My assigned task is to discuss the three fine dissertations chosen as finalists for the Allan Nevins Prize. But, I want to start by mentioning the eight other dissertations that I read as part of the competition. I found it truly inspiring that so much good work is being done in American economic history. All 11 dissertations submitted were truly first rate and all of them deserved a chance to be recognized. So, to all who submitted, I want to say congratulations on a job well done. And, to the three who were chosen as finalists, I want you to realize just how special your dissertations really are. There were not only the best; they were the best of a very impressive group.

Divergence, rather than convergence, has been the name of the game in worldwide “modern economic growth,” at least up to the 1980s. This empirical observation no longer puzzles economists, as it did thirty years ago. In the last two decades, we have taken a more sophisticated approach to the issue of the long-run relative performance of pioneers and latecomers, of core and periphery, of rich and poor countries. If we are currently able to talk of “conditional convergence,” “convergence clubs,” and the like, this is the result of a tremendous cross-fertilization between the so-called “new growth theory,” the pioneering work of Moses Abramovitz and a few others, and new approaches in global economic history. Amongst the latter, the monumental research program of Jeffrey Williamson stands in a class of its own. Thanks to his intellectual inputs and coordination efforts we have rediscovered the so-called “first globalization” and the backlash against it, and are thus better equipped to understand the causes and effects of the current globalization wave, and thus produce plausible scenarios for its future course.

In the extensive literature of British economic and social history, much less attention has been given to merchants and trading companies than to manufacturing and banking enterprises, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is because the British Industrial Revolution was long thought to have been about production rather than trade or finance. The present generation of researchers has sought to redress the balance, but has often been handicapped by a paucity of records, and by an unwillingness on the part of the handful of surviving firms to release information. Geoffrey Jones has succeeded in assembling a large volume of evidence from diverse sources, but high-quality archival evidence is only available for a small number of long-lived and probably untypical enterprises.

Since 1995 three volumes of essays, in each of which Richard Bonney has served as contributor or editor, have been published around the history of European fiscal systems. What new contribution or approach does this volume, the third, offer? Like its predecessors, this one fits into the “new fiscal history,” structured around the notion that fiscal systems should be studied in their broader constitutional, political, social, and economic contexts. As Bonney states in the introduction to the present volume, the point is to move beyond “teleology” (p. 12) or the tendency to compare “any fiscal system over time … with another in a sort of balance sheet” (p. 2). While not wanting to take any one country's experience as the measure for others, Bonney does identify certain broad stages through which fiscal systems have passed. His approach borrows from Joseph Schumpeter's thesis—subsequently adopted primarily by historians of Scandinavia and Germany—that early modern “countries” underwent a transition from “domain state” to “tax state,” whereby sovereigns expanded their fiscal reach beyond the medieval ideal of living from the revenues of the royal domain. In a previous volume Bonney and his collaborators revised this model of the rise of the tax state (see the introduction to Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, edited by W. M. Ormrod, Margaret Bonney, and Richard Bonney. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1999). Tax states, they argued, could falter and break down through loss of confidence or institutional paralysis, and thus did not represent the endpoint of fiscal development. Rather, it is the modern “fiscal state,” where institutions and structures allow for self-sustained growth and development, that represents the culmination of revolutionary changes. Furthermore, they held that crisis might occur within a given fiscal system and affect its shape or scope, but that only revolutionary upheaval could cause transition from one system to another. A revised model requires empirical support, and the present volume seeks to deliver it in the form of “national” case studies that are juxtaposed (in rough geographical order, from Western Europe eastward), but not compared.

This book comprises two parts: a discussion of about 100 pages on the origins and growth of the London trade in scientific instrument making between 1540 and 1610, and on its main protagonists, serving as an introduction to a catalogue raisonné (c. 200 pages) of all recorded instruments by Elizabethan makers, including unsigned ones. For the latter the author wisely inserted an appendix (“The Attribution of Unsigned Instruments”) explaining a script-based methodology for making attributions of unsigned pieces. Comparative tables of letters and numbers from signed and unsigned instruments are put side-by-side, providing a more or less scientific foundation for an otherwise subjective exercise.

Until the 1960s clothes were a barometer of social and economic status. An outfit's age, style, and method of production—bespoke, wholesale bespoke, or off-the-peg—offered a visible pronouncement on an individual's, particularly a male's, place in the social and economic order. In the decades that have followed, as style of dress has become increasingly informal and designer labels have overtaken design, this means of identification has become less reliable and the home-grown industry that provided the garments less economically viable. In Well Suited, Katrina Honeyman provides a volume that not only details the rise and demise of the Leeds men's and boys' wholesale tailored clothing industry but, in addition, compensates for the paucity of historiographical studies of “the industry that created garments from … cloth” (p. 1). As such, the work has impressive and scholarly depth; by following a thematic rather than simply chronological structure, it enables the reader to locate the micro study within a broader economic and labor-related framework that correlates with the meso and macro.

