Exploration of the data on the character of the ownership of manufacturing establishments presented in the 1900 Census volumes has revealed some challenging phenomena. Buried in this material, for example, is the somewhat unexpected information that the corporation was used extensively in manufacturing establishments in such localities as Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and California, but to a much smaller degree in places like New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, where by 1900 the corporation might be assumed to have become well established as a form of business organization.

Industrial historians have generally failed to note the importance of the technical standards that have been developed through intercompany agreements in the automobile industry. While they have studied the changing institutional character of American industry and have chronicled the mechanical developments of recent technology, they have undertaken but few explorations into die complex interrelationships between mechanical technology and business structure. In relating the growdi of intercompany technical standards' in the automobile industry up to about 1930, this study attempts to show the influence of changing business conditions on standardization and hence on the mechanical technology of the automobile.

An Essential factor in the rise of the investment banker to a dominant position in the American economy in the decades following 1880 was his command of the mobilized savings of the country's financial institutions. While considerable research has been devoted to the investment bankers' domination of transport and industry, little attention has been paid to their organization of financial institutions and their significance for the development of these institutions and their reorientation toward the securities market. This paper is a study of the relationship between the large life insurance companies and investment banking in the years immediately preceding the Armstrong Investigation.

Charles Francis Adams, JR., one of my favorite characters, preserved with youthful pride the reactions by letter to one of his earliest essays for the Atlantic. One, from an unidentifiable correspondent in Cambridge, expressed a considerable degree of disenchantment with the author's effort.

In A society operating completely on the principles of economic individualism, each adult person would be expected to make provision for his own needs and for those of his dependents. He would have to earn enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter, as well as develop the necessary frugality to lay by enough to care for himself and dependents during periods of illness and unemployment. He would likewise be expected to make provision for old age and for funeral expenses. The duties of an adult person in society would be looked upon as being not only economic but also moral in nature, requiring the constant making of choices in expenditure, not merely of what goods to buy but of the spacing of expenditures over long periods of time. If a person met with economic reverses and could not provide, he showed himself to be incapable of dealing with the problems of a responsible adult and ought not to look to others to get him out of his predicament. His condition would be considered to result from lack of the moral qualities required of a person who had taken upon himself the responsibilities of adult life.

While the problem of economic development long has been a standard topic for economic historians, it has not been until recent years that most other modern economists have displayed a more dian casual interest in this subject. Two sets of factors have been particularly important in stimulating this new activity. The first, of course, concerns the ever-increasing efforts being made to accelerate economic development in the so-called “backward” regions of the world. Since World War II a number of the countries in the economically backward list have received eitfier complete political independence or a much greater degree of freedom. And one of the major ways they are using this new freedom of action is to plan and undertake extensive governmental development projects. For rightly or wrongly most of these countries feel that their former rulers thwarted the type of economic development most beneficial to the native population, and they are almost fanatically anxious to remedy this condition.

The National Labor Union represented the first attempt to organize a national federation of labor in the United States. The germ of the idea for such a national federation of labor had been planted at the beginning of the Civil War, but it was not until 1866 that plans were set in motion to organize such a body. In February of that year William Harding, the president of the Coachmakers' International Union, met with Willam H. Sylvis, president of the Iron Moulders' International Union. A preliminary meeting called by these two leaders led to the convening of a national labor convention in Baltimore on August 20, 1866. From this modest beginning the National Labor Union quickly rose to a prominent position. The Chicago Tribune in 1869 estimated its membership at 800,000, and Sylvis himself put the figure at 600,000. Both estimates are undoubtedly exaggerated, but it is quite apparent that the organization represented a large proportion of the nation's laboring force and perhaps at its peak strength numbered between 200,000 and 400,000. The decline of the union was almost as spectacular as its rise, and by 1872 it was totally defunct.

The Industrial Revolution had begun to affect the Austrian textile industry by the beginning of the nineteenth century. First to feel the effects were the woolen industry and the new cotton industry, which soon had copies of the new English spinning machines in operation. In England adaptation of these machines to flax had been made by John Marshall at Leeds as early as 1793, so that flax was spun dry in successful competition with hand-spun yarn, but only in the coarser yarns up to No. 16. However, similar attempts were not successful in Austria. The machines and processes were not so efficient as the English and could not compete with the cheap domestic hand-spun yarn. Because flax fibers are held together by a gum, they cannot be spun like cotton without excessive waste. Special treatment and machines had to be devised in order that flax might be spun in the range of numbers demanded by the market, and profitably. In the second decade of the new century efforts were being made in Austria, as elsewhere, to solve these special problems. Production of linen goods led all other industries in the monarchy. It provided a livelihood, wholly or in part, for thousands of families in town and country and constituted an important export. But the severe blows dealt by the Napoleonic Wars were followed by growing competition from more progressive linen industries in western Europe and especially from the rapidly growing and more easily mechanized cotton industry. The importance of the introduction of machinery in the Austrian linen industry as a means of meeting these threats to its very existence thus becomes apparent.

