I Do not much hold with ardent debate about method. A historian method is as individual—as private—a matter as a novelist's style. There is good reason for reserve—even reticence—on this subject, except insofar as we seek to share each other's unique professional adventures and to listen occasionally, in a mood of interest tempered with skepticism, to such general reflections as we each would draw from those adventures.

From the days of the confederation through the nineteenth century, the frontier land speculator was a familiar figure in the United States. Perambulating foreigners recorded the activities of this gentleman, and land speculation was discussed in both Congress and in the editorial columns of Western newspapers. Many twentieth-century students of America's political and economic development have dealt in one way or another with frontier land speculation. They have depicted the land speculator at times as a sinister figure, corroding the morals of national or state legislators as the lawmakers endeavored to formulate land policy. Writers have sketched the antagonism between speculator and “actual settler.” Nor have they ignored the effect which the speculator had upon the social and economic development of the region in which he operated. Such commentators have contributed to a literature that has its share of colorful characters and even displays the occasional symbol: star-crossed Robert Morris entering debtors'

Economic and business literature has hitherto served restricted purposes, although by no means unimportant ones. Chiefly it has been called upon to explain specific events or trends, from the issuance of assignats to the decline of laissez faire, or it has been surveyed to reveal the emergence and evolution of certain concepts significant for economic theory or economic analysis. Business literature has been especially neglected, unless one includes within that term writings on behalf of the East India Company on economic policies or unless one remembers the books and pamphlets utilized by historians of the East India and other such enterprises in the compounding of their volumes. By and large it is accurate to assert that parts of the literature have been used, but the whole has been overlooked.

When he became Her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Unionist government of 1895, Joseph Chamberlain was already the acknowledged leader of those who believed that Britain would most surely safeguard her military and economic future through closer links with the Empire and the extension of its boundaries. Yet a mere fifteen years before he had played an important part in the campaign against Disraeli's imperialist designs that had swept the Liberals back to power. The change in Chamberlain's political fortunes as a result of the Home Rule controversy needs no recapitulation here. More interesting is the process by which he was won over to those very ideas of imperial consolidation that Disraeli had propounded so frequently.

During World War II a system of labor participation and representation emerged in a series of national economic planning agencies. This study is primarily concerned with the representation and participation of organized labor in the activities of the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the War Production Board. Some attention is also given to the War Manpower Commission and the Office of Price Administration.

This paper is an attempt to examine critically the function of theory in historical research and particularly in economic history. the function of We shall take as our starting point the assertion that the historian is not interested simply in collecting facts or true statements about some segment of previous experience. He wants to find causes and to explain what happened. The purpose of this paper is to introduce some of the problems attached to the concepts of historical causality and explanation in a stochastic universe and to suggest how the analytic tools of scientific inference can be applied in economic historiography.

Jules Michelet remarked that the forms of association “must differ … among the different countries, according to the diversity of national genius.” and Denis W. Brogan once said (he is surely one who does not merit the reproach): “Because we have studied only France, we have not understood even France.” The second remark might apply to the United States, too. There has been talk of the value of comparative study of labor movements, but comparatively little application of comparative methods to labor history. A comparison of the history of association in labor unions in France and the United States may therefore throw a little more light on the “national genius” of each country as well as on die behavior of each labor movement.

Since 1951 the population, social structure, and economy of Norristown, Pennsylvania, have been the focus of study of an interdisciplinary research seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Under the over-all theme of technological change and social adjustment, a variety of investigations have been conducted to discover the ways in which the processes of industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century have operated dynamically to bring about changes in the social and economic structure of the Norristown community.

During the winter of 1867–1868 readers of Le Temps were entertained by a series of articles on the municipal finances of Paris by one of the paper's sharp-tongued contributors, the republican deputy Jules Ferry. The substance of the articles was not original, nor were they the most revealing of the many publications on the subject that appeared during the ‘sixties, but they were cutting and witty, and in 1868 Ferry republished diem as a booklet with an arresting title, The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann. (Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann was a pun on Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, a play presented at the Odéon in 1851 and later set to Offenbach's music.) When more analytical studies were forgotten, Ferry's work was remembered. The title found its way into popular histories, and for most people, Baron Haussmann's financing of the rebuilding of Paris is still something seen darkly through the glass of Ferry's political pamphlet.

The mainsprings of the entrepreneur's activity are his expectations of profit. Being aspirations, these are rarely expressed, but they are founded on objective facts—upon the experience of profits actually earned. Until the days of the limited company or corporation, actual profits were close secrets. Few records survive of the profits of individual enterprises before the nineteenth century, and little is known of general levels of profits and profit expectations. This paper attempts to throw some light on the subject by an exploration of some financial records of the English shipping industry in the decades around 1700. The records are of special interest because the assets of this industry were expensive and long-lived units; it was natural to relate earnings to an annual rate of return on the capital invested in those units. The industry was, moreover, a large and rapidly growing one.

