Fiscal regimes have become progressively more centralized and though the trend extends over nearly a millennium, the process accelerated in the early nineteenth century. The growth of central government budgets as a fraction of the economy and relative to local and regional budgets is well known. Many believe that the process has been driven by changes in citizens' demand for social services and therefore have associated it with democratization and with crises such as World War I and the Great Depression. In this paper we take a different tack and consider the evolution of fiscal institutions and changes in the preferences of the central executive. Our reconsideration is prompted by the observation that from and institutional standpoint fiscal centralization long preceded the massive expansion of the welfare state in the twentieth century.

This paper examines various legal, economic, and technological aspects of economic warfare—particularly naval blockades. It begins with a summary of the rules of international law that most developed countries “agreed” should govern “legal” blockades, and the degree to which they are enforceable. The focus is then narrowed to a particular example of a blockade—the varying success of the German submarine blockade of the British Isles and the Eastern Coast of the United States during World War II. The basis for the early German success is described, as are the contribution of the varying technological (radar, Huff-Duff, the hunter-killer groups) and organizational (convoys and command) innovations in the subsequent allied success. The role of the link between the scientific and military community and the increased ability of the Americans to produce shipping are also discussed as factors essential to successfully ending the submarine blockade. Finally, the paper raised questions about the possibility of enforcing “legal rules” during a “total” war and about the role, pro and con, of individuals in structuring blockades and countermeasures.

History's broadest pattern, and its biggest unsolved problem, are its very different course on different continents. Why did Aboriginal Australians remain stone-age hunter-gatherers, while agriculture and empires were arising among Native Americans, and while widespread literacy and metal tools were arising in Eurasia? Why were Europeans the ones to conquer Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans, instead of vice versa? For lack of an accepted explanation, many people fall back on racist explanations. I shall show instead how the different fates of different peoples were stamped by differences in continental environments.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Therefore, a comparison of the U.S. and Canadian experiences is helpful, because of the close economic ties the two countries share and because of significant differences between the two countries' financial structures. Yet, both countries experienced the Great Depression at roughly the same time and of comparable economic magnitude. The survey finds that a single cause is not responsible for this event. Nevertheless, what is striking is that despite differences in the two countries' financial structures, both countries suffered a tremendous slump. Institutional differences are insufficient to insulate a country from foreign shocks or their role in insufficiently understood. I conclude that the “ideology” of the Gold Standard was significant in overcoming the potential for institutional differences to cushion the blow of the Great Depression in Canada.

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. The paper analyzes this development, attributing it to the confluence of diffusion of a general-purpose-technology (electrification) with a regime change in the industrial labor market.

Bernanke suggested that the source of credit-channel effects lies in the longevity of credit disruptions. The investigate how the duration of credit-channel effects influenced macro-economic activity during the Great Depression, we employ the amortized stock of deposits in closed banks, which contains information about the time it takes to rehabilitate insolvent debtors or liquidate their collateral. As found by Bernanke and others, vector autoregression models provide evidence that changes in prices explained the largest proportion of fluctuations in industrial output. In our model the stock of closed national banks' deposits was as important as the money stock in terms of explaining output changes. Consistent with recent theoretical work on the financial system and economic growth, our new credit proxy provides evidence that the dynamic effects of credit disruptions were cumulative and pervasive during the Depression.

Movies might appropriately be the defining genre for the twentieth century. There were no movies before the twentieth century. Knowing what movies were made and seen by whom over time, and which messages and symbols were conveyed tells us a great deal about the American Century and about how people saw capitalists and capitalism. We argue that American movie culture evolved at a time when the debate about wealth and poverty and structural change was transforming the economy, and when most people could not explain or understand the revolutionary changes underway. We also suggest that who made the movies and how they made them mattered: a majority of the early movies were made by immigrant groups, such as Jews, and that mattered to how the movies perceived the outsiders and the insiders and how they portrayed capitalism and capitalists.

This paper is an effort to build on the essays collected in our three NBER conference volumes by offering a new synthesis of American business history. We move beyond the traditional markets versus hierarchies (or markets versus central planning) dichotomy and argue that one can observe in the cross-section of the economy at any moment in time a variety of coordination mechanisms in use, man of which do not fit neatly into these ideal types. We argue further that one can speak of the incidence of these different mechanisms in cross-section, and hence one can speak of modal mechanisms and hence of the history (that is, evolution) of these cross-sections. Finally, we argue that changes over time in the incidence of these coordination mechanisms were propelled by forces that can be taken as exogenous including, most importantly, improvements in transportation and communications, urbanization, and the general rise in per capita income.

