The shift from steam to electric power in manufacturing is recounted. Between 1880 and 1930 the production and distribution of mechanical power rapidly evolved from water and steam prime movers with shaft and belt drive systems to electric motors that drove individual machines. The use of electricity reduced the energy required to drive machinery, but more important, enabled industry to obtain greater output per unit of capital and labor input.Reduced energy needs and increased productivity in manufacturing influenced the relationship between energy consumption and gross national product in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The study of French enterprise and entrepreneurship is rewarding for two major reasons. In the first place, anything that will help explain the present weakness of French industry and commerce throws light in turn on one of the most important political phenomena of the last 150 years: the fall of France from hegemony under Napoleon to the position she holds today. Secondly, the history of French business and businessmen is significant precisely because of France's relatively minor place in the economic world. If we are to weigh the validity of the recent emphasis of theorists on the role of the entrepreneur qua se in the over-all process of economic change—on the contribution of the personal element to the impersonal operation of the system—we must consider not only the more “modern” nations but those less industrialized as well. It will not suffice to study the progress of American or German business and deduce therefrom impressive theories on the importance of the businessman. The converse must also be examined: To what extent are certain attitudes and values inimical to the development of enterprise ? Or concretely in the case of France, to what extent have the character and mentality of the French financier, industrialist, or merchant been responsible for the relatively retarded status of the country's economy ?

This article scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. Multivariate analysis of 4,705 demographic observations, covering women's marriage age, female lifetime celibacy, and household complexity in 39 European countries, shows that the most extreme manifestations of the EMP were associated with economic stagnation rather than growth. There is no evidence that the EMP improved economic performance by empowering women, increasing human capital investment, adjusting population to economic trends, or sustaining beneficial cultural norms. European economic success was not caused by the EMP and its sources must therefore be sought in other factors.

In 1910 one New England cotton textile operative performed as much work as 1.5 British, 2.3 German, and nearly 6 Greek, Japanese, Indian, or Chinese workers. Input substitution, and differences in technology, management, and workers' training or inherent abilities do not explain this. Instead local culture seems to have determined worker performance. Such differences, if widespread, would explain much of the international variation in wages. They also have important consequences for understanding labor migration, the choice of technique, and the sources of economic growth.

We revisit the evidence on the relations between institutions, the cost of government debt, and financial development in Britain (1690–1790) and find that interest rates remained high and volatile for four decades after the Glorious Revolution, partly due to wars and instability; British interest rates co-moved with those in Holland; Debt per capita remained lower in Britain than in Holland until around 1780; and Britain did not borrow at lower rates than European countries with more limited protection of property rights. We conclude that