Present-Day economic historians should be well qualified to talk about uncertainty. There was a happier time when the empirical and concrete study of individual situations was deemed sufficient, when mediodological problems of the long run were left for historians to raise and solve if they could and controversies centered on questions that they themselves formulated. Differences there were, but few irreconcilable differences; areas of the unknown were recognized but there appeared to be no gaps in knowledge that could not be bridged in the course of time. Now, for better or worse, this sheltered position has itself become a datum of history. The challenge of social scientists seeking chics to an understanding of die forces shaping secular change has become increasingly insistent and effective; the strenuous wooing of Clio by economic theorists, statisticians, and Parsonian sociologists can no longer be ignored. Assuming that retreat to the shelter of cloistered storytelling is out of the question, creative response on the part of historians to the uncertainties of their twentieth-century environment becomes a condition of leadership in historical inquiry, its lack a virtual guarantee of submergence.

Historians have taken it for granted that the Revolutionary, debt was fairly well concentrated before it was funded in 1790, but they have not been able to support this view with concrete evidence. Most of the people living at the time thought the same thing but were likewise unable to prove it. The truth could not be known until Hamilton's funding operation assembled the securities that made up the debt. Under the act of 1790 a new federal loan was instituted. Various kinds of securities representing unpaid claims against the government were taken as subscriptions and the possessors given new federal stock. As nearly all the old securities came in, the government had full information about the transfer and ownership of the Revolutionary debt. The details, however, were not made public. Later, a succession of fires in the treasury destroyed nearly all the central records. Documents now existing, though voluminous, are scattered, incomplete, and hard to interpret. Historians have not made much use of them. For this reason, the ownership of the debt, which was a question in 1790, is a question still.

Napoleon's successful campaigns against Austria in 1805 and 1809 led to the signing of the treaties of Pressburg and Schonbrunn which placed interalia the eastern shores of the Adriatic in French hands. The entire coastline from Trieste to Cattaro became part of the Illyrian Provinces designed to act as a barrier against British trade, to provide a land route between Turkey and the French empire, and to weaken Austria.

The purpose of this note is to examine the method by which N. S. B. Gras establishes his thesis concerning the evolution of the English grain markets. According to his book, grain, markets evolved through several distinct stages, culminating in the “metropolitan market.” Although the influence of the London market by the sixteenth century can be demonstrated without reference to the existence of the early stages, it is nevertheless they that constitute the essential novelty of Mr. Gras's approach and, presumably, the main contribution of the book to the study of economic history. It will be contended below that the existence of certain of these early stages is at least doubtful and that, in any case, their economic significance is either negligible or not provable.

The appraisal of the period when America was governed by the Articles of Confederation as one of stagnation, peculation, and disunion so long popular with writers of the Fiske “Critical Period” school has been attacked quite successfully in recent years by such writers as Merrill Jensen. While challenging many popular, misconceptions concerning the period, he has also demonstrated that the mercantile situation was by no means a hopeless one and that long before 1789 the states were moving in the direction of an increasing co-operation on matters affecting interstate and international trade.

Of The many tasks confronting economic history, none are more shrouded in uncertainty than those encompassed in the theme “Institutional and Cultural Factors in Economic History.” We have in general treated these factors respectfully, but as a profession we have preferred to work in areas more clearly defined and with tools more fully developed. As a result few areas have received less sustained attention than the zones where we must seek the interplay of economic, social, and cultural forces.

Nineteenth-century romanticism and the hardships of capitalist individualism have caused scholars to emphasize collectivistic social and economic institutions i n the Middle Ages. Carried to extremes by the English socialists, this attitude tended to ignore or even to deny the competitive aspects of medieval production. Church authorities and guild ordinances were often cited in support of the thesis that the era was noncompetitive. Even Sombart was able to see in the medieval craftsman and tradesman a petit bourgeois who typically held to the morals prescribed by church authorities.

R. C. O. Matthews' full-length study of British fluctuations in the 1830's is good history and good economic analysis. There is no equivalent book on a single cyclical passage, not even excepting the great interwar boom and slump in the United States.

The following bit of research has two purposes, one general and one specific. Its general purpose is to suggest how the three elements in its title arc linked together, and in doing this to connect more closely the work of historians, which has focused on entrepreneurship, with that of economists, which has centered around economic growth as measured in statistical aggregates. The specific purpose is to show how the organization of the German coal-mining industry in fact constituted one such connection between the economic activity of individuals and the industrial development of a nation.