One need not be very conversant with modern money, credit, and banking to find in them a kinship with the land banks of the Colonial era. In a manner suggestive of our Federal Reserve System, the Colonial land banks exerted a wide influence over the economic life of the times. Indeed, the functions of the land-bank system embraced every phase of the Colonial economy. Its history to a large degree comprises the history of currency, money values, inflation, credit, public finance, and economic development in eighteenth-century America.

“Imperialism is no word for scholars.” I quote my own printed words of ten years ago. The bewildering changes of content and color of that chameleon word throughout the brief century of its existence are. now being explored by R. F. Koebner of the University of Jerusalem. Here indeed is a fit task for scholars—to take a key word such as imperialism or despotism, to trace the history of its usage and abusage, to fit it into its true context of ideology, propaganda, and political warfare throughout successive historical phases. What a scholar can NOT do with these emotionally reverberant words is to make them reliable instruments of scientific exploration and explanation.

In a long list of publications since 1923 Harold Innis with industry and insight set a pattern for the study and interpretation of Canadian economic history. The University of Toronto, the Dominion Government, and Canadian learned societies in their various fashions paid tribute to the high quality of this achievement. His career, moreover, was a refutation of his own generalization, perhaps playfully formulated, that no Canadian scholar could secure recognition in the United States. He was a charter member of the Committee on Research in Economic History, the second president of the Economic History Association, and at the time of his death president of the American Economic Association.

The opportunity to talk to The Economic History Association is asflattering to an international lawyer as it is unexpected. I have never been entirely clear on how economic historians select their materials in order to distinguish their product from political history, a subject with which I am supposed to be more familiar. The future historian of the period in which we live will, I am sure, encounter unusual difficulty in making this distinction. America's foreign policy seems to center around economic aid to allies and economic boycott of potential enemies. The New Deal made economic welfare of the people a domestic policy until the outbreak of war compelled the national economy to become an instrument for achieving unconditional surrender of foreign enemies. It cannot be said that the present administration, with proposals for more social security, continued foreign aid, and continued agreements for reducing trade barriers, is moving very fast in unscrambling economics and politics.

Many writers treating the late colonial period have touched uponthe subject of economic fluctuations, but no agreement is found as to the duration, intensity, and amplitude of these alterations of good and bad times. Nor has any investigation as yet assembled all the available data necessary to an understanding of this phenomenon. Since agriculture constituted an important aspect of the colonial economy, some light may be shed upon these economic vicissitudes by an examination of Northern agricultural conditions in the two decades preceding the Revolution.

The activities of the General Managers' Association of Chicago in the great strike of the American Railway Union in 1894 are well known, but the earlier history of this association has remained obscure. Even the most scholarly writers on the Pullman strike have accepted statements made in testimony before the United States Strike Commission that this association first participated in a labor conflict in 1893. As a matter of fact, it originated in a strike, and early in its career it set precedents for many of its exploits a few years later.

In The first half of the seventeenth century the northern mercan-Itile nations of Europe followed Spain and Portugal in flinging their Ncommercial frontiers westward to the New World. By the end of the century they had surpassed the Iberian nations in western trade and made of the Atlantic basin a single great trading area. Their economic enterprises created not only a crisscrossing web of transoceanic traffic but also a cultural community diat came to form die western periphery of European civilization. The members of this community were widely separated, scattered across three thousand miles of ocean and up and down the coasts of two continents. But the structure of commerce furnished a communication system mat brought these far-flung settlements together. The same structure proved to be a framework upon which certain important elements in colonial society took form. My purpose is to sketch certain characteristics of the Atlantic colonies in die seventeenth century which relate to these social consequences of commercial growth.

Local governments played a notable and somewhat neglected part in the American movement for internal improvements. Their activities in aid of canals and railroads varied greatly in scale and method and in the scope of planning involved. They ran the gamut from the far-flung projects of great commercial cities striving for the dominance of the trade of vast areas to the donations of obscure rural townships trying only to make sure that the promised railroad should pass through their village rather than the adjacent crossroads. Among the greater cities, none played a more notable role than Baltimore in the promotion of internal improvements. Its total of railroad subscriptions, loans, and bond endorsements was about twenty million dollars—a figure of municipal contribution only exceeded by Cincinnati's investment in a city-owned railroad. Baltimore was in the field of internal improvements well before Cincinnati and remained in it long after such early rivals as Philadelphia had withdrawn. Baltimore's first investment in the Baltimore and Ohio was audaorized in 1827, and its last loan to the Western Maryland was made in 1886. It continued to vote stock and to appoint public directors to the board of railroad corporations until it sold its interest in the Baltimore and Ohio in 1890 and in the Western Maryland in 1902.

