Cliometric Studies Research Articles

On the activities of the Odesa branch of the Ukrainian Submarine Navigation School

Relevance. The issue of Ukrainian submarine navigation has received undeservedly little attention in the modern research literature. Despite the objective importance and the fundamentally innovative potential of this topic, little constructive investigation has been carried out so far in this area.Purpose. This paper aims to conduct a detailed prosographic analysis of the Odesa branch of the Ukrainian School of Submarine Navigation, which operated between 1877 and 1905. The study focuses on understanding the internal dynamics and the broader impact of this branch on national and international submarine navigation practices.Methodology. The study employed the methods of comparative analysis, hindsight, induction, and deduction, using both online and archival sources to cover as much information on the topic as possible. Cliometric studies were also conducted.Results. The presented study provides a prosographic analysis of the Odesa branch of the Ukrainian School of Submarine Navigation, which operated from 1877 to 1905. The branch�s basic structure has been defined. Various types of connections have been identified. The influence of the representatives of the Odesa branch on the representatives of other branches and national schools of submarine navigation that functioned in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century is illustrated.Conclusions. The findings will provide a solid basis for further scientific efforts in this area and for making strategic decisions to protect Ukraine's maritime interests. This investigation can also be used as a source of educational literature for historical and educational materials.

Local Nutritional Availability and Adult Height: Evidence from South Korea, 1946-1977

Local Nutritional Availability and Adult Height: Evidence from South Korea, 1946-1977

The Bigness Complex Redux: Horizontal Ownership Concentration and Efficiency Conundrums

This cliometric study evaluates efficiency outcomes from America’s telecommunications sector acquisitions, based on data for 1988–2001, as the sector’s horizontal acquisition processes have repeated themselves. Sector ownership has been comprehensively reconcentrated. Concepts from the size and structural capital literatures enable defining mechanisms to establish causality between horizontal ownership influence and efficiency. For the measure of size, smaller-sized firms display positive efficiency impacts, while medium-sized firms display lower performance than average and large-sized entities display substantially lower performance. Entities experiencing a lesser level of structural capital influence enjoy better performance, while entities experiencing a medium level of structural capital influence experience lower performance than average and entities experiencing a high level of structural capital influence experience much lower efficiency. The evidence implies that negative motivations associated with size and power acquisition may be spilt over to acquired entities, and increasing negative size impact suggests these motives have strengthened as larger controlling entities have brought more units under their ambit. Restraining concentration is a fundamental policy concern to restore competitive economy fundamentals and prevent ruining America’s entrepreneurial spirit.

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley James Sanders Day Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation. By Michael S. Frawley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 195. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7068-7.) Asserting that southern industry was well developed before the American Civil War, Michael S. Frawley contends that historians who compare northern and southern industry miss the mark. In fact, industrial development in the South lagged behind the North by a decade. Nevertheless, southern industry, when evaluated on its own merits, represented a viable industrial base by 1860. Debunking traditional views that slave labor compromised the basic tenets of free enterprise, Frawley posits that slaves “served as both labor and capital for antebellum southern industry” (p. 92). The combination of plantation-based [End Page 470] agriculture and industrial production constituted “pure and simple” capitalism (p. 95). Consequently, entrepreneurs invested money in whatever would earn a profit. Citing DeBow’s Review, Frawley notes that the slave population eventually exceeded the number of agricultural jobs, thus creating the need for industry. Cotton production generated profits, and planters invested those proceeds in land, slaves, and manufacturing. Although industrial output always ran second to “King Cotton,” the development of southern industry proved significant. Addressing several historiographical arguments, Frawley confirms that former studies tended to corroborate preconceived notions—the institution of slavery was incompatible with industrial development; industry disrupted the agrarian way of life; and industry was not integrated into southern society. In contrast, he argues that the Panic of 1837 prompted planters to invest in industry to counter agricultural slumps, thereby leading to a diverse southern economy. Frawley examines A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy by Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss (Chapel Hill, 1981), one of the first cliometric studies of southern industry. This work, grounded in the 1860 manufacturing census, arrived at conclusions that Frawley describes as inconclusive and unrepresentative. He argues that census marshals failed to record approximately 20 percent of all manufacturing firms in the Gulf South. Therefore, in addition to the 1860 census, he considers “all available sources” using a “geographic perspective” (p. 17). For example, applying Geographical Information System (GIS) software, he charts and maps the combined effects of physical environment, technology, and social institutions. Moreover, he consults newspapers and journals, city and county directories, R. G. Dun and Company credit reports, and local histories to determine that industry was more widespread in the South than previously thought. Having created a vast database of Gulf South industrial firms operating in 1860, Frawley concentrates on Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, three states that constituted the richest part of the Gulf South region. He also presents five major themes: location, organization, and ownership; resources and raw materials; transportation and markets; capital and labor; and production and scale. As the southern economy expanded, a growing transportation network connected roads, rivers, and railroads. Rivers were the dominant transportation routes, facilitating trade both upstream and downstream. Railroad construction complemented river traffic by connecting remote areas to outside markets and by linking interior points to nearby rivers or to the coast. Consequently, southern industry developed along railroad lines and in areas rich in raw materials. Ultimately, Frawley constructs a convincing argument. Refusing to evaluate southern industry by looking backward through the lens of the Civil War, he uses maps, tables, and charts to present data in digestible form. Too extensive for publication in book form, his Appendix C (located on a personal website) provides 140 additional pages of pertinent information. Although he seems to ignore the reality of nonstandard gauges, he concludes properly that southern railroads were designed to support local and regional trade, not to provide logistical support for a major war. Configured for a peacetime economy, much of southern industry was “worn out or destroyed” by the Civil War’s end [End Page 471] (p. 125). In summary, Frawley suggests that southern industrial development before the Civil War might have represented “the beginning of the ‘New’ South” (p. 127). James Sanders Day University of Montevallo Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Does academic management accounting lag practice? A cliometric study

