When I began to prepare this talk, I recalled that the first such address I ever listened to helped persuade me to become an economic historian. It was Herbert Heaton's delightful “The Making of an Economic Historian,” which began with a bit of elegant doggerel. If a discipline could produce such an address, I decided that this association was certainly worth joining. But alas, I was optimistic. I was to hear more erudite presidential addresses but few so witty and informative. Nearly all these rituals, in this association or others, have followed the traditional recipe so well summarized by Shepard Clough. In a systematic review of our past meetings Shep found that “most of our presidential addresses have been devoted to making suggestions for research (mostly to be undertaken by others), to delineating the broad ‘tasks’ of economic history, to defending the kind of work in which the speaker has been engaged, and to advocating some particular methodology in our discipline.” Mine is no exception.

Economics textbooks invariably describe the important economic choices that all societies must make by the following three questions: What goods are to be produced? How are these goods to be produced? Who is to get what is produced? This way of stating social choice problems is misleading. Economic organizations necessarily do resolve these issues in one fashion or another, but even the most centralized societies do not and cannot specify the answer to these questions in advance and in detail. It is more useful and nearer to the truth to view a social system as relying on techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources rather than imagining that societies specify the particular uses to which resources will be put.

This paper is concerned with the old economic history which developed in Britain before World War I. It would be more appropriate to call it “the very old economic history,” to distinguish it from “the old economic history” of the inter-war years and beyond, and “the new economic history,” a fragile offshoot of American enterprise only now being propagated successfully. To avoid terminological clumsiness, and to indicate clearly that the history of economic history in Britain divides into three stages, I will refer throughout this paper to Economic History I (EH I), Economic History II (EH II) and Economic History III (EH III), stages which divide chronologically at 1910–1920 and 1960–1970, and which are characterized by quite distinctive methodological features. My particular aim will be to show that EH I seems to the economist, and to the new economic historian, to be modern in content and method compared with EH II. In particular EH I had a major interest in the conditions of freedom and restraint, especially those embodied in legal institutions controlling property rights, which limited individual economic action, and devoted much effort to investigating the origins of property rights and the development of custom and law as they affected property rights. EH I, also, was more strongly motivated than EH II, both because of a belief in the power of “the historical method” for the understanding and analysis of social processes, and of participation in the great socio-economic debates of the day, especially that which attempted to define the role of the state in economic life. In contrast, EH II seems to have had no particular methodological bias, and, although often politically motivated, was not involved in contemporary debate or in the determination of current policy.

The existence of property rights affects the allocation and distribution of economic resources. The exclusive rights to ownership and control over assets leads to a different level and pattern of economic activity than would occur if these assets remained unowned or “common property.” While property rights are frequently subject to various constraints imposed by law or custom, within these bounds owners are free to use their resources to achieve their desired ends. Resources may be sold in an exchange of property rights, rented for a specified time period in exchange for some quid pro quo, or employed (or kept idle) by the owner himself. The owner's welfare function will include the income (or other utility) derived from use of the resource, while, for purposes of measuring national income, the final consumption of the entire population would be included.

This paper illuminates one particular aspect of the theme of this session, property rights in man. It will deal with various emancipation plans: those actually enacted in various slave societies; those discussed by legislators who debated slave and antislave proposals; and those which, being purely fictional, have become part of counterfactual history.

The purpose of the following observations on serfdom in Western and Eastern Europe is to call attention to some of the problems, in part methodological ones, that arise in attempts to analyze the system of serfdom as a social institution in space and time.

On the eve of the Civil War southern per capita real income was eighty percent of northern. Treating slaves as property, real income per free southerner was four percent greater and growing at the same rate as its northern counterpart. Southern per capita income was but fifty-one percent of the national average in 1880, and only slowly began to relatively advance after 1900.

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.

This paper investigates the organization of southern agricultural enterprise in 1910, with special regard for the interrelations of race, land tenure conditions, and the allocation of resources. After surveying the distribution of farmers and land among the major racial and tenure classes, I seek to answer two main questions. First, what determined the distribution of farm rental contracts between share-rent and fixed-rent forms, and did the tenant's race influence the form of rental contract he obtained? Second, what effect did the race of the farmers and the form of their land tenure have on the determination of farm size? A concluding section raises some further questions and briefly explores the difficult problem of discovering the effects of racism on the southern economy.

