The first formal meeting of the Economic History Association after This death should not close without appropriate tribute to our initial president and the first real American economic historian, Edwin F. Gay. More than most members of the Association, I feel his loss, since in one capacity or another I had the good fortune to be associated with him for almost thirty-five years. And I am the more appropriate agent to render our common tribute, since, more than others, I am indebted to him. I realize that, without his instruction, encouragement, and stimulation, I should not be standing here as a successor to him in office.

To study the role of the entrepreneur is to study the personal factor in economic history, to introduce the problem of what today is called the businessman. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, the expression “businessmap” was apparently not used in late colonial times, although “going into business” or “going into merchandising” was. The distinction is important; the colonial economy was far too general, and its participants too many-sided, to permit the assumption that there was a colonial man of business in the modern business sense.

This paper is concerned with the semipiratical entrepreneurs who roamed the United States virtually unchecked before 1903, save for who the opposition of a few publicists and some short-lived vigilante committees. Contemporaries, following Henry Demarest Lloyd and Carl Schurz, likened businessmen of this type to the nobles who infested the Medieval Rhine. The term “robber barons” has stuck to them through the years despite occasional attempts at rehabilitating one or another who stood out above the throng by virtue of his accumulations or philanthropy. Only recently, for example, Howard Mumford Jones distinguished between the “cruelty” and the “culture” of these magnates whose behavior in the commercial-political and the artistic-literary fields he prefers to liken to the “commercial tyrants” of the Renaissance. No one to date, so far as I know, has attempted to distinguish from their strictly buccaneering activities the permanent contributions made by these businessmen as a group to American business practices. Such is the purpose of this paper.

This is frankly a paper with a purpose. It is a plea for the abandonment of that academic isolationism that marks our teaching of the economic history of the United States, and for at least an occasional glance at those other new countries to which Europeans flocked between the sixteenth century and the drying up of intercontinental migration less than two decades ago. The plea might be made on the high ground of promoting international understanding and of making our leadership in world affairs better informed. I am content to present it on the lower plane of improving our teaching of this country's economic and social development. If we examine the story of those areas that have had basically the same experience as ours, we begin to notice the significance of some things here that we have always taken for granted. Some of our problems lose their terror when we discover that other countries are also plagued with them; some of our ideas or methods may look better, or worse, when we contrast them with those of other regions; and some of our achievements may appear greater, or less, when we place them alongside the accomplishments of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Latin Americans, or Russians in Siberia. It used to be said that the study of the varied forms of government in the eastern Mediterranean made the Greeks good political scientists. Some comparative study of the quantity and character of material development among the peoples just listed might make us better American economic historians.

That the later Roman empire was a period of stagnation, not to say X of decline and total collapse, in the economic as in other spheres has long been recognized. But it has been the contribution of such modern scholars as Frank, Rostovtzeff, and Heichelheim to show that the symptoms and causes of this stagnation are not to be sought solely in the anarchy of the third century A.D. They may be detected earlier, behind the facade of peace and prosperity in the second century, and have roots which reach back into the very beginnings of the Roman domination over the Mediterranean world. In order to avoid too great extension in time, as well as in space, the present discussion will be limited to the symptoms and causes of economic stagnation that may be detected throughout the Mediterranean world during the early Roman empire, the two hundred and fifty odd years that elapsed from the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., which left Augustus master of the Mediterranean world, to the assassination of Severus Alexander in 235 A.D., which ushered in a half century of anarchy and eventually the totalitarian state of Diocletian and Constantine.

All scientific research requires at its initial stage as precise a formulation of the problem under investigation as is possible to the human mind. In a study of retardative factors in French economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the need for clarifying the implications of the subject and of removing possible ambiguities is particularly urgent. By economic development is meant here an increasing amount of goods and services which are customarily exchanged for money. I am eliminating from consideration many of the intangibles of life, which are important and which the French may have in abundance, like joie de vivre.

The phenomenon of change lies at the core of economic and business history. Otherwise, in common with other branches of economics, we would be engaged in the dull task of describing and explaining the static state of the classical and neoclassical theorists. The historical economist deals with the field of dynamic economics on the largest possible scale. Furthermore, unlike the theorists of dynamic economics, he is under obligation to deal with actual situations as they have arisen, and to reach judgments in the light of all-important observable factors. This is a difficult assignment.