The schism between accounting practice and the accounting academy has been a lament of accountants for many decades. This schism has two aspects – the schism between research and practice and the schism between education and practice. This article focuses on the later schism and uses a statistical approach to compare the dates of introduction of new management accounting concepts into accounting education and the professional body of knowledge over the period 1967 to 1997. The results indicate that, on average, accounting education lags practice and the length of the lag has increased since the early 1980s. The study contributes to the growing use of cliometrics (quantitative analysis) in accounting history, provides new empirical data on the accounting schism and offers insights for the profession and academy on the pattern of knowledge transfer. The use of new sources and a different research method offer additional insights on the established themes of “relevance lost” and the “accounting lag” in the management accounting and accounting history literatures.

A PATCHWORK SAFETY NET: A SURVEY OF CLIOMETRIC STUDIES OF INCOME MAINTENANCE PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract Social welfare programs in the USA are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the USA, we examine the variation in the safety net in the USA across states in the 20th century, the determinants of the variation and its impact on socioeconomic outcomes. The USA has always displayed substantial variation in the extent of the safety net because the features of most public social welfare programs have been and currently are determined by local and state governments, even after the federal government became involved in the 1930s. Differences across states persist strongly for typically a decade, although the persistence weakens with time, and there are some periods when federal intervention led to a re‐ordering. The rankings of state benefits differ from program to program, and economic and political factors have different weights in determining benefit levels in panel data estimation of their effects. Variation in benefits across programs during the early 1900s had significant impact on labour markets, economic activity, family formation, death rates and crime.

The spread of empire: Clio and the measurement of colonial borrowing costs1

Modern cliometric studies use dummy variables to measure the effects of institutions. The dummy variable approach can be misleading, as illustrated by recent research on the impact of colonial rule on borrowing terms. We show how trying to measure a ‘colonial effect’ without an analysis of the financial consequences of political subjection can be misleading. The main effect of the British Empire was to remove the default risk. Establishing how this was done, and with what effects, should take us closer to a proper understanding of the effect of empire.

The historiography of French economic growth in the nineteenth century

SummaryThere has been a long‐standing debate about French nineteenth‐century economic growth. After 1945 the ‘retardation—stagnation’ thesis dominated. From the 1960s ‘revisionists’ painted a more optimistic view. Recently, ‘anti‐revisionism’ has revived gloomy ideas. New research has been primarily responsible for changes of view. National income estimates, and later cliometric studies, bolstered the revisionist argument. Work on the ‘great depression’ stimulated anti‐revisionism. Scholars have also been influenced by the economic and political state of France at the time they were writing and the debate has been somewhat politicized. The article ends by surveying the ‘moderate revisionism’ which now prevails.