From the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, the major countries of Western Europe—England, Holland, France, and Spain—can be viewed as a single entity in terms of overall economic growth. Population and output rose in all until the early fourteenth century when famine and then plague caused population and production to decline for over a century. Again in the sixteenth century there exist clear indications of a general expansion of population and output levels. In the seventeenth century, however, this uniform pattern is broken. Holland and England continue to expand; France falls relatively behind; and Spain absolutely declines. A simple Malthusian model appears to go far in explaining the general contours of the pre-seventeenth-century growth pattern. The differential pattern of the seventeenth century, however, has proven less amenable to unique explanation. This paper will not provide a unique explanation of the seventeenth-century growth pattern. It will, however, attempt to focus the search for such an explanation by arguing that the source of the differential growth lay in a single sector of the economies under discussion. Specifically, it will be argued that given the relatively constant technology of the period, growth, both extensive and intensive, can be explained by population increase in conjunction with economies of scale; that the source of the economies of scale lay in the transactions sectors of the economies under study; that only England and Holland had institutional structures that allowed the population growth beginning in the sixteenth century to give rise to large market areas and thereby allow realization of the economies of scale inherent in the transactions sector; and that the productivity increases brought about through realization of these economies of scale made it possible for Holland and England in the seventeenth century to support continued population increase and to evidence an increasing standard of living. This explanation of growth will necessarily remain incomplete because no attempt will be made to explain why Crown policies, and therefore institutional structures, differed between the countries.

The political and economic institutions of the Dutch Republic puzzle the historian. Closely juxtaposed are elements suggesting a tantalizing precociousness and elements which hearken to the medieval past. The Republic was the creation of a revolution; it can be identified as the first European state to throw off a monarchical regime and bring a bourgeois social class to full political power. On the other hand, the foremost motive behind this rebellion was the resistance of medieval, municipal particularism to governmental centralization—to modernization, if you will.

The rise of the nation-state is assigned by most historians a central role in the economic growth of Europe. Most recently Douglass North and Robert Thomas have argued that sustained economic growth was made possible only by institutional changes which, themselves, were a consequence of the rise of the nationstate. Thus it is clear that a complete model of the economic growth of Europe will have to account for the rise of the nation-state. That is.the humble task of this paper.

Expropriation of private property by government is seldom found on the list of policies which have influenced the course of economic development in American history. To be sure, the once-vigorous myth of antebellum laisser-faire has been discarded; and it is no longer taken as a startling proposition that governmental interventions to promote and regulate the economy occurred regularly throughout the nineteenth century. But for two reasons, I think, expropriation as an instrument of conscious resource allocation has failed to receive from historians the attention it deserves.

The traditional economic history of the 1920's emphasizes the importance of changes in the structure of the American economy. It is argued that three structural changes—monopoly power, technical change, and income distribution—tainted the prosperity of the twenties. The main features of this explanation are easily summarized. Rapid advances in technology reduced the costs of producing output. At the same time corporate monopoly power was increasing thereby restricting the tendency for output prices to fall. In the presence of weak labor unions, the interaction of technical change and monopoly power had the result of increasing “profits” relative to “wages.” The shift in the distribution of income not only favored owners of capital but it also created an imbalance between investment and consumption. Consumption expenditures could not keep pace with investment expenditures and this tendency towards underconsumption, in turn, was one reason for the onset of the Great Depression.

Corporate farming is not new in the United States. The companies of “gentlemen adventurers” setting out in the seventeenth century to establish settlements in the New World were not corporations in a modern sense, but in organizational form and motivation they bear a striking resemblance to corporation farming ventures of recent decades. The twin lures of short-run profits and long-run capital gains have been major forces in shaping land use patterns and institutional structures throughout America's history. For over 300 years repeated efforts were made to use large scale organizational forms to reap these rewards in agriculture. Up to 1950 the record was one of almost consistent failure.