population, partly fed by immigration; the effective application of technological improvements to the exploitation of natural resources; an increasing complexity of the division of labor; and a rise in productivity and real income per capita, participated in by large segments of the population. During the same period, the Western Hemisphere was normally the outlet for from 40 to 60 per cent of British foreign investment, the United States and the Argentine being two of the countries chiefly affected. We are familiar with estimates that British investments in the United States, on the eve of the First World War, amounted to over 4 billion dollars, approximately 3 billion of which were in railway securities, and that something like half as much was invested in Argentina, with a somewhat smaller percentage directly in rails.

In a recent Journal article Professors Ransom and Sutch (R & S) suggest “debt peonage” as a broad explanation for the course of southern economic development after the Civil War. They summarize their general thesis in the following three statements:

“(1) That because of the readjustments in agriculture and the difficulties in forming new banks under the banking laws, the South was unable to re-establish a viable network of commercial banks to serve her agricultural economy.

The British Workmen's Compensation Acts of 1897 and 1899 were “astonishing” to contemporaries and have not been adequately explained by historians. Although passed under a Conservative-Liberal Unionist Cabinet, these acts put heavy burdens upon industry and agriculture, interests that were very influential in both of these parties. “It was no wonder that Tories asked themselves what they were coming to, nor that the usual answer to the question was that they were being swallowed by Mr. Chamberlain.”

The phenomenon of change lies at the core of economic and business history. Otherwise, in common with other branches of economics, we would be engaged in the dull task of describing and explaining the static state of the classical and neoclassical theorists. The historical economist deals with the field of dynamic economics on the largest possible scale. Furthermore, unlike the theorists of dynamic economics, he is under obligation to deal with actual situations as they have arisen, and to reach judgments in the light of all-important observable factors. This is a difficult assignment.

The revolutionary technological changes that have come to typify our modern industrial society were first felt in the New England textile industry. The American zeal for useful improvements that greeted the industrial revolution was counterbalanced by a patriotic fear that the ill consequences of European manufacturing would be repeated here. The textile manufacturers who introduced the factory system into the United States early in the nineteenth century found it necessary, in order to win a full measure of public support and secure workers in a land where labor was dear, to demonstrate that “the moral standards of the community would not be impaired.”

In the eighteenth century, Haiti was the world’s leading sugar producer, but when cane surged in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century, Haiti produced none. Instead, the land sat idle while workers emigrated to work on sugar plantations. I examine the hypothesis that historical property rights institutions created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production. I collect new data on land-use from 1928–1950 and a proxy for transaction costs. The evidence suggests transaction costs impeded the land market from responding to the sugar boom.

Hollywood converted to sound in three years. In comparison, Hollywood's conversion to color required more than three decades, and included a three-year period in which the share of color movies declined from 58 to 31percent. We investigate this puzzling adoption profile using detailed data on 7,022 movies between 1940 and 1959. These data indicate differences in studio size and complementarity between genre and color impeded the rapid diffusion of color. These data also indicate that disadoption followed weak returns to a wave of color releases that were encouraged by the introductionof a low-cost color process.

The district of Malabar on the Southwest coast of India has been a major exporter of a wide variety of agricultural products to Europe for more than two thousand years. Despite the two millenia of sustained contact between agricultural producers and merchants, however, social relationships in land are, even today, of a predominantly feudal character; cultivation techniques are generally primitive, and the rural portion of the district, notwithstanding the great commercial importance of its produce, appears to be surprisingly impoverished. How could the social and economic organization of a people so long exposed to the influence of world market activity remain so little affected by the currents of economic change and development in the outside world? The purpose of this article is to explore, by the study of this extreme example, the reasons for the apparent failure of a pattern of sustained economic growth to become established in a rural area exposed to continuing commercial influences.

Our best estimates fail to reveal significant quantitative changes in the level of macroeconomic variables (such as per capita output or the savings rate) for Britain during the eighteenth century.1 Efforts that investigate economic activity at the industrial level are, therefore, well placed if the concept of Industrial Revolution is to remain useful. For example, N. F. R. Crafts and T. C. Mills use a segmented quadratic-trend model of industrial production and find that the trend rate of growth accelerated in 1776.2 In addition, my own research has revealed trend acceleration for industrial-level patented invention in the 1760-to-1790 period, which is consistent with Joel Mokyr’s argument that the essence of the Industrial Revolution was a cluster of pivotal “macroinventions” made in this period.3