The seasonality of weddings molded itself to regionally specific patterns of labor in early-modern England. Advantage can thus be taken of the widely available if unlikely source of parish registers of marriages to reveal the timing of regional specialization, defined narrowly as the ability of regions to forgo the production of the staples of local consumption and concentrate on whatever production best suited local resources of land and labor.

This study is part of a continuing effort to document and date the emergence of a market economy in rural Massachusetts. It uses a probate data base to test for evidence of increased portfolio liquidity, decreased transactions costs, and the appearance of developmental institutional change. A regional capital market, so critical for the industrialization of New England, is found to have emerged in the early 1780s.

The demand for land in the United States was shaped by inherited attitudes and modern asset creation. Immigrants inherited the view that landowners had an enhanced chance of survival in a “starving time.” But the United States farmer also found that by clearing his unimproved acres he could create assets from otherwise idle time between seasonal peaks in the use of family labor. Public land sales in the South from 1820 to 1860 correlate well with variables that reflect expected money return and supply price. Substantial residuals for 1835–1837 chiefly trace to specific policy actions in Washington.

Many distinguished foreign visitors to the United States in the 1850s commented on the advanced states of mechanization in manufacturing. But why, at the same time, were interest rates higher and the aggregate manufacturing capital stock lower in American than in Britain? We resolve this paradox by noting that British engineers were most impressed by only those industries which relied on skilled workers. Using production parameters estimated from 1849 census data, we develop a computable general equilibrium model of the American and British economies which reconciles the apparently contradictory evidence.

In the study of Roman money Theodore Mommsen remains 135 years after his work a towering figure, more pragmatic than theoretical in his economics, yet still sound. He saw the politics in monetary history, and especially its connection with the strength of the state. His view is more penetrating than MV = PT, fashionable in twentieth-century scholarship on Rome. And it is better economics than offered by the Polanyi School as the alternative line of analysis. The Polanyists infer an absence of a Roman monetary system from the failure of some part to be as sophisticated as the best. On the contrary, the Roman monetary system does not look so different from that of Europe since Mommsen wrote, uneven in its use of monetary devices, but sensibly so.

Historians frequently use values to explain behavior. Since their studies focus on the behavior, they have neglected to measure values and change in values. The current practices of historians of values will not yield conclusions usable in the history of behavior.

Despite its wealth of economic data, Domesday Book, complied almost nine hundred years ago, has been surprisingly neglacted by quantitative economic historians. In analyzing one of the central issues in Domesday book—namely the relationship between manorial resurces and income—we here provide a first step in the attempt to redress the balance, by employing recently developed statistical techiniques. The result of the analysis constitutes strong grounds for rejecting the traditional interpretation of the relationship. It also suggests that the English economy of 1086 can be reconstructed more completely than previously thought possible.

The money stock in France from 1493 to 1680 has not been well understood. Changes in the money stock have usually been represented by moving sums of annual mint output. Mint output, however, included large amounts of recoinage, resulting in double-counting. A model of mint output is estimated to determine the amount of recoinage. The money stock estimates are also improved by incorporating a constant rate of loss of coins.

A revised view of the nature of Russian industrialization is proposed. It is argued that economic conditions on the serf estates did not hinder industrialization; they in fact facilitated proto-industrialization by promoting the nonagricultural pursuits of the peasantry. In opposition to the traditional view that industrialization took place after the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and that there was an “agrarian crisis” in the nineteenth century, it is argued that industrialization was well underway on a wide scale on the basis of serf labor before 1861. The so-called agrarian crisis may really have been a period of increased proto-industrial activity by the peasants.

This paper uses a taxation assessment to analyze the relations between taxable peasant wealth and regional marketing geography. The results show cashcropping patterns for different grains and livestock. The selectivity of market involvement poses broader questions concerning economic vulnerability at the household and community levels among the English peasantry, and strategies used to contain vulnerability.

The integration of capital markets is usually tested with an interest rate arbitrage model even though much different financial assets must be compared. This paper compares prices of identical assets that are traded simultaneously in two or more markets. The range, average level, and time series pattern of the differences can be used to infer threshold levels, transaction cost levels, and the efficiency of arbitrage operations, respectively.Examples are given for financial crises from 1745 to 1907, using prices from the London, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York stock exchanges. These show European capital markets to be well integrated by mid-eighteenth century.

Integration in the American foreign-exchange market under the nineteenthcentury specie standard is examined using a newly developed series of the dollar- sterling exchange rate and estimates of specie-point spreads. A distinction is made between internal and external integration. The latter is much more important over the entire 1791 to 1900 time span, but by 1881–1900 the market is tightly integrated in both senses. The long-term trend of improved integration is interrupted only by wartime.

The Russian Industrial Society, the first national organization of commercial and industrial interests in the empire, attempted to win governmental support for a comprehensive program of economic development. It enjoyed some successes in the fields of tariff protection, factory legislation, and the conquest of Central Asia. The tsarist bureaucracy, however, proved unwilling or unable to implement rational reforms in such key areas as subsoil mineral rights, monopolies, and corporate law. Moreover, policy disagreements among the society's regional branches, especially those in Moscow, Warsaw, and Lodz, weakened the organization from the 1880s onward.

The transformation of the Cotton South after the Civil War involved distinct regional developments. Regional analysis of crop production in Reconstruction Georgia, for example, identifies different patterns of specialization in cotton in the Cotton Belt and Upcountry counties. It also reveals an overlooked aspect of Reconstruction, the integration of Upcountry farmers into the cotton economy. The spread of cotton culture into the Upcountry followed the construction of an internal marketing and transportation system in Georgia in the 1870s which was related to and was part of the formation of a national market in the postbellum United States.

I present estimates here of the geographic persistence of estate owners and managers in Barbados during 1673–1723. The estimates are based on evidence generated by the functioning of an economic market; the evidence was produced by tracing the names of purchasers over time through the invoice accounts of slave sales held by the Royal African Company on the island.Estimated rates of out-migration from Barbados were low during the 1670s, comparable in magnitude to those found in colonial New England towns, but the rates rose considerably during the following decades. The initially low rates of out-migration might have been the result of the great profitability of sugar planting in early Barbados, while the subsequent increase might have been due to the development of methods of plantation management that allowed estate owners to earn profits as absentees.

The Wealth of Nations does not recognize the fact of industrial production, and its analysis of price does not account for the fundamental feature of industrial markets, falling price per output unit based on exponential growth obtained by technological applications. Smith's laissez-faire doctrine contains distinctive value postulates intended to promulgate an egalitarian agrarian capitalism in the spirit of physiocracy. Criticisms of Smith by Alexander Hamilton, J.-B. Say, Andrew Ure, and Friedrich List are instanced to support the present interpretation.

We examine the role of southern legislators in resisting the early expansion of the welfare state in the 1930s. A desire to keep agricultural labor cheap and dependent on southern landlords motivated the resistance. Dependence promoted a loyal labor force and thereby reduced monitoring costs in the labor-intensive production of cotton. Federal and state welfare programs would have substituted for landlord paternalism and hence made labor less loyal. Evidence on the federal Old-Age and Unemployment Insurance systems and state Old-Age Pension and Mothers' Aid programs are found consistent with our hypothesis.

Indentured servitude is modeled as a trans-Atlantic market in forward-labor contracts. The model is applied to servant-auction evidence in Philadelphia, and the determinants of contract prices are used to test the efficient-market hypothesis. While competing for servants in Europe, most of the expected price differences across servants were lost through arbitrage by recruiters.

Perhaps no single element involved with the rapid assumption of economic power by the federal government was more important than the passage of the income tax, the means by which the increasing role of government was financed. We explain the political and economic interests that came together to successfully pass the income tax, and we provide extensive empirical evidence regarding the determinants of the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.