American Economic History Research Articles

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honour Robert Fogel.

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honour Robert Fogel.

Latin American Economic History

Latin American Economic History

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel.

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel.

Dictionary of United States economic history

Preface Dictionary Appendix: A Chronology of United States Economic History Selected Bibliography Index

Knut Borchardt: A Critical Appreciation

A merican economic historians should thank Cambridge UniverLsity Press-and Harold James, who promoted the idea-for making this collection of important papers by the dean of German economic historians available in a competent English translation. Knut Borchardt of the University of Munich is well known as the writer of authoritative handbook articles and textbooks synthesizing research on German economic history from early industrialization, but American economic historians remain largely unfamiliar with his scholarly work. Borchardt is one of the few German historical economists in

General and Miscellaneous - Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel. Edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 491. $60.00.

General and Miscellaneous - Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel. Edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 491. $60.00.

Strategic factors in nineteenth century American economic history: a volume to honor Robert W. Fogel

Introduction, Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff Two Appreciations, Stanley L. Engerman, Donald N. McCloskey I. Labor Markets in Manufacturing and Agriculture 1. The Market for Manufacturing Workers during Early Industrialization: The American Northeast, 1820 to 1860, Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor 2. Wages, Prices, and Labor Markets before the Civil War, Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo 3. Structural Change in the Farm Labor Force: Contract Labor in Massachusetts Agriculture, 1750-1865, Winifred B. Rothenberg 4. Farm Tenancy in the Antebellum North, Donghyu Yang II. Markets in Capital and Credit 5. Regional Interest Rates in Antebellum America, Howard Bodenhorn and Hugh Rockoff 6. Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914, Michael D. Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna J. Schwartz 7. Precedence and Wealth: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Utah, David W. Galenson and Clayne L. Pope 8. The Wealth of Women, 1774, Alice Hanson Jones III. The Demography of Free and Slave Populations 9. Adult Mortality in America before 1900: A View from Family Histories, Clayne L. Pope 10. Toward an Anthropometric History of African-Americans: The Case of the Free Blacks in Antebellum Maryland, John Komlos 11. The Slave Family: A View from the Slave Narratives, Stephen Crawford 12. The Fertility Transition in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses, Richard H. Steckel 13. Trading Quantity for Quality: Explaining the Decline in American Fertility in the Nineteenth Century, Jenny Bourne Wahl IV. Political Economy 14. The Profitability of Early Canadian Railroads: Evidence from the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railway Companies, Ann M. Carlos and Frank Lewis 15. The Rise and Fall of Urban Political Patronage Machines, Joseph D. Reid, Jr., and Michael M. Kurth 16. Dividing Labor: Urban Politics and Big-City Construction in Late-Nineteenth-Century America, Gerald Friedman

Women In or Out of American Economic History?

ABSTRACT This viewpoint discusses the absence of women from the economic history of the USA. During the past 25 years American economic historians have been so concerned with conceptual and methodological arguments within the discipline that they have failed to examine the female factor. Though many practitioners might consider that women have had little input into marketplace activities in the past, their attitudes stem from conventional ways of examining both issues and data. A more balanced and realistic approach to writing American economic history will entail seeing women as an integral part of past economic change. To do this will involve asking different questions of the past ‐ both of new and existing sources. American economic history could greatly benefit from looking at changes in both history and economics.

The rise and fall of Great Britain's technological leadership: Is the United States following in Britain's footsteps?

Before 1500, Britain was not considered a major European power. Three hundred years later, she led the way for the Industrial Revolution and held sway economically and militarily during the 19th century. The 20th century saw the United Kingdom lose her empire, her military leadership, and most of all, her capacity to lead the world in technological innovations. We examine the rise and fall of the United Kingdom and identify potential parallels with recent US economic history. We derive the frightening conclusion that the United States may well be following in Britain's footsteps toward technological decline.

Cyclical analysis of key US aggregates during a period of macroeconomic stability (1953–1965)

The cyclical response patterns of major financial and macroeconomic aggregates to money shocks in the US economy is estimated. The data set is limited to the 1953–1965 period. The nature of this temporal window is rare in US economic history; growth was stable and noninflationary, and there was a marked absence of major downturns, inflationary expectations and supply shocks. These facts permit a more reliable portrayal of the dynamics associated with conventional monetarism than would otherwise be the case. Instead of a formal structural model, the methodology employs a four-variable vector autoregression. Variables are chosen according to the traditional IS-LM model and include money, the Index of Industrial Production, the CPI and various interest rates. While the method is a theoretical, the variables accord with accepted orthodoxy and the results allow theoretically, plausible interpretation. Significant patterns of persistence are found in major macrofinance aggregates over the period. Money shocks produce peaks at eight, twelve, and twenty-four months for interest rates, the IIP, and the CPI, respectively. We find the liquidity effect dominated by a short-term income effect. The Fed appears to have engaged in significant monetary accommodation over the period. A stable Phillips curve tradeoff is evident. Finally, we find the conventional upward-sloping yield curve replaced by a humpshaped configuration about eight months after a money-induced shock to aggregate demand.