I feel especially honored to be handling the Gerschenkron prize for these meetings on the American Century because I have concluded that the Gerschenkron prize is a quintessentially American beast. This may seem an odd statement; the prize is named for a man who was bron in Russia, trained in Austria, and spoke more than a dozen languages. None of these traits sound quintessentially American. But the prize we have named for him reveals some profound national characteristics. To see my point you have to recall that a dissertation is eligible for the Gerschenkron prize only if it is not eligible for the Nevins prize. We often say that the Nevins prize is for North American economic history, but if you check the precise definition it is really for the economic history of the United States and Canada, thus illustrating our characteristically weak grasp of geography. North America, my encyclopedia tells me, includes all the lands north of the Isthmus of Panama. There is a very large country well to the north of Panama and just to the south of the United States, but for some reason dissertations on this country do not qualify for our prize in North American economic history. But the most revealingly American feature of the Gerschenkron prize is the way it is defined as “not American.” The prize is not for European, or Latin American, or Asian economic history; it is for the rest of the world, or as one of my uncles would put it, “them foreigners over there.”

How long is a century? In British history, the answer is rarely a hundred years. The last two decades of historiography have extended the eighteenth century deep into the nineteenth. In his new book, Richard Price both develops and modifies this tendency by suggesting that the two centuries from 1680 to 1880 constitute a single phase in the broad sweep of British history.

Differences in institutions are thought to be a key part of the explanation for large cross-country differences in per capita income. Unfortunately, recent empirical research suffers from severe endogeneity problems. In this paper we provide both a theory of why different countries have different institutions and a way of measuring this, which does not suffer from endogeneity. We focus on economies that were colonized by European countries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Institutions in these countries were shaped by their colonization experience and we can use the differences in these experiences as an exogenous source of variation in institutions. We focus on differences in state institutions that depended crucially on settlement patterns. We use data on the mortality of settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an instrument for current institutional differences and show that institutions are a major determinant of different income levels. In our basic empirical model, once we instrument for institutions, two-thirds of the variation in current per capita income is explained by them.

This volume represents the proceedings of a conference held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1995. It consists of five parts. In part 1, “Meanings of Material London,” David Harris Sacks explores the 1601 Essex Rebellion and finds its failure in the primacy that commercial relationships now held over older patron–client bonds. Will Kemp's Morris dance from London to Norwich, meanwhile, seemingly illustrates the way in which market capitalism corrupted civic virtue and traditional hospitality. Derek Keene's richly documented survey of the London economy reinforces the value of a long-term perspective on the capital's growth. The roots of London's consumption patterns can be traced back as far as 1300, and much of its skilled trades and mercantile expertise derived from Continental rather than native sources. Part 2 examines “Consumer Culture: Domesticating Foreign Fashion.” The title of Joan Thirsk's thoughtful essay “England's Provinces: Did They Serve or Drive Material London?” is an accurate guide to its content. Existing provincial skills could be exploited to develop new industries or crops catering either to the London market, or to gentry and aristocracy intent on creating islands of metropolitan taste in the provinces. Jane Schneider shows how the accession of James I ushered in a world in glorious technicolor, a welcome relief to the relative drabness of high Elizabethan fashion, and relates this sartorial revolution to familiar changes in England's overseas trade. Color is of concern also to Anne Jones and Peter Stallybrass, who describe the growing popularity of yellow “mantles” in the early seventeenth century, an enthusiasm that ignored their criminal and, worse, Irish associations. Jean Howard analyses Westward Ho, in order to explore attitudes to foreigners. Ian Archer's rewarding essay “Material Londoners?” begins part 3 of the volume. He explores the limited extent to which “new,” “acquisitive” commercial values conflicted with traditional Christian personal and communal values. This is followed by Gail Paster's examination of that age's peculiar fashion for ever more violent purges and evacuations. Patricia Fumerton contributes an essay notable for its wrongheaded conflation of the experience of vagrancy with that of London's servants and apprentices.

Michael Sanderson, author of several influential books on British education and industry, is the general editor of the series in which this volume appears. It admirably fulfills the aim of the series—to survey the current state of scholarship for students and their teachers—by reviewing an extensive literature on British schooling and its relation to the economy in seven tightly organized, substantive chapters. If a succinct overview of this work is what you need, this is the book to get.

If you like a contentious book, ranging across wide swathes of history, you will enjoy this one. Although Richard Lachmann kicks a few fairly dead horses along the way, he takes on enough lively speculations and conventional wisdom to make the trip worthwhile. His subject is the changes that occurred in Europe from the end of feudalism down to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Lachmann undertakes to explain how feudalism gave way to centralized states with landlord elites; why the autonomous urban centers of the Renaissance were eclipsed by national territorial states as the foci of wealth and power; why England and France surpassed Spain and the Netherlands as commercial and imperial powers; and why none of these changes can be attributed simply to a Weberian process of greater “rationalization” of social and political life.

