The 1970 meeting of the Economic History Association in Dallas, Texas, marked die organization's thirtieth anniversary. Occasions such as this call for certain ritualistic responses—as every husband knows—and the Program Committee was more than willing to satisfy the demands of tradition. Thus our anniversary program included a review of past accomplishments in the various branches of economic history. To balance this review, however, we introduced an element which seldom plays a visible role in the anniversary: a set of resolutions or guidelines for future work in the field. By design, each of the sessions had both a past and future dimension.

In following the paths of historical development … the analyst finds himself … engaged in the rather thankless task of trying to derive known from unknown or, at least, better-known from less well-known facts. Would it not be much more efficient to reverse this procedure? By establishing the base of his operations, that is, the principal store of primary factual information in the present or a very recent past, and then moving on backward with the help of theoretical weapons step by step toward the more and more distant past, the analytical historian could make most effective use of the limited amount of direct factual information to which he usually has access.

In this article we investigate the nature of long-term fluctuations (commonly called long-swings or Kuznets cycles) in the general level of activity of the American economy over the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. We conclude that a stable socio-economic structure of long-term economic change was in existence over this entire period. This structure defines a concurrence of relationships between certain economic and demographic variables which in combination determined the dynamic pattern by which economic growth proceeded. Our findings should be of interest to the economic historian studying the general process of economic growth in a capitalist economy.

Scholars are gradually piecing together the puzzle of the economic development of the American colonies through quantitative studies designed to clarify and measure economic variables having theoretical relevance for the wider process of economic growth and development. Recently, researchers such as Jones, Land, Shepherd, Walton, and Thomas have been helping others to build a base that one day may permit the writing of a comprehensive study of the process of early American economic development which may even include reliable estimates of economic growth and living standards. The data problems for the colonial period of American economic history are severe, and much of the research has tended to concentrate on the important role of international trade, where the extant data sources are capable of yielding rich lodes of quantitative information. Customs 16/1, entitled the Ledger of Imports and Exports for America, 1768–1772, has been the most valuable source of trade data, since it is the only comprehensive document which shows the trade of the American colonies with all parts of the world and not just with the British Isles. Still yet to be mined are the rich sources of data buried in the naval office lists for the various colonies. These sources also give the trade of each colony with all parts of the world although they are more tedious to work with than the better collated Customs 16/1.

European economic history has always been concerned with the grand theme of the rise of the Western World. Sometimes this is put in terms of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, if a Marxian dialectician is present, eventually to socialism. The literature is essentially the product of historians and as such is particularistic. No consistent theoretical foundation runs through it, except perhaps the Marxian one. The result is a chaotic output for which generalization is difficult, and in which bits and scraps of evidence are proffered for almost every specific explanation. This has helped the Marxist explanation to survive since, despite its evident shortcomings, it does provide a single path through the wilderness of medieval and modern European economic history.

Systematic demographic analysis of early America has been neglected until quite recently. As the interest in and need for demographic data on pre-1800 America have increased during the last five years, efforts have been made to remedy this situation.The most recent studies are utilizing such new techniques as family reconstitution to avoid the problems created by the lack of reliable census data and vital statistics. But these techniques yield results very slowly, and in any case their results are subject to methodological limitations that make it necessary to check them against larger aggregates. For these reasons we need to reexamine the usefulness and accuracy of earlier studies on colonial population that were based on aggregate data. Unfortunately, this latter task has not been adequately carried out during the recent burst of activity among demographers of early America.

The conduct of the British government's financial affairs during the Duke of Newcastle's tenure as First Lord of the Treasury has never to my knowledge been specifically investigated. This gap in our understanding of the eighteenth century is doubly puzzling: the period itself, during which Britain won a war and an empire, is pivotal in the kingdom's history; moreover, the sources for such a study are uncommonly rich for precisely those years in which the duke held the office. The lack of such an analysis, however, has not prevented several authorities from passing severe judgments on the duke's handling of financial affairs, and while these authorities speak from extensive knowledge of the Treasury and its complexities, I have come to conclude that their assessments are too harsh—a view I shall elaborate at the end of this essay. But even if the reader should conclude at that point that my flirtation with revisionism is itself ill-founded, there is yet another value in examining the Treasury under Newcastle: as in perhaps no other period we can sometimes see decisions at the Treasury actually being made, ideas being transmitted, and problems being analyzed. And above all we can see in some detail how Britain's remarkably successful governmental financial machine operated.

The President of this Association is like a species of short-lived insect, whose only function in life is to lay an egg, and then to die. Yet, like the walking candle, a President has this brief moment on stage, and his obscurity before and after it makes him determined to burn all the more brightly.

Economists who have studied the evolution of trade transactions between the two world wars have often stressed the existence of an obvious paradox: despite the disturbances brought about by the war period, the territorial changes, the monetary difficulties and the crises, international trade as a whole and particularly from a structural point of view, had a tendency, after a few years of complete disruption, to return to a pre-war pattern of evolution. Trade flows were returning to a distribution very similar to the one prevailing in 1913, and changes were occurring in the same direction as those of the 1896–1913 period. Certain countries endured great difficulties in the readaptation process, especially the United Kingdom, whose “structural crises” have often been cited. But the very changes that were sources of anxiety for English rulers were less a result of the transformation or the acceleration of pre-war tendencies than of their continuity.

In the past decade the question of the degree of mutual economic dependence among the three major regions of the antebellum United States—Northeast, South, and West—has received considerable discussion. Good indicators of the degree of dependence would be ratios of the interregional trade flows of particular commodities to the amounts of those commodities produced locally in each region. Trade data are available, however, only in limited series for major cities or commercial areas. Since comprehensive trade flows cannot be measured directly, various indirect approaches to the question have been employed.