In the United States the density of economic activity in cities differed significantly over time. Between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cities became increasingly dense; however, since the second half of the twentieth century, the trend has reversed as cities have become dispersed. The density of economic activities differed significantly across cities as well. At any given point in time, there is a great variation in the density of economic activities across cities. The dynamic changes in the spatial organization of economic activities also differed across cities. In some cities, such as New York, population density grew and plateaued while in others, such as St. Louis, it grew and fell dramatically. Yet, despite the fact that the defining element of a city is its density, few scholars have systematically examined the long-run changes in the spatial organization of economic activities. This paper documents the historical changes in the density of economic activities and explores the causes of their rise and decline.

This paper investigates the dynamics of rapid frontier development in the 40 years of Barbados' history before 1680, the decades of its transition to sugar island and slave-based “plantocracy” from a settler economy peopled by white servants and numerous small land-owners. It uses a linked data set of several thousand individuals who appeared over time in three key data sources: the 1665 export registration, the 1679 census holdings of property, and the record of deeds. Combining these sources into career histories of thousands of the people who lived in Barbados during its sugar revolution make it possible to answer some of the most intriguing questions about that economic transition. In particular, these new data shed light on the land-consolidating activities of individual landowners over time, the role of small planters and artisans in the process of land clearing and agricultural capital formation, and the participation of merchants and foreign investors in creating sugar enterprises.

Why and how did the institutional characteristics often described as the Japanese system of the Japanese enterprise system emerge? Although there is a broad consensus among researchers that Japan's enterprise system emerged between 1930 and 1955, researchers differ with regard to the importance of the prewar system, changes and their magnitude during the wartime planned economy, and the impact of postwar reforms. Okazaki suggested that the origin of the current Japanese economic system can be found in the wartime planned economy. In contrast, this paper suggests that the impact of postwar reform was crucial for establishing the current system. Specifically, that GHQ's “Americanization” of the economic system created a discontinuous transformation of that system. This paper highlights the effects of occupation reform on changes in corporate finance, governance, and industrial organization. In order to clarify the transformation process of the economic system, I use microdata for capital composition, ownership structure, and firm behavior such as depreciation and investment, which I collected from the 126 largest industrial and mining firms.

The dissertation uses evidence from the notarial records between 1850 and 1905 to analyze the economic and social relations in a transitional economy. During the period covered by the project, the Sates of Yucatan changed from an economic backland to an export-oriented producer of benequen (sisal) used for binding twine and ropes in the United States and Europe. With the postcolonial power struggles in government as a backdrop, I use the notarial records to study the development of the credit market, as well as the social, institutional, and economic relations between the local players in an increasingly integrated export-oriented economy.

The editors and the Association wish to thank the following individuals who were program committee members, chairs, or discussants at the 2000 Economic History Association Meetings:

Georg Fertig's Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt is an in-depth account of eighteenth-century migration from Southwest Germany to North America. Above all, the author seeks to explain the nature of migration decisions. Section 1 discusses theories of migration that have been entertained by historians and economists. Section 2 offers a comprehensive characterization of eighteenth-century migration from Germany to North America. Section 3, the monograph's centerpiece, concerns local migration behavior in the village of Göbrichen, located in Baden. Migration decisions in the eighteenth century were made for the most part at the individual and family level; it is at this “micro” level that Fertig explores the many aspects of migration behavior. Much of this section is devoted to explaining, in the manner of David Sabean, the social and economic relationships in this village and how they changed over time. With a motto that the best stuff lies in the details, Fertig provides a plethora of possible demographic, economic, and social reasons why Göbrichen residents might want to leave town.

This important book considers changes in the legal framework of business organization in England in the era of the industrial revolution. The significance of that theme has long been recognized, but it has grown over the past two decades because of increasing emphasis, within both economics and economic history, on the need to understand institutional contexts. That said, Harris is returning to often complex sources that have not been considered closely since W. R. Scott, A. B. DuBois, and N. C. Hunt in the first half of the last century. Moreover, he brings to the task a very wide range of skills. The result is a book for the times, but one that deserves to have a very long shelf life.

