As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily upon small, local investors who preferred safety to innovation. As a result, southern manufacturing firms were hampered in their flexibility, and southern industrial structure was skewed toward mature industries with little developmental potential.

The author of the earliest general treatise on economics, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, regarded the entrepreneur as a key factor in production. Later economists have in general had the same feeling, though they have not defined the word entrepreneur in precisely the same manner. By some the entrepreneur has been considered to be primarily a risk or uncertainty bearer, by others an innovator, by still others a superintendent or manager. The list could easily be expanded. The tendency for economists to emphasize now one and now another aspect of entrepreneurship derives, I believe, from several factors: the variations in the volume and nature of economic opportunities, the increasing size of the business unit, and the changes in the legal forms of business organization.

Although it has not been our practice to publish issues devoted to single themes, the nearly simultaneous submission of three manuscripts treating the economic history of the elderly inspired us to highlight the new research in this area by publishing the articles together and by inviting Professor Stanley Engerman of the University of Rochester to write an introduction.

Perhaps in no other stage in history has a rapidly changing pattern of economic life raised so many acutely disturbing economic problems as it did in England during the last decade of the eighteenth and the first few decades of the nineteenth century, even as there have been few periods in which the body of economic thought has been more enriched. The era that included the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1814) and the postwar period witnessed such historic events as the suspension of specie payments by the Bank of England, modification of the corn laws, industrial depression, widespread introduction of machine technology, and the Luddite riots. Little wonder that the brilliant minds of Malthus, Ricardo, James Mill, Bentham, and many others were stimulated by the troublesome issues of the day.

Many students of Franklin discuss his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., as a precursor of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population? overlooking the more significant fact that Franklin's essay is part of an extensive movement to analyze population trends, a movement dating at least from John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality (1662). Just as every writer on physics from Newton to Einstein has something to say aboutmotion, Franklin and Malthus as writers on population naturally discuss some common concepts. The similarities are not remarkable. As John Adams observes, “That the first want of man is his dinner, and the second his girl, were truths well known to every democrat and aristocrat, long before the great philosopher Malthus arose, to think he enlightened the world by the discovery.” The real significance of Franklin's essay lies in its influence in drawing attention to the potential economic and military strength of the Colonies and hence in contributing indirectly to the restrictive measures of the British colonial policy, the very policies that it was written to forfend.

Between 1660 and 1815 the combat fatality rate among British navy captains fell by 98 percent, even as the combat success of the British Navy rose dramatically. Both developments can be explained as a result of learning by doing among British commanders. This learning was importantly driven by the extensive wartime experience accumulated over this period, combined with the unparalleled financial incentives for combat success offered to British commanders.

Control of livestock disease had large spillover effects on human health. By 1900 the United States was a leader in livestock disease control, thanks to the efforts of the Bureau of Animal Industry. Its first chief, Daniel Salmon, established a model that would be copied around the world in campaigns against human and animal diseases. For the most part, the Progressive Era regulations to advance livestock health and food safety were spectacular successes. The bureau's main blunder was its failure to deal effectively with trichinosis, which was far more widespread than generally believed.

The Great Depression of the 1930s involved a severe disruption in the supply of home mortgage credit. This paper empirically identifies a mechanism lying behind this credit crunch: the impairment of lenders’ balance sheets by illiquid foreclosed real estate. With data on hundreds of building and loans (B&Ls), the leading mortgage lenders in this period, we find that the overhang of foreclosed real estate explains about 30 percent of the drop in new lending between 1930 and 1935.

Present interest in communication research in the social and physical sciences raises some interesting and difficult questions for the economic historian. Arthur Cole, who claims that he is merely trying to carry further the work of Harold Innis and others at Toronto, but who is surely the moving spirit in this session, has suggested that we might begin by pin-pointing a few leading questions for examination. Is this comparatively recent development to be regarded as merely a passing phase in the history of fashions in thought? Is the process of relating communication to economic change mainly a process of sophistication and is there anything to argue about in this relationship? Or, on the other hand, does it in fact amount to a major break-through in scientific and historical analysis, something comparable to the impact made on economics about a century ago by the Austrian School?

Evidence from banks in one southern city casts doubt upon the view that the quasi-monopolistic structure of the national banking system financed American industrialization by depriving southern and western regions of relatively inexpensive money. An increased number of national banks were lending much more locally in the 1880s and 1890s in Knoxville, Tennessee, than they were in the 1860s and 1870s. The national banking expansion and associated expansion in the number of state-chartered banks appear to have resulted from a local boom rather than from removal of barriers to entry.

The sterling crisis of 1337–1339 is interesting for two reasons. First, it seems to be the earliest such crisis for which detailed analysis is possible. Second, the details of this crisis, when compared to those pertaining to the 1340's, offer what might be called a “textbook example” of the differences between non-convertible and convertible foreign exchange systems.

Economics, like geology, is an historical science. Geology has made incredible advances by accepting it is an historical, rather than a laboratory science. Economic historians can help economics make similar advances by adopting the research strategies of modern geology. Intensely empirical and global in their range, today's geologists focus on the historical remains of shocking, usually catastrophic, events in the earth's past. Already empirical and global, economic historians have ample shocks to study whether their specialty is population, technology, or institutions. A few examples of the possibilities should stimulate us to reinvigorate our parent disciplines of economics and history.