Twenty years ago Professor Frederic C. Lane recognized the close connection between economics and political history and suggested that it is impossible to understand fully the first without some understanding of the second. Relatively little work has been done in that area over the ensuing two decades. In that period both social and political historians have become more quantitative, and although their work has permitted us to discuss some alleged explanations of social and political development, it has not really produced viable alternatives. This failure is linked with the theoretical nature of the analysis. Although there does not appear to be a useful body of theory in sociology, positive political science offers such a structure for our understanding of political history.

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

This paper provides evidence regarding the extent of antebellum trade in major agricultural products between the West and the Northeast, the types of products involved, and the magnitude of surpluses or deficits. We found that West-Northeast trade was more important than West-South trade.

Trade protection commonly is viewed as a support—external and perhaps occasional—granted to an industry by government policymakers. Focusing on the steel industry, this study argues that protection is better viewed as a commodity, an input into the production of steel. The development of the market for the protection commodity during the past century is related to the history of regional, national, and international markets for steel.

The pioneering work of Lance Davis on regional bank loan rates in the United States from 1870 to 1914 generated several attempts to explain the observed regional interest rate differentials and their subsequent narrowing by 1914. This article reports on a more direct test of the hypothesis that barriers to capital mobility were due to monopoly power on the part of local bankers. Tests using data on individual banks and local markets for one state, Wisconsin, suggest that local competitive conditions did not exert a significant influence on bank lending performance. This may be the result of relatively free entry into Wisconsin banking during the period.

This article briefly discusses the operations of the British Exchange Equalization Account, 1932–1939, on the basis of the Treasury records of the time and in the light of modern views on exchange management. Its conclusion is that although the float may not have been “clean,” the intervention was probably justified by domestic objectives and the state of international capital markets.

In recent work, W. W. Rostow and W. A. Lewis have forcefully argued that real, not monetary, forces explain major periods of inflation and deflation in both the United States and Great Britain from 1797 to 1914. For them, changes in relative growth rates of agricultural and industrial output induce changes in the relative prices of major commodities and in the overall price level. A test of the substitutability of wheat for other primary products, 1870–1914, does not support the Rostow-Lewis theory.

This study examines the Florentine economy and women's role in it from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The changes that took place in the Florentine economy as it adapted to new economic opportunities undermine the notion of economic decline and suggest instead considerable resilience. The changes that took place helped to produce and were themselves the product of the growing participation of women in the economy.

Single women dominated the U.S. female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of single women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of their earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task-oriented and payment was frequently by the piece. Earnings rose steeply with experience and peaked early; learning was mainly on-the-job. Occupational segregation by sex was a partial product of the method of payment, and the early termination of human capital investment was a function of the life-cycle labor force participation of these women, although the role of the family was also critical.

Between the years 1940 and 1947 the demand for female labor in the United States shifted rapidly. Wages for women rose swiftly during the war, then fell suddenly when industries converted to peacetime production. This paper makes use of household production theory to explore the behavior of different segments of the female labor force as they responded to the radical changes in demand brought by World War II. The analysis suggests that a crucial turning point in the efforts to hire women was reached in the second half of 1943.

Two financial missions to Colombia headed by Edwin W. Kemmerer are examined to determine their impact on Colombia's financial system and on the flow of American investment to Colombia. The 1923 and 1930 missions established a central bank and completely reorganized the Colombian financial and fiscal system. These reforms served to provide enough stability to encourage American investment, which helped to develop a financial and economic infrastructure in Colombia.

This study constructs indexes of productivity change to show that the yield of prairie farm land fell, in some cases as much as 25 percent, while the productivity of non-land inputs rose 300 percent or more from 1900 to 1930. It was this latter productivity growth, rather than the supply of prairie wheat land emphasized by the “staples approach” to Canadian economic history, that made the western prairie profitable to farm, and that contributed most to expanding the supply of prairie wheat. Much of the post-World War I expansion of settlement was on the drier and relatively low yielding parts of the Canadian prairie.

The experience of Russia is examined to establish whether the area underwent a process of proto-industrialization comparable to that found in Western Europe. It is argued that the process did take place in this region, even with unfree labor, and served as the basis for much later industrial development. It is also argued that the Russian case differed a good deal from that found in the West. The major factors operating to make the pattern different include the previous existence of the “non- European” marriage pattern, marked differences in family and household structure, the relative immobility of labor, and the degree to which there were half-peasant, half-manufacturing households that dominated much of manufacture.

This study analyzes the content and distribution of shops in provincial England between 1550 and 1700. Its major finding is that although retail trade was declining at markets and fairs, most tradesmen did not develop product specialization until the mid-seventeenth century.

An increase in labor productivity and a reduction of fuel consumption rates were two notable and closely related achievements of the management of Hopewell Forge, an ironworks in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Significantly, these economies were realized in the face of technological stasis through learning by doing. The analysis of this accomplishment is cast in the larger context of the performance of the iron industry before and after 1800.

In the neoclassical-cliometric view of historical events, earlier concerns with economic change over time are now “out of bounds.” This narrowing has been justified by the supposed demands of scientific rigor, but a new model of science suggests that this need not be so. Science does not have any single goal or method. Science demands that economic historians develop whatever tools are needed to solve the problems they face. Examples of this already exist.