Historians commonly attribute the origins of the French Revolution to the crown's relative inability to tax members of the elite. The proliferation of tax-exemptions, the argument goes, contributed to the fiscal crisis that brought about the collapse of absolutism. While Michael Kwass sets out to disprove this thesis, taxation nonetheless remains central to his understanding of the Revolution's origins. The crown did indeed succeed in taxing nobles and other members of the privileged elite, he argues, and yet the very debates and contestations that arose from such policies laid the groundwork for a new revolutionary political culture.

As a result of social historians' desire to investigate nonelite groups, the historiography of the Russian peasantry has burgeoned in the last twenty years or so. Numerous studies on both the macro and micro levels have illuminated various aspects of Russian peasant life during serfdom, the postemancipation period, and the revolutionary era. Others have begun to document the systematic destruction of the Russian peasants' way of life during collectivization, and the peasants' stubborn resistance to that onslaught. It is therefore fitting for David Moon, a recognized scholar of the Russian peasantry in the last decades of serfdom, to write a book that synthesizes the latest scholarship, both Soviet and Western, as well as studies by prerevolutionary historians and observers. The numerous citations in each footnote testify to Moon's prodigious reading and mastery of the literature.

Readers may obtain from this book an overview of German–Central American relations, the main points of which can be summarized briefly. Germany had a significant presence in the Central American republics since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Well before Germany's unification, they figured in German public discourse as potential areas for colonization, trade, investment, and performance of the rituals of great-power politics. First the Prussian state and then the Reich displayed a restrained concern for Central America, and engaged in competition with Britain, France, and the United States to advance the interests of German businesses and settlers. German commerce with the region rose at times to not-insignificant levels, especially when measured in terms of the total trade of individual Central American countries. Landowners, businesspeople, and professionals of German extraction have had a significant effect on the cultural and social histories of Guatemala and Costa Rica. However, at no time has Central America been of vital economic importance to Germany or at the forefront of German policy. In general, at least between the 1870s and 1929, German governments were unwilling to challenge U.S. hegemony in the area.

The precise role of the Marshall Plan in stimulating economic recovery in Western Europe after 1945 remains problematical. One thing, however, is for sure: writing about the Plan has given employment to many scholars. Over 50 years on, the scholarly literature is extensive and growing. Happily, a consensus of sorts has emerged. Firstly regarding the overall purpose and impact of the Plan, the New Left's contention of naked American imperialism has been replaced by the view that Marshall aid was, in Geir Lundestad's words, an instance of “empire by consent.” Secondly, it has been established that while the role of Marshall aid in fueling the West European economy was marginal, that margin was critical. The workings of what Charles Maier has called “a consensual American hegemony” have been investigated in several key works. Michael J. Hogan's The Marshall Plan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) has shown how and why the British Labour government fought so tenaciously against America's vision fot the post-World War II world, concluding that “the Marshall Plan had aimed to remake Europe in an American mode. In the end America was made the European way” (p. 445). Anthony Carew's Labour under the Marshall Plan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) is equally ambitious, focusing on American initiatives and on their reception of four major European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Britain); Carew does inquire in detail how the British Labour leaders and Trades Union movement influenced the Marshall program. In this context Manipulating Hegemony is an important new study, because it offers the first in-depth scrutiny of British responses.

Patterns of commercial development have varied widely across the world. At one end of the spectrum is the experience of premodern Europe, where commercial centers grew up in cities that were independent of the surrounding feudal political system. Over the centuries these commercial centers developed their own laws and other institutions that laid the foundation for the capitalist economic system based on the rule of law that exists today. In regions such as Southeast Asia and East Africa, by contrast, commerce was mostly a foreign import with citizens of the colonial power running the larger commercial enterprises and immigrants from China or South Asia owning and staffing the rest of the system. China fit neither of these patterns: over the centuries it developed a commercial system that was entirely Chinese, but was based on networks of traders who set many of their own rules and yet were in no sense independent of the governing bureaucracy whose power ultimately rested with the emperor. This system led to a level of commercial development that was marveled at by European visitors into the eighteenth century.