It is commonly thought that income distribution among people became more concentrated after the Civil War and that this direction continued until the turn of the century. We can look methodically at the income tax distributions from the Civil War period and compare them directly with the distributions arising from the income tax after 1912. We also have some data from the abortive income tax of 1894. After examining the various blocks of evidence, the conclusion will be made that inequality among upper-income groups did not increase during this period. It is necessary to emphasize that the present investigation is one of income and not of wealth. It might have been possible for the nonhuman wealth distribution among people to remain constant or to increase in inequality while the personal income distribution was decreasing in inequality.

Nazi Germany was not the only enemy the British faced in the fall of 1940. While the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over southern England, an equally important struggle took place at the diplomatic and financial level. This time Britain's foe was far more nebulous: American distrust of things European and the memory of World War I. Although Britain eventually withstood the blitz on her own, British leaders knew full well by the summer of 1940 that continued resistance to Hitler depended upon aid from the United States.

The economic system of the Ottoman Empire and its basic economic principles derived from a traditional view of state and society which had prevailed since antiquity in the empires of the Near East. This theory, since it determined the attitude and policy of the administrators, was of considerable practical importance.

The cost of fencing the farm was a topic of constant discussion and complaint in American agricultural circles in the second half of the nineteenth century This prosaic topic appeared continually during the period 1850 to 1880 in agricultural journals, state agricultural bulletins, and annual reports of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture.

Japanese historians have characterized the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as an “early modern feudal system” (kinsei hòken seido). While there is disagreement on the nature of feudalism in general, and the form of feudalism in the Tokugawa period in particular, I believe that Tokugawa society does include the essential elements of a feudal system so as to justify this label. What is particularly conspicuous is that Japan, like Europe, experienced feudalism before the birth of the modern age. In the case of Japan, as Professor E. O. Reischauer has pointed out, feudalism permitted the development of a goal-oriented ethic, rather than a status-oriented ethic, a strong sense of duty and obligation, and excluded the non warrior class from political power. Professor R. N. Bellah has differentiated the social values of Japan's feudalism from those of European feudalism by stressing the element of “loyalty” in the former and identifying this value as a key to the modernization of Japan. Whatever the special characteristics of feudalism in Japan may be, all analysts agree that the term “feudalism” is appropriate as a description of Tokugawa society.

The object of this dissertation is to analyze the role of the banking system in the process of industrialization in Spain from 1829 to 1874. The reasons for taking these two dates as starting and closing points in my investigation will be evident as the exposition proceeds.

The Old Poor Law has recently found a forceful defender in Mark Blaug, who in two articles has challenged the critics of England's first public welfare system and displayed the clay feet of that towering structure of words, the evidence for the 1834 Report. This is a notable achievement, but Mr. Blaug's case should not be accepted in toto: indeed, that it has survived so long without criticism is surprising. G. R. Elton felicitously referred to one of his critics as a “self-appointed hound of heaven,” but scholars who propound provocative theses are likely to provoke responses. Mr. Blaug's interpretation of the Old Poor Law is, to at least one “selfappointed hound,” eminently provocative.

It is one of the ironies of economic historiography that the country which gave birth to the Historical School of Economics should have come to play such a relatively minor role in the field of modern economic history. The irony lies in the fact that the Historical School, although it emphasized historical studies at the expense of theory, did see economic history as an integral part of economics. Its founders recognized that the main purpose of economic history is to elucidate the problem of economic development, to search for “development laws,” and in attempting to accomplish that mission, they made use of economic theory. From around the 1870's, however, interest in these ties to mainstream economics began to recede; emphasis on institutional and legal studies, collection of sources, and sheer antiquarianism grew ever more important. Since then, German economic historians, increasingly producing economic history without economics, have been playing Hamlet without the Prince. The present character of the field in Germany is reflected in the fact that German economic historians are de facto and de jure social historians as well. Indeed, many university chairs, the principal West German journal (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte—hereafter cited as VSWG), and the German counterpart to our Economic History Association (Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte) do grant formal priority to social history.