That the ruling samurai class suffered increasing poverty during the Tokugawa period is accepted, without dissent, by all students of Japanese history. However, this view is based primarily on contemporary descriptions of the financial distress felt by the samurai class and has never been established empirically through the use of quantitative data. Most of the literature supporting this long accepted view is highly impressionistic and fails even to define precisely what is meant by increasing poverty. Thus, the writers on this subject use the phrase “increasing poverty” to mean variously a decline in real income, a lagging increase in real income vis-a-vis that of other classes (merchants, artisans, and peasants), or increasing “psychological poverty” experienced due to increasing expectations while real income was rising less rapidly. Authors not infrequently use these different concepts of “increasing poverty” interchangeably.

Few recent intellectual currents have been so self-consciously controversial as the New Economic History. It has been a rare meeting patronized by historians or economists that has not featured a discussion of the merits and defects of applying theoretical and quantitative constructs to historical problems. This occasion is obviously no exception. Yet milestones must be respected, and on this thirtieth anniversary, a review of the profitability, if not the viability, of the new techniques being applied to economic history seems very much in order.

This paper attempts to illustrate some future areas of quantitative historical research which have not yet received the attention we think they deserve. Our interest is primarily in aggregate economic systems. This emphasis is not motivated by a distaste for the analytical tools of microeconomics. On the contrary, a central premise of this paper is that macroeconomic models are ideally deduced from propositions about the behavior of individual decision-making units, and that they also critically depend on rules for the aggregation of such behavioral relationships. In fact, quantitative economic historians have long recognized the critical role played by aggregation rules in historical analysis. And, in the end, it will be the quantitative economic historian who will best be able to evaluate the efficacy of the employment of such rules in specified historical circumstances.

Skilled engineers who had sufficient technical know-how to construct the antebellum canals and railroads were viewed by their contemporaries as a key input in the transportation revolution, and a number of modern scholars have concurred in this judgment. Yet very little is known about the economics of the antebellum engineering profession. This article is a modest attempt to help remedy that deficiency. We shall present and describe three original salary series that chart the course of earnings for three distinct grades of antebellum civil engineers from 1820 through 1859. In addition, we shall argue that our data clearly indicate that a highly competitive market of broad geographical scope for high-ranking engineers was coming into being during the decade of the 1820's. This trend toward competition which these data reveal persisted until about 1835, but was then swamped by the rapid economic changes which occurred in the fifteen years from 1835 to 1850, only to reappear again in the last antebellum decade. As we shall argue below, the economic changes that temporarily overrode the earlier pattern of competition reflect a significant structural change in the antebellum engineer market.

There is some speculation that there was more economic egalitarianism in the United States among free men in the period from 1776 to 1790 than there was at any time in the following seventy years until the abolition of slavery. One would like to believe the speculation since it is known that there was extensive inequality of wealth in I860 and one would like to believe that the formation of the nation took place within a context of economic equality. This would be produced from a condition where aggregate wealth is shared fairly equally rather than being owned by a few. Let us give this ideal, this proposition relating to wealthholding for the Revolutionary era from 1776 to 1790, a title of romantic equality.

Alone woodsman erecting a log cabin, wagon trains curling across the prairies, fur trappers high in the mountains, Indian war parties, gold strikes, frontier marshalls and gunmen—of such stuff the legends of the American West have been formed and in the popular imagination they are the Westward Movement. Of course, serious historians have long recognized that this is merely a fascinating but veneer-like overlay which disguises a massive movement of people from East to West.

In this paper, I will discuss three classic problems in economic history. I label them “classic” because they are problems of general interest that share the central characteristic of classic problems: an extensive literature has not led to general agreement. They are taken from the literature on the history of the United States because of the wealth of data and secondary material on this country's history, but they all have their analogues or reflections in European history. They are the problems of labor scarcity in America, the depression of the 1930's (which Americans call the Great Depression), and the deflation of the late nineteenth century (which the British call the Great Depression).

British investment in Argentina in the period 1880–1914 amounted to some 8 percent of total British overseas investment; it exhibited long swings which were roughly similar to long swings in total British overseas investment but opposite to British domestic investment, although the bursts of lending to Argentina were particularly concentrated. These swings have attracted the attention of economists and some (notably Brinley Thomas) have pointed out that emigration from Europe to North America and American investment in construction and transportation and other series in the American economy exhibited 18–20 year swings similar to those in British overseas investment, and that these were all in opposite phase to swings in British home investment and the building cycle in Britain. They have then gone on to explain these inverse British patterns in terms of emigration and the growth rhythm of the Atlantic economy, with heavy stress being laid on North American effects. The analysis of movements of both labor and capital can then be conducted in terms of the varying intensities of the pull of opportunities at home and abroad, and the push of home conditions and prospects, and how these interacted with each other to produce these inverse patterns.

A distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century international economy was the mass movement of people out of Europe. Between 1840 and 1914 over forty million persons permanently left Europe and settled in the New World, Asiatic Russia and Oceana. In contrast with contemporary population transfers, nineteenth-century international migration occurred within an international political framework which placed few restrictions on geographic mobility. Within this institutional context there were substantial country by country differences in the participation of European populations. This article is concerned with the secular determinants of intercountry differences in emigration.

On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory.” The discovery of such “unfair competition,” along with its other findings, led the commission to recommend legislation restricting the admission of the “new” immigrant groups, and subsequently the immigration laws of 1917, 1921, and 1924 implemented this recommendation.