In his rejoinder in the September 1983 issue of this JOURNAL to our comment on his article that appeared in December 1981, J. E. Inikori claims that we fail to address effectively any of the six major points raised by his article. We confess that we did not respond to his arguments about temporal fluctuations and interfirm variations in profit margins, largely because we regarded such arguments as commonplace and the subject of little debate among historians. We do have doubts, however, about Inikori's attempt to relate profit margins to the size of firms in the trade, as we indicate below. The main concern of our comment was with several more questionable assertions made by Inikori about the market structure and general profitability of the slave trade, and we sought to challenge these. Our criticisms centered on Inikori's classification of British slaving firms, his analysis of the elasticities of supply of trade goods and export credit, his method of calculating profits, and his interpretation of the career of one Liverpool slave merchant, William Davenport, for whose ventures we have exceptionally detailed accounts. Inikori's Rejoinder rejects all of our criticisms, but the arguments he advances remain conceptually unsound and rely upon questionable interpretations of slender evidence. We propose to deal only with the main points of our criticisms that Inikori either misunderstands or still fails to meet.

This article uses data on regional output and imports to examine the relationship between imports and regional growth in the Northeast. The tariff rates, both nominal and effective, are considered as evidence of national policy that may have benefited this particular region. The findings are that particular industries do benefit from tariff protection, but their location is due to regional resource advantages.

Newly estimated national accounting data for the Arab community are utilized to provide a comparative economic profile of the Arab and Jewish sectors in mandatory Palestine's dual economy. It is shown that the Arab economy grew substantially, but at a much slower rate than the Jewish economy. Productivity advance, however, seems to have made a significantly larger relative contribution to Arab growth. General and specific dualistic features of Arab-Jewish trade and their growth promoting effects are also explored, suggesting that the political conflict between the two communities played only a minor role in shaping their economic interrelationship and performance.

Seymour Drescher's comments center on whether British traders exporting slaves from Africa directly to non-British territories in the Americas were able to load more slaves per ton after 1788 than the slave-ton ratios imposed by British laws. The bone of contention here arose originally from attempts to estimate the volume of the trade. I argued that the British traders did load considerably more slaves per ton after 1788. Neglecting this factor would lead to a significant underestimate of the volume. Drescher disagreed and offered comments in Econocide; I replied in Forced Migration. In discussing the profits I found the subject still relevant: I argued that loading considerably more slaves than British laws allowed enhanced profits of the larger firms with access to non-British territories. On this Drescher here takes issue.

Private savings–often through employer-based pension plans–account for a larger proportion of retirement incomes in Britain than elsewhere. The strength of employer–based pension plans in Britain can be traced to a variety of factors; their early development and security are emphasized. The pattern of spread, with heavy concentration initially in bureaucratic firms, suggests that old-age saving entered the employment relationship around 1900 because large-scale bureaucracies needed conditional, lifetime payment systems. By the 1930s, the other main intermediaries for old-age saving, specializing in private provision on an individual basis, had moved into the market for collective, employer-based pension plans.

Mortality differentials for 122 cities in the United States in 1910 are examined with specific attention given to the influence of public works projects. Sewage systems are found to have significantly reduced mortality, while water filtration systems had no impact. This runs counter to the theories and beliefs of many public health officials and sanitary engineers of the era. Other factors, including the racial and immigrant composition of the population, urban density, number of physicians, and the standard of living, are also examined.

We use a genealogical data base to question the idea that the frontier was a “safety valve” for Americans in the years of the founding of the republic. Our findings about the relative wealth of members of nine families show how the frontier affected their migration patterns. We find that it was the middle class, not the poor, who seemed to make best use of the opportunity of the frontier.