In the early nineteenth century, five versions of stationary steam engines were in widespread use. In America, the high-pressure engine was dominant in the West, but on the eastern seaboard the low-pressure engine was viable. In Britain, the low-pressure engine was overwhelmingly dominant. Here we analyze the evidence on cost and performance of high- and low-pressure engines, and show that fuel-price and interest-rate differentials were sufficient to explain the distribution of steam engine types in America.

The pendulum of scholarship has swung too far towards the position that the profits from slaving were small. Thomas and Bean in concept and Anstey and Richardson in practice have reckoned them too small. The detailed accounts of several dozen ventures in the late eighteenth century show that the trade was difficult to enter, dominated by a few large merchants, and subject to long runs of high “short-run” profits, as in 1779–1788: The best firms earned upwards of 50 percent on their investments, well above the normal profits of an easy trade.

Two ideas contrary to those of the existing literature are advanced. First, the early years of the Hudson's Bay Company/Northwest Company duopoly were characterized by passive rather than by predatory competition. Second, the Hudson's Bay Company initiated the changes that eventually led to predatory competition. The Company's financial crisis of 1809–1810 brought about by the decline in demand due to the Napoleonic Wars shocked it out of complacency and into aggressive competition.

Certain data from the familial world have value as a means for charting increments in wealth over the long term. Dowries from medieval Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 1235 to 1460, provide such evidence where other surviving records prove inadequate. Social cohesion and endogamy allowed the noble merchant citizenry to utilize dowries to redistribute personal fortunes broadly, thereby creating broad-based wealth. Comparisons with Italian towns indicate dowry increase was widespread but often served different social and economic purposes. Analyzing dotal strategies at Ragusa allows a glimpse of the means a cohesive elite could employ to promote economic growth.

The origin of the land-equalizing community, the most important system of tenure in the nineteenth-century Levant, has never been explained. The evidence of language and the dynamics of factor relationships concur with the historical record: there was no scarcity of land. On the basis of a systematic comparison with the land-equalizing commune in Russia, the answer to the puzzle looms as the need to equalize a heavy burden of impositions. Indeed, villages whoselocation or political strength helped them resist taxation did not equalize holdings.Equalization was an adaptation to external demands, not a static vestigialinstitution.

Several economic historians have suggested that economic instability in American agriculture was a primary cause of agrarian discontent during the late nineteenth century. This paper, in providing a rigorous analysis of the issue, presents estimates of economic instability in agriculture and evidence on the location and intensity of agrarian unrest for 14 northern states from 1866 to 1909. I statistically test for a relationship between the two. The results strongly suggest that late-nineteenth century agrarian unrest was directly related to a state's degree ofeconomic instability. This conclusion holds for the entire last third of the century and for several subperiods.

This paper uses numismatic sources to estimate the volume of unaccounted currency issued during the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century. “Unaccounted currency” includes any currency issued by private business firms and by municipal and state governments. This money, unlike state bank notes and deposits and federal government currencies, was issued illegally, and not recorded in conventional statistical sources. Exact quantification, therefore, is next to impossible. The principal significance of this phenomenon is the credibility it gives to private competitive issues of money.

Although cotton smuggling through the North's blockade of the South during the American Civil War has often been viewed as a highly profitable activity, only a small percentage of blockade-running ships made more than one run. New figures for capture rates reconcile these observations by showing that the risks of blockade running were substantial. Estimates are also provided for the amount of cotton smuggled through the blockade and of its disposition between the North and Europe.