Kenneth L. Sokoloff, who was a close collaborator of Stanley Engerman, passed away prematurely on May 21, 2007. This volume is an occasion to also acknowledge his contributions.

It seems particularly fitting to evoke Sokoloff's work on endowments and institutions because he began it as part of a dissertation completed under the supervision of Robert Fogel at Harvard in 1982. This part of his research was closest to that pursued by Engerman, a co-author and close collaborator of Fogel's, and what had been a long-running conversation blossomed into full-fledged collaboration in the 1990s.

Much of Sokoloff's research has focused on the interaction between the expansion of markets and productivity growth. In his early work on industrialization he emphasized the importance of market forces in spurring firms to reorganize their modes of production. This theme recurred in his work on the relationship between agricultural seasonality and the adoption of capital intensive methods of manufacturing. He also reprised this approach in his work on patenting and invention, in which he showed that patenting rates were much higher in counties traversed by navigable waterways and that repeat inventors were likely to move to such counties as they pursued the returns to their discoveries. Over time, however, Sokoloff became more deeply concerned with understanding how endowments and institutions co-evolved, rather than simply attributing primacy in economic outcomes to one or the other. It was this latter set of interests that brought him to work closely with Engerman.