During the 1970s and 1980s the Irish historical profession, which was challenging nearly all the old verities of nationalist historiography, proved strangely reticent on the single event in Irish history most likely to be familiar to non-Irish readers: the Great Famine of the 1840s. That all changed in 1995, however, when the sesquicentennial observances called forth a huge outpouring of famine research. This research has shed new light on a wide range of social, political, administrative and cultural issues, but the work under review is the first full-length monograph on the Famine by an historical econometrician since Joel Mokyr's pioneering exploration of Malthusian explanation, Why Ireland Starved, appeared in 1983.

This paper presents a detailed accounting of the sources of African-American economic progress in the labor market over the twentieth century. We examine the received literature and demonstrate the sensitivity of conclusions stated in it to choices of samples used to measure wages and to specifications of earnings functions. We present a quantitative assessment of the contributions of migration, schooling choices, schooling quality, and social activism to both absolute levels and relative levels of African-American earnings.

This is a strong contribution to a cultural interpretation of the dynamics of industrialization. Critical of quantitative debates and their limited insights into the processes of change, critical too of polarized views about the primacy of supply (production) or demand (consumption), Smail's study is directed at the ways in which merchants and merchant manufacturers fought to reconcile the shape of supply with that of markets, and thus brought about fundamental changes in the processes of production and the source and scale of profitability. Smail's central thesis concerns the shift, as he sees it, from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian economy: from activity based upon the extension of operations and growing sophistication in the division of labor, to an economy founded upon continuous product and design innovation and intensive technological as well as organizational change. His concern is with the cultural and economic conditions under which producers and merchants shifted from maximizing profits by manipulating the marketing system (through niche products and niche markets) to maximizing profits by changing the mode of production. He dates this shift, in the case of the woolens sector, from the middle third of the eighteenth century. Focusing upon the interplay between production and marketing systems, he carefully documents change in the four major regions of manufacture in England: East Anglia, Devon, the West Country, and West Yorkshire. He places particular emphasis upon Yorkshire, which quickly emerged as the most responsive region and which dominated the trade in the second half of the century.

Until now, the Montgolfier family's best-known historical legacy has been the name they lent to the hot-air balloon, whose development they sponsored in the 1780s. Leonard Rosenband's achievement in this book is to elucidate the industrial enterprise that laid the foundation for that adventure. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Montgolfiers owned and operated one of the most important papermaking manufactures in France, centered in Vidalon-le-Haut in northern Languedoc. As Rosenband acknowledges, the Montgolfiers were hardly representative of the French papermaking industry. The scale of their operations, concentration on high-quality paper, and determination to compete with superior Dutch products all clearly distinguished them from their lesser brethren. Nonetheless, Rosenband claims that in their reliance on the same production techniques, division of labor, and well-organized journeymen, the Montgolfiers have much to teach us about the papermaking industry as a whole and, indeed, about the overall process of industrialization in France.

Modern political economy stresses “society's polarization” as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common forms of social conflict are class polarization and ethnic polarization. The paper links the existence of class polarization to exogenous country characteristics such as resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative economic-history thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff that tropical commodity exporters are more unequal than other societies. This hypothesis is confirmed with cross-country data. This makes it possible to use resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war and ethnic minorities at risk, more social “modernization” and more democracy.

Did the Second World War create a new sense of social unity and a consensus on domestic policy in Great Britain? Through an examination of rationing and consumption controls from 1939 to 1955, Austerity in Britain presents new evidence undermining the traditional interpretation that the war stimulated social unity and a policy consensus. Making good use of Public Record Office files, the author devotes separate chapters to the evolution of rationing policy and its effect on diet and health, popular attitudes toward rationing, the gender dimensions of rationing, and the political consequences of the postwar Labour government's continuation of rationing.

Proving again their mastery of both detail and synthesis, Barbara and Stanley Stein have done a masterful job of compression, packing into one mid-size book material that could easily have filled two. Silver, Trade, and War is more than a discussion of the role of silver in the evolution of the Spanish Empire: it addresses the role of Spain and America in the making of Early Modern Europe. The first half of the book outlines the emergence and consolidation of the system of political authority and silver flows that linked America, Spain, and the rest of Europe by 1700. The second half explores the efforts (and ultimate failure) of early and mid-eighteenth-century Spanish economist–bureaucrats to purge Spain of the its entrenched patterns of immobility, dependency, and self-interest.

This is an important book, with implications far beyond the Swedish case. The author has painstakingly constructed a unique aggregate series of transport expenditures covering two centuries (the book contains 260 pages of appendices). He uses this information in a series of models that analyze the crucial role of transport improvements in Swedish economic development, with a special focus on industrialization.