In this article we investigate the nature of long-term fluctuations (commonly called long-swings or Kuznets cycles) in the general level of activity of the American economy over the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. We conclude that a stable socio-economic structure of long-term economic change was in existence over this entire period. This structure defines a concurrence of relationships between certain economic and demographic variables which in combination determined the dynamic pattern by which economic growth proceeded. Our findings should be of interest to the economic historian studying the general process of economic growth in a capitalist economy.

The conduct of the British government's financial affairs during the Duke of Newcastle's tenure as First Lord of the Treasury has never to my knowledge been specifically investigated. This gap in our understanding of the eighteenth century is doubly puzzling: the period itself, during which Britain won a war and an empire, is pivotal in the kingdom's history; moreover, the sources for such a study are uncommonly rich for precisely those years in which the duke held the office. The lack of such an analysis, however, has not prevented several authorities from passing severe judgments on the duke's handling of financial affairs, and while these authorities speak from extensive knowledge of the Treasury and its complexities, I have come to conclude that their assessments are too harsh—a view I shall elaborate at the end of this essay. But even if the reader should conclude at that point that my flirtation with revisionism is itself ill-founded, there is yet another value in examining the Treasury under Newcastle: as in perhaps no other period we can sometimes see decisions at the Treasury actually being made, ideas being transmitted, and problems being analyzed. And above all we can see in some detail how Britain's remarkably successful governmental financial machine operated.

That the ruling samurai class suffered increasing poverty during the Tokugawa period is accepted, without dissent, by all students of Japanese history. However, this view is based primarily on contemporary descriptions of the financial distress felt by the samurai class and has never been established empirically through the use of quantitative data. Most of the literature supporting this long accepted view is highly impressionistic and fails even to define precisely what is meant by increasing poverty. Thus, the writers on this subject use the phrase “increasing poverty” to mean variously a decline in real income, a lagging increase in real income vis-a-vis that of other classes (merchants, artisans, and peasants), or increasing “psychological poverty” experienced due to increasing expectations while real income was rising less rapidly. Authors not infrequently use these different concepts of “increasing poverty” interchangeably.

Skilled engineers who had sufficient technical know-how to construct the antebellum canals and railroads were viewed by their contemporaries as a key input in the transportation revolution, and a number of modern scholars have concurred in this judgment. Yet very little is known about the economics of the antebellum engineering profession. This article is a modest attempt to help remedy that deficiency. We shall present and describe three original salary series that chart the course of earnings for three distinct grades of antebellum civil engineers from 1820 through 1859. In addition, we shall argue that our data clearly indicate that a highly competitive market of broad geographical scope for high-ranking engineers was coming into being during the decade of the 1820's. This trend toward competition which these data reveal persisted until about 1835, but was then swamped by the rapid economic changes which occurred in the fifteen years from 1835 to 1850, only to reappear again in the last antebellum decade. As we shall argue below, the economic changes that temporarily overrode the earlier pattern of competition reflect a significant structural change in the antebellum engineer market.

On December 5, 1910, the Immigration Commission presented its voluminous report to the Congress. Though the report covered a multitude of topics, a central theme was that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were earning less than the “old” immigrants from northwestern Europe because the newcomers were willing to accept a lower standard of living. “They were,” the commission concluded, “content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory.” The discovery of such “unfair competition,” along with its other findings, led the commission to recommend legislation restricting the admission of the “new” immigrant groups, and subsequently the immigration laws of 1917, 1921, and 1924 implemented this recommendation.

The major purpose of this paper is to call attention to an article by Keynes (1937) published in Eugenics Review the year following the publication of the General Theory, and which has been neglected in the literature on Keynes. The emphasis in the General Theory is on the short-run with given resources and a given state of technology. In his Eugenics Review article, Keynes examined the effects of a changing population upon savings and investment and the level of income and employment. He was thereby led on to an approach nearer to what might be regarded as growth theory than that of the General Theory. In this sense, Keynes' 1937 article may be viewed as supplementing the General Theory.