As part of a general inquiry into the economic growth of die United Kingdom, an attempt is being made to estimate long-term trends in output of individual industries over as long a period of time as the data allow. Throughout the eighteenth century wool was the major English manufacturing industry. It is the purpose of this article to consider the evidence of contemporary estimates of the value of the woolen manufacture, with a view to using them as a basis for an assessment of the broad trends in its output over this crucial period of Britain's industrial history.

In The past few decades several approaches have been adopted with respect to the Molasses Act controversy of 1730–1733. It has been considered from the standpoint of Anglo-French commercial rivalry; as a conflict between two British colonial regions; as a measure designed to aid one group of British colonies at the expense of another; and as a source of precedents for parliamentary taxation of the colonies on the one hand and the colonists’ refusal to comply with such taxation on the other. While the trade between North America and the French West Indies was the chief target of attack, it is not always realized that proponents of the Molasses Act had other objectives in mind. British sugar planters were not only at odds with North American merchants who traded with the foreign sugar islands, but also with Irish merchants who pursued a similar course of trade and with the buyers of sugar in England. Failure to achieve results by means of restrictive legislation in one area did not necessarily preclude success in others. The controversy needs to be understood in terms of the international sugar economy, the changing nature of the British market for sugar and rum, and the planters’ attempt to adapt the Navigation Acts to these changes. From the planters’ standpoint, the Molasses Act was only one of several measures that were needed to adapt the Navigation Acts to the realities of the market, so it may be unrealistic to consider any one act in isolation.

Our conference today on comparative economic history is in some clanger of rushing into the wide-open spaces of ambiguity, for the term is new, and to agree too quickly on its meaning and implications may not even be desirable. In order to avoid engaging in a mere game of definitions, this paper will deal first with three general types of comparison in relation to their bearing on problems of evidence. It will then review some of the chief uses to which these types of comparison have been put in building up our body of knowledge about Western economic history. The survey will close with particular reference to our own preindustrial stages of economic growth, when western Europe was, in our uncomplimentary phrase, an underdeveloped or backward area.

The relative stagnation of British industry during what has been called the climacteric of the 1890's did not extend to shipbuilding, though that industry, producing capital goods and depending on a substantial foreign market, shared many of the characteristics of the industries most affected by foreign competition. The purpose of this article is to discuss the comparative success of British shipbuilding. In the first two sections, the conditions of shipbuilding in Britain and in the countries that rivaled her are briefly described, and in the remainder of the paper the factors influencing comparative costs are examined.

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.

Investigation of Florentine legislation concerning the practice of usury in the fourteenth century leads the researcher to the conclusion that a general theory cannot be constructed unless more facts are made known. It is to be hoped that an exposition of factual data will lead to an inquiry into those “shades and nuances” of meaning that are symptomatic of historical change. I do not believe that the present state of knowledge on this problem allows more than a descriptive historical approach, followed by a suggestion of possible levels of understanding and strategies of further inquiry. There are many reasons for taking this position. First, the documents available to the researcher are less than adequate for the formulation of a general theory. To cite only one instance, the judicial records of the period before 1343 were burned in the revolution of that year. Second, case histories of those individuals cited by the court or the councils as usurers have not been written. Finally, the Consulte, which contain the opinions of the advisory councils of the Priorate, do not aid the researcher in understanding the motives that animated the passage of legislation. With these limitations firmly in mind, I should like to present certain facts that I suspect can be understood only dimly within die framework of our present knowledge of Florentine life in the Trecento. One further disclaimer must be made: this paper does not purport to consider the state of juridical consciousness nor the legalistic matrix that provided the framework in which the events narrated took place.

In this paper I shall limit myself to various comments on integration narrowly conceived, that is, within the discipline of economic history itself, and to a few historical cases used to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of comparative method as a means to this end. Comparative study, as Miss Thrupp has stressed, scarcely represents a new departure in economic thought. The novelty seems to be rather in the almost universal appeal it now has for those who would explore the mysteries of change. This interest appears to be a consequence of the impact of recent developments in backward-area studies and the closely related pursuit of a general theory of growth; these tend to focus attention on different kinds and rates of growth and comparison becomes inevitable. In turn, accumulations of knowledge about economic change in very different contexts lead to the need for some means of correlating diese, partly for aesthetic reasons but also because a synoptic view of the landscape of change has its very practical use. Unless the whole field can be surveyed from a single point of view, and by this I do not mean the same point of view, it is very difficult to know where the need for more intensive exploration is greatest.