An early long-running federal social policy experiment was the preferential hiring of American Indians at agencies, reserations, and shools. This government employment was designed to accelerate the assimilation of the natives and to reduce their resistance to education and economic change. Instead, the program inadvertently created a form of dependency. This ironic outcome was due to the power of the natives to shape the policy according to their needs and values.

In the 1950s the British Treasury made an unusual departure from its traditional effort to minimize government spending, arguing that publicly funded development corporations rather than private developers should build town centers in New Towns so as to reap returns from property development. Often associated with frontier growth, development gain is partly created by the state and can only emerge and be realized with the passage of time and the evolution of expectations. Divisions within the state kept Treasury officials from fully securing a greater public role in New Town center building.

Contrary to earlier assertions, the historical data for Britain do confirm a (lagged) crowding-out effect during the Industrial Revolution. Heavy government borrowing after 1793 for the wars with France raised interest rates. These results are confirmed with nominal-interest-rate equations rather than with real-rate equations, which impose restrictive assumptions about the adjustment of nominal rates to inflation expectations. We see no reason to abandon the neoclassical, factor- allocation model of saving and investment in favor of a theory asserting that firms accumulate capital for investment independently of household saving decisions.

From its beginning the Quebec dairy industry was characterized by many small factories producing butter and cheese of such a low quality that the British called all bad cheese coming from Canada “Joseph.” The Société d'industrie laitière, created in 1882 to promote the industry, asked the government to impose compulsory inspection, licensing, and grading. Between 1905 and 1921 the government finally but reluctantly responded.

Sectors of the English economy recognized as technological leaders have records of accelerated patent activity soon after 1760. But the patent record also reveals considerable inventive activity during the same period in industries not normally associated with advancing technology. It is therefore unlikely that there was a “leading technological sector.” The widespread increase in patenting is consistent with macroeconomic causes of accelerated invention.

Interest rates in the Civil War South were quite stable and even declined a bit during the war. In this article we explain the mechanism that produced this puzzling result. The existence of a fixed-rate call certificate redeemable at par anchored interest rates expressed in terms of Confederate dollars. When expressed in terms of gold, they were volatile, high, and reflected war events.

The skills and knowledge necessary for patentable invention during early American industrialization were widely dispersed among the general population. This endowment permitted a rather elastic supply of patentable ideas over the relevant range as the expansion of markets induced more individuals to invent and innovate.Although a broadening of the ranks of patentees was primarily responsible for the initial acceleration of patenting, the importance of patentees with greater long-term investments in inventive activity increased during later stages of development.

The Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence became in the early fourteenth century the largest merchant-bankers ever seen in medieval Europe. Their collapse in the 1340s has been attributed by most historians to huge losses on loans to Edward III of England. This article explores some flaws in the conventional explanation and shows that the firms lacked the resources to have made loans on the generally accepted scale. It also suggests means by which the companies could have recovered at least part of their advances to the king without the results appearing in government ledgers.

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.

The American workers' quest for an eight-hour day finally came to an end around 1919. I argue that the most important factors behind the rapid decline in manufacturing hours in the decade before 1919 include the rapid expansion of the economy, which increased wages and drew new participants into the manufacturing sector; the reduction of immigration during the war; the growth in organized labor's strength; federal and state legislation that mandated reduced work weeks; and the electrification of the manufacturing sector.