In Retrospect: Ransom and Sutch's One Kind of Freedom

Few works in southern economic history have achieved the level of respect and renown enjoyed by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch's path-breaking 1977 book One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (or 1Kf as it came to be called). If any single work can be said to have transformed an entire field in history, this is it. Whether one points to the 1978 symposium on One Kind of Freedom held at Duke University, the special issue of Explorations in Economic History devoted to the book in 1979, the high-decibel graduate-student buzz surrounding the book, or the broad diffusion of terms and concepts associated with Ransom and Sutch-lock-in mechanisms and territorial monopoly, most notably-1lKf is virtually unique.1 That the book was the subject of another major conference in September 1999, twenty-two years after the fact, testifies further to this point.2 What is it about One Kind of Freedom that makes the volume so important? Why did this difficult, technical study evoke the response it did? How do Ransom and Sutch's conclusions hold up today? These are some of the questions with which this essay will deal. Let me attempt to answer the simplest of these questions first: the response to 1Kf. It seems clear in retrospect that the book's prominence, quality aside, was aided by timing considerations. Quantitative history was in its heyday in the mid-to-late '70s, and Ransom and Sutch's work was nothing, if not an exemplar of the approach.3 African American history was also a hot field in the decade-one thinks immediately of the landmark syntheses of slavery that appeared during the '70s-and here again One Kind of Freedom had fortune on its side. Finally, the book and the authors' conclusions, ideology, and politics were interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as markedly different from those associated with Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, whose prizewinning cliometric study of slavery, Time on the Cross (1974), raised the hackles both of traditional scholars suspicious of quantitative methods and of

Book Review: Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History

Book Review: Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History

Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History

Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History

Quantitative economic history in Europe since the second world war : survey, evaluation and prospects

It is not an easy task to present a concise, clear, and complete review of European research in the field of quantitative economic history. Indeed, several dficulties arise when one starts to critically review the long tradition of European historiography and its vast literature. First, it is difficult to precisely define what is meant by the concept of quantitative economic history. Second, the time period which is to be reviewed, must be carefully delineated. Indeed, if a very general interpretation is given to the above mentioned concept and a long period of historical research is studied, then the literature fitting such criteria is vast and can hardly be reviewed within the strict scheme of a meaningful synthesis. If, on the contrary, a rather narrow interpretation is used, then the review will only contain a brief list of the very few cliometric studies which were undertaken in Europe. Consequently, it is vitally important to adequately limit the scope of this paper so that the relevant quantitative and economic aspects of European historical research clearly emerge.

The “new” history as applied social science: A review essay

increasing use of quantitative methods and materials in their research. Numerous quantitative studies have appeared in virtually all fields of history and quantification has become an accepted and increasingly valued weapon in the historian's research arsenal. In no field of history, however, has explicit use of quantification been more general or more effective than in economic history. Through the use of mathematical methods and reasoning, quantitative data, and economic theory, scholars in this area, often called cliometricians, have produced important new findings bearing upon the economic life and processes of the past.' In so doing, they have also produced a form of history quite unlike the history to which most readers are accustomed. Time on the Cross2 is, in part, an example of this form of history. The study also diverges from the carefully focused nature and the highly technical presentations that are more usual characteristics of cliometric studies. In these volumes, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman have attempted a broad exploration and interpretation of the operation of the slave system and of the antebellum southern economy more generally based upon their own research and the work of other scholars. They have also attempted to present their findings in a manner useful to general readers and to technically skilled specialists alike. A first and primary volume presents the authors' basic findings and arguments in essentially non-technical form; a second volume provides references and the theoretical and methodological apparatus on which the study rests. Fogel and Engerman, moreover, make heavier use of impressionistic and fragmentary evidence to supplement more reliable systematic data than is usual among econometric historians, and they also venture further in judgmental and interpretive directions for which empirical support is not and, perhaps, cannot be provided. This is, in short, a work of interpretation and synthesis as well as original research, and it attempts to present the results of highly technical investigations in a manner that can be comprehended by non-specialists. The study has now been widely reviewed in publications ranging from the popular press to the most scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, as a consequence of the excellence of the authors' work, the controversial nature of their findings, the promotional efforts of the publisher, or some combination of the three, the study has received remarkable attention in view of its scholarly character, the extensive evidence which it employs, and the technically complex methodology and theory on which it rests. The reviews have been mixed to say the least, for the study has raised the scholarly, moral and ideological hackles of some, provoked bemused uncertainty on the part of others, and moved still others to high praise. Commentary upon the conclusions reached by Fogel and Engerman would be misplaced here. A number of extended essays have already appeared that attempt to modify, challenge, and contest the research and conclusions presented in these volumes. There can be little doubt that these efforts will continue in the future, and a final and sound assessment of the study will depend on the commentary and continuing research of specialists. But however well or badly it stands the test of informed criticism, reanalysis, and continuing research, Time on the Cross must be seen as something of a historiographical landmark. Again, in recent years, historians have made extensive use of quantitative methods and materials. The quantitative methods employed in much of this work, however, have been relatively straightforward and, sometimes