The economic significance of the lottery business is a subject which historians have generally neglected. This is unfortunate, for both in Europe and the United States the lottery was at one time a capitalmobilizing device of major importance. It appears worth while, therefore, to explore in some detail the operations of a lottery firm that seems to exemplify some of the features of the system in its most mature form. This is the firm of Yates and McIntyre, lottery managers in New York State and elsewhere between 1821 and 1834.

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.

Tradition depicts American business as the chiefexploiter of our national free immigration policy during the latter defender andhalf of the nineteenth century. The contribution of immigrant labor to the building of the American industrial empire is much discussed. The interest of employers in recruiting cheap labor and strikebreakers from Europe is a familiar story. That industrialists and their allies in the years of rapid expansion and mechanization of the American economy stood to gain as much as any other group, even including the aliens themselves, from the maintenance of large-scale immigration has appeared so obvious as to demand little careful investigation. Historians have ordinarily described the succession of laws after 1882, gradually narrowing the “open door” the United States offered to Europe and pulling in the welcome mat as well, as a series of labor and nativist victories in the face of dogged resistance by the business world. Yet such an interpretation fails to explain the fact that the period which saw the growth of strong anti-immigrant feeling among native workers witnessed a strikingly similar development in the ranks of businessmen. During the 1880's and 1890's, while labor leaders protested the competition of alien workers, business publications were criticizing no less bitterly the impact of immigration upon American society. When nativists sought financial support for their efforts to restrict immigration they found many businessmen in sympathy with their aims. Measures presented to Congress for regulating and limiting the admission of aliens were frequently concurred in by prominent business leaders. Indeed, a notable development in American business thought after 1880 was the rise of hostility toward the swarms of cheap foreign laborers which employers had long considered essential to their own, and the nation's, prosperity.

The influence that short-time economic fluctuations in western Europe presumably had on the development of the Swedish timber trade during the latter half of the nineteenth century must, to an American audience, seem to be a rather specialized subject, and I think a few introductory words giving a background might be useful.

Few men have had a worse posthumous press than Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, second president of the Second Bank of the United States. He has generally been portrayed as an able lawyer but ignorant of economics and banking—and often as a narrow deflationist who saved the Bank but ruined the country. Vexed by criticism, he is frequently supposed to have gladly bowed out in favor of the better trained Nicholas Biddle.

The question whether business, or capitalism, has been a force for peace or for war has been one of some historical interest. Before 1914 there were few to challenge the thesis of the great liberal-capitalist ideologists—Comte, Spencer, Fiske, to name only outstanding specimens —that the triumph of free enterprise meant the end of war, or its progressive decline; that the businessman would make a world in which the arts of peace permanently displaced those of war. But after the World War there naturally arose schools which sought to establish that capitalism carried within itself the seeds of ferocious wars. The thinking of a disillusioned generation was powerfully influenced in this direction. The loosely drawn but vehement indictment of capitalism as partner of Mars can be read in such typical pieces of the ʼ30s as H. N. Brailsford's Property or Peace (New York: Covici, Friede, 1934) and C. H. Grattan's Preface to Chaos (New York: Dodge Publishing Co., 1936). But these Marxist theories have been subjected to devastating criticism.

By The end of the sixteenth century, the tendency in the OttomanEmpire toward the expansion of timariote properties or military fiefs is reversed, and quasi-private properties begin again to acquire ascendancy in the Balkans. To understand die process of reversal, one must bear in mind the separation of die properties administered by die timariote into two distinct categories, die raya-čiftlik and the hassa-čiftlik The raya-čiftlik was die property over which die peasant tenant had rights of usufruct. The hassa-čiftlik was the private farm or “proprietary nucleus” of the timariote. Slowly the timariote expands his hassa-čiftlik at die expense of die raya-čiftlik. This is possible because certain peasants become indebted to timariotes, others sell dieir right of usufruct, some leave no legal heirs behind them, and others abandon dieir lands to escape plague or famine or to avoid a census, die collection of taxes, or armies on die march.

It is now five hundred years since the Byzantine empire was brought to an end by the Ottoman Turks, Scholars today quite justly reject Gibbon's assumption that the Byzantine empire was, throughput its entire existence, in a state of decline. They have come to rank it, instead, as one of the great empires in history. And this for good reasons. It endured for over a thousand years. Down to about the middle of the eleventh century it was the center of civilization in Christendom. It preserved the thought and literature of antiquity; it developed new forms of art; it held back the barbarians. It produced great statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats as well as reformers and renowned scholars. Its missionaries, aided by its diplomats and sometimes by its armies, spread the gospel among the pagan tribes, especially the Slavs, which dwelt along its frontiers and beyond. As a Czech historian has put it, Byzantium “molded the undisciplined tribes of Serbs, Bulgars, Russians, Croats even, and made nations out of them; it gave to them its religion and institutions, taught their princes how to govern, transmitted to them the very principles of civilization—writing and literature.” Byzantium was a great power and a great civilizing force.