Monetary historians have contended that Free Silver advocates were inflationists seeking debt reduction. We offer an alternative interpretation using a theory of money demand with differential returns on nominal units and a nonoptimum nominal money stock. Our explanation is more logically appealing and more consistent with contemporary evidence. The restrictive coinage laws of the period produced chronic shortages, and our empirical analysis provides clear evidence of these shortages. A shortage of coins valued at a half-day's wage and less, raised transactions costs, produced hardship and spawned protest.

It is indeed a pleasure to be invited to address economists and economic historians regarding the dynamics of peasant economic integration into a national economic system. The particular subject of these meetings, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and their Evolution,” is an appropriate one for us since, as anthropologists, we are generally interested in the “Evolution of the Organizational Forms of Life.” Today we will examine the organizational form of peasant economic life in Brazil in an effort to develop a fuller understanding of the socio-economic transactions which take place within this traditional—better, transitional—agrarian society.

This article examines one feature of the pre—Federal Reserve financial system that has not been widely researched: the market for bank drafts (the “domestic exchanges”). Though the exchanges existed for nearly a century, critics argued that exchange rate fluctuations exacerbated financial panics. We find, using cointegration analysis over the period from 1899 to 1908, that differences in growth rates across regions caused predictable movements in rates. We conclude that the exchanges promoted efficiency in the payments system. This supports the view that the private sector might have developed a unified national system had the Fed not abolished the exchanges.

Two major themes have been developed by Ernest Labrousse in his well-known works on prices and income. One, a reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution, does not concern us here. The other, a theory of an agriculturally determined business cycle, has recently been confirmed for the early nineteenth century by a young historian and student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, and forms the subject of this paper. Chabert's first work offered time series of French prices from 1798 to 1820, a hitherto neglected interval falling between the monetary anarchy of the assignats and the period covered by the tables of the Bureau de la Statistique Générale. He has followed this with a more ambitious effort, a general study of the social and economic development of France during the same years, as reflected in the price series already presented and other data assembled since.

Few systematic studies of the effects of patronage on public-sector employees' wages and working conditions exist. Exploiting a sample of nearly 90,000 workers, this article provides systematic evidence: Where patronage was widespread, state and local employees earned 40 percent more per hour; worked 16 to 17 percent fewer hours; and earned 22 percent more per week than comparable private-sector workers. Public-sector wage premia varied; low-skilled workers, and workers in Baltimore and New York, enjoyed relatively large wage premia. Wages were less dispersed in the public sector than in the private, suggesting that pay scales reflected politics, not marginal products.

During the eighteenth century various methods existed for obtaining shipping tonnages; Most official records of shipping throughout this period record a vessel's “registered tonnage” which was the figure which appeared in the vessel's certificate of registration. This registered tonnage was less than a vessel's “measured tonnage.” The latter was the basis for building, buying, and selling vessels and was computed by means of a given formula. Registered tonnage was then estimated at roughly two thirds of measured tonnage and the figure rounded down to the nearest large whole number. This practice was encouraged by ships' captains and ship owners who wanted to minimize lighthouse and port duties that were based on tonnages. Thus only when the registration of measured tonnages became compulsory did shipping tonnages in the records become reasonably accurate.

On June 4, 1946, the Federal Communications Commission approved the request of Western Union for an increase in rates. In the same breath the commission declared:

That such increased rates provide no assurance chat the Western Union Telegraph Company will now be able to furnish a rapid, efficient, nation-wide communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, and that serious questions are presented as to the company's ability to continue in operation as a solvent enterprise, providing satisfactory service on a comprehensive nationwide basis, in the absence of some further relief.

A plant that is largely obsolescent, a rate structure requiring thorough overhauling, deteriorated quality of service, high unit labor costs, failure to withstand severe competitive pressures–these are some of the ills that currently beset Western Union. And many of these ills, as I shall indicate, have their origin in the development of the industry over many decades.

From the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, the papermakers of Ambert (Auvergne, France) remained the leading producers of quality printing paper in Europe. During the second half of the eighteenth century, they expanded greatly their production in response to a dynamic market. This success was achieved not through the adoption of new methods or the expansion of enterprises but through subcontracting practices. This article explores the conditions that fostered such strategies. It confirms the multiplicity of options available to early modern manufacturers but suggests that the socioeconomic characteristics of each community of producers conditioned their choices.

It is one of the ironies of economic historiography that the country which gave birth to the Historical School of Economics should have come to play such a relatively minor role in the field of modern economic history. The irony lies in the fact that the Historical School, although it emphasized historical studies at the expense of theory, did see economic history as an integral part of economics. Its founders recognized that the main purpose of economic history is to elucidate the problem of economic development, to search for “development laws,” and in attempting to accomplish that mission, they made use of economic theory. From around the 1870's, however, interest in these ties to mainstream economics began to recede; emphasis on institutional and legal studies, collection of sources, and sheer antiquarianism grew ever more important. Since then, German economic historians, increasingly producing economic history without economics, have been playing Hamlet without the Prince. The present character of the field in Germany is reflected in the fact that German economic historians are de facto and de jure social historians as well. Indeed, many university chairs, the principal West German journal (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte—hereafter cited as VSWG), and the German counterpart to our Economic History Association (Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte) do grant formal priority to social history.

A Geographer speaking to the theme of the relationships of his field with that of economic history has many choices. Mine is to suggest ways, and one in particular, in which we may be of service to you. There is much that we need from you, too, but it seems less presumptuous to offer than to ask and it may be more useful to you in the long run to do so.

In a recent issue of this Journal Peter Temin has offered a challenging analysis of American labor scarcity and the choice of technology. He deserves our gratitude for attempting to increase the analytical rigor in discussions of this matter, but his analysis is puzzling and, I think, profoundly misleading. This note is meant as a comment upon certain of its oddities.

In a recent article in this Journal, Howard Bodenhorn made a remarkable suggestion: “Antebellum financial markets may have outperformed those of the post–Civil War period.” According to Bodenhorn, antebellum capital markets displayed notable integration, as indicated by movements in short-term (60–day) interest rate data for important commercial centers east of the Mississippi. When considered in light of Lance Davis's work, suggesting poor integration of credit markets immediately after the Civil War and only gradual integration thereafter, we believe economic historians will find Bodenhorn's hypothesis provocative—even startling. We found the hypothesis so suggestive that we attempted to replicate Bodenhorn's analysis—a process that generated both “bad news” and “good news.” The “bad news” is that we believe the evidence Bodenhorn provided for his hypothesis is weak or irrelevant. The “good news” is that the data Bodenhorn generated support the integration hypothesis more strongly than even Bodenhorn suggested.

The work of H. J. Habakkuk, Peter Temin, Robert Fogel, and Nathan Rosenberg on the effect of relative factor price differentials between America and England in the nineteenth century on the course of technological development has generated considerable interest in providing some empirical evidence on the labor scarcity hypothesis. Briefly stated, the hypothesis claims that relatively higher wages in America brought about the invention and use in production of a relatively capital intensive technology, and since “technical possibilities were richest at the capital intensive end of the spectrum,” this phenomenon was somehow responsible for the unique characteristics of American technology, that is, interchangeable parts, certain machine tool developments, and the proliferation of self-acting mechanisms.

This paper aims to provide an economic explanation of the pace and causes of the diffusion of the mechanical reaper in Ontario, 1850–1870. The analysis is based on Paul David's diffusion model, extended by the introduction of the size distribution of farms. The model is able to capture the reaper's S-shaped diffusion path. The major explanatory variable is improvements in reaper design, followed in importance by increased scale of operations and changes in factor prices. A third finding is that the effect of change in one of the three explanatory variables depends on the level of the other variables.