The classical legacy and beyond

This study is a plea for a reassessment and development of the classical legacy (Smith, Ricardo and Marx), stressing the importance of the treatment of disequilibrium. A framework of analysis is built for the study of the stability of capitalist economies which is illustrated by the example of the US economy following the Civil War. The first part briefly recalls the main aspects of the classical analysis of competition and equilibrium. The second part presents the model (in particular modeling of behaviors within disequilibrium: ‘disequilibrium microeconomics’). The third part discusses the stability of classical equilibrium in two respects: (1) the relative values of the variables (relative prices, proportions of outputs and capitals among industries), i.e. the stability in proportions, and (2) the general level of activity, i.e. the stability in dimension. We contend that capitalism is constantly maintained at the limit of its stability in dimension (stability frontier). From this property and non-linearities in the behaviors of economic agents, we derive a theory of business fluctuations. The last part, using the example of US economic history, discusses the relationship between historical tendencies (the long-term movements of the profit rate) and stability.

Homesteading and Property Rights; Or, "How the West Was Really Won"

Homesteading and Property Rights; Or, "How the West Was Really Won"

Trends in the Terms of Trade of Primary Commodities, 1900-1982: The Controversy and Its Origins

Primary commodity markets have offered an opportunity for much economic debate on a number of key issues. First, secularly declining terms of trade of primary commodities are used to explain the widening gap between developing (LDCs) and developed countries (DCs). Second, they are regarded as a contributing factor to the creation of a structural condition of unequal exchange between a "dominating" industrial center and a "dominated" agrarian periphery. And third, they are thought to be a source of instability, often causing financial vulnerability to foreign exchange equilibria and fragility to international market institutions.

Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Economic History

Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Economic History Generations of foreign observers have considered the American economy unique. Its growth was a wonder of the Western world for more than a century (I850-1950). The organization of American economic life provided a model for other nations to emulate. For a while after World War II, the United States even appeared capable of transforming the world economy into a larger version of itself. This article offers a synoptic view of this remarkable performance. The American economic experience until very recently was shaped by the interaction of two factors that were uniquely American. The first was the pervasive effect of free land. The abundance of rich American farmland in favorable climates and close

American Economic History: From Abundance to Constraint.

American Economic History: From Abundance to Constraint.

Race, Radicalism, and Reform: Selected Papers, Abram L. Harris

This volume presents selections from the work of Abram L. (1899-1963), acknowledged as the first black American economist to achieve prominence in academic life. Between 1927 and 1945 he served on the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he was a professor in the College at the University of Chicago. During the Howard years, was a central figure among a remarkable group of black social scientists clustered at that institution. He influenced the thought and work of Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, and Eric Williams. A frequent contributor to professional journals in economics, especially the Journal of Political Economy, Harris was recognized as perhaps the foremost expert on the comparative analysis of alternative approaches in economics. Race, Radicalism, and Reform includes an introduction by the editor that provides a chronology of Harris' life and an assessment of his scholarly contributions. A diverse array of Harris' papers is contained in the volume covering all the major themes he addressed in the course of a lifetime of research: the Negro problem in the United States, the interaction between race and class, controversies in American economic history, Marx and Marxism, the nature and content of institutional economics, and the economics of John Stuart Mill. What results is a comprehensive view of Harris' work, affording insight into important transitions in his thinking about radicalism and social reform. In particular, the book chronicles his movement from a left orientation in his youth to a moderate libertarianism in his later years.

Disciplinary self-examination, departments, and research traditions in economic history

Abstract Our tripartite theme has a curious asymmetrical quality as applied to Anglo-American developments. On the one hand, American economic historians, like American social scientists generally, have been much more disposed to engage in disciplinary self-examination and methodological controversy than their British counterparts, largely for sociological and cultural rather than strictly intellectual reasons. On the other hand, unlike the British, they have never had independent departments of economic or economic and social history, and most students of the subject would agree that until the cliometric movement of the late 1950's and 1960's there were no well-defined schools or research traditions in American economic history (at least, not in the full Lakatosian sense of research programs, with a hard core, protective belt, positive and negative heuristics, etc.)1 By contrast, as Donald Coleman has recently argued, there have been readily identifiable schools in British economic history which he terms ‘Reformists’ and ‘Neutralists’ respectively.2 These were preceded by a number of ‘Rebels’ and ‘Outsiders’, who launched the subject as a university subject between 1880 and 1910. Some of these predecessors, together with the earlier Reformists, constituted a series (rather than a school) of historical economists who are the subject of Gerard Koot's valuable study published in 1987.3 During the formative years, and indeed thereafter, there were some mutterings of methodological discontent among the historical economists.4 But open conflict was effectively damped down in the early 1890's by the two Cambridge economists, Alfred Marshall and John Neville Keynes; and the hegemony of the neo-classical paradigm, to use up-todate jargon, was largely unchallenged prior to the publication of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, and then not on overtly methodological grounds. By that time economic history was a relatively secure, if still insignificant, academic field in Britain, and its practitioners' reluctance to engage in methodological debate three decades later is beautifully depicted in Coleman's comment on the reception of the “new”, or cliornetric, economic history:

The Wealth of British America on the Eve of the Revolution

Revolution British America's free population was extremely wealthy on the eve of the Revolution. A generation of scholarship has made that fact clear. Moreover, as work on wealth-holding patterns in the early modern period proceeds, it is becoming increasingly apparent that nowhere else in the world did a population of comparable size live so well. Indeed, as Perkins has pointed out, the free population of British North America-by all accounts far less wealthy than that in the British West Indiesenjoyed higher incomes and living standards in I774 than roughly 70 percent of the world's inhabitants in the I98os.1 This research note does not purport to contravene these findings. Rather, it attempts to clarify them by discussing, adjusting, and, at times, correcting certain data on wealth and wealth-holding patterns presented in the best recent synthesis of early American economic history: McCusker and Menard's Economy of British America, 1607-1789. In undertaking this task, I intend in no way to diminish the achievement of McCusker and Menard; I have written favorably of their book elsewhere, and the points that I raise, even if accepted in toto, will hardly damage its well-deserved reputation. Nonetheless, in economic history seemingly minor technical questions relating to what Morgenstern called accuracy and error matter a great deal.2

The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States by Leo Marx

1050 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE are restatements of the conventional wisdom. So it is here. Therefore, the most interesting portions of the book, at least to a reviewer familiar with many of the arguments tying technical to economic change, are those that fit the editors’ thesis less well. These are the essays that assess the interactions between technology and urban form (by Kenneth T. Jackson), politics (by David C. Hammack), education (by Geraldine Clifford), and religion (by Martin E. Marty). When the power of the marketplace is tempered by or mixed with other forces, the historical patterns are more ambiguous, less one-sided. This is especially dear in Derk Bruins’s interesting and innovative study of the effect of technological change on social structure in the U.S. Navy. There the power of tradition and politics often resisted the sort of technical improvements that would have succeeded much more rapidly in the economy. These essays make it plain that technological change, operating through the economic system, is now generally acknowledged to have been the most important source of changes in society since the 18th century. To be sure, there are sectors where its influence has been slowed or muted, particularly when noneconomic motivations have played a significant role. Nevertheless, its fundamental dominance is clear. And so is our ambivalence about this state of affairs. When we care most about material achievement, we celebrate technology’s triumph. When we concern ourselves with other values, however, we fear the power of technology, and we doubt our ability to control or even to influence its course. In the end the question, as Martin Marty concludes, is “not how to resist or worship technology but how to make the technological order more open to humaneness” (p. 287). We have come a long way from the Enlightenment optimism that accom­ panied the origins of our technical, industrial world. Glenn Porter Dr. Porter is the director of the Haglev Museum and Library. He was the editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of American Economic History, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1980. The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. By Leo Marx. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xx+ 357; notes, index. $29.95. In his pioneering The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), Leo Marx argued that literary aware­ ness of accelerating mechanization appears in classic American works of the 1830s, much earlier than critics had assumed, and found that writers like Hawthorne and Twain revealed their anxieties in images of locomotives or steamboats invading an Edenic landscape. Here, in The Pilot and the Passenger, a splendid collection of essays written TECHNOLOGY AND ( I I I I RI Book Reviews 1051 between 1950 and 1987, Marx recasts this dichotomy between pasto­ ral dream and industrial reality into a permanent dialectic, an engine of culture still operating in the present. As he is careful to define it, however, the pastoral ideal itself already represents a balancing of the alleged harmonies associated with an unmodified nature, on the one hand, and the more doubtful virtues linked to rapidly advancing civilization, on the other. The traditional American version of tech­ nological moderation is Jefferson’s vision of a “middle landscape,” a primarily rural countryside populated by yeomen who would manu­ facture just enough goods for sufficiency, a préfiguration of later ecological and “small is beautiful” movements. If pastoral loyalties gave political style to the vernaculars of Twain and Whitman, they have also furnished substance for modern ideologies like those of Herbert Marcuse and Susan Sontag: where cultural agendas are concerned, pastoral and postindustrial values seem rhetorically, psy­ chically, and politically dependent on one another. Nevertheless, Marx points out, efforts to wed the pastoral ideal to social action are likely to fail, as happened in the 1960s. Detailing the reasons for its political failure also outlines the dimensions of the dream. In our century, technology can no longer be equated with its synecdoche, the machine; technology is better understood as the organizational complexes in which we live and function. Decisions concerning those systems, however, are political. The major expression of the...