The external growth of a sample of large German enterprises for the 1880–1913 period is here investigated. External growth, defined as acquisition of existing firms and measured by the reported value of their assets, is found to have accounted for no more than one-fifth of average overall enterprise growth in the period. An examination of individual examples, however, reveals that external growth was frequently decisive for the growth of survivor enterprises and, in some sectors, a significant contributor to concentration. Some quantitative tests suggest that financial factors, and particularly stock prices, significantly influenced external growth. The paper concludes by comparing German with British and American findings.

The different rates of technical progress in Western Europe and the United States, exemplified by the motor industry, created a problem of adjustment in international payments by the 1920s. American direct investment in manufacturing in Europe was a manifestation of technological superiority and a partial solution to the payments problem. The scale of their operations gave the American motor vehicle firms an advantage even in foreign production. An alternative way of closing the technological gap, the transfer of machine tools and trained men from America to Europe, allowed the European motor vehicle producers to compete without becoming entirely American-owned.

By 1950 cotton had emerged as one of California's leading crops and California had become an important cotton producing state. The institutional and environmental settings associated with cotton cultivation in California differed markedly from those found in the Cotton South. Both institutional conditions, such as the size of farms, and environmental factors, such as the region's dry weather during the harvest season, help explain the more rapid mechanization of picking in California.

For reasons that were exogenous or predetermined, the ex ante propensity to invest out of income in the United States declined in the 1920s while the ex ante propensity to save increased. The consequent ex ante surplus available for saving drove up asset prices. Higher asset prices produced a substantial wealth effect on consumption, converting ex ante saving into ex post consumption. Output was consequently maintained at high employment. Eventually asset markets reacted to excessive price levels. Then the momentum of falling asset prices released and reinforced the weight of “surplus” saving.

This paper describes two contrary developments in corporate finance during the Great Depression. In 1930s downswings the top one percent of firms acquired unusually high rations of liquid assets to receipts, thus withdrawing funds from the spending stream. Smaller firms, however, were forced into highly illiquid positions (by postwar standards) by episodes of monetary restriction in 1931 and 1937. It is argued that both developments made the Depression more severe. A structural change is found after 1945 in the financial behavior of large firms. This is attributed to a new cyclical pattern of price change and lower business uncertainty during postwar recessions.

The paper develops a Marxian approach to economic history utilizing some recent, far-reaching reformulations of Marxist theory. On the basis of a new specification of class structures, the approach permits a nondeterminist analysis of the interactions of class and nonclass aspects of social change.

This study uses supply and demand analysis to interpret the expansion of Canadian newsprint production and exports after World War I. Canada and the United States played complementary roles in this expansion, and by 1930, 90 percent of Canadian production based on relatively abundant natural resources went to satisfy U.S. demand. At the same time, U. S. tariffs against Canadian newsprint were relaxed, and Canadian provinces imposed a manufacturing condition on Canadian pulp and paper producers prohibiting the export of pulpwood cut from Crown lands. The analysis shows that the growth of U.S. demand and Canadian supply conditions can account for almost all the Canadian newsprint expansion, whereas policy initiatives generated at most two years of growth.

The paper will show how the Marxian concept of class can be applied to the processes of slavery in the American antebellum South. The use of the notion of classes, and particularly the reconceptualized concepts of fundamental and subsumed class processes, provides an alternative to the received non-Marxian categories of plantation capitalism and planter hegemony. These concepts are developed and applied to Southern class conflicts over both state banking and national monetary policy. Competition among various classes is shown to have had significant influences on the nature of these conflicts.

The transition from a classless to a class society has been a major dilemma to Marxist economic historians. Using the Wolof social formation of West Africa as its historical example, this paper produces a class theoretic analysis of primitive communism. From this analysis, it is then able to show how such a transition could take place.

Capitalist relations do not develop “naturally,” nor are the preconditions for capitalism assured by the rise of markets alone. This paper takes seventeenth–century Massachusetts as a case in point. Class relations there were noncapitalist. A brief exploration of these class relations as well as their economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence will show how complex interaction between classes produced the conditions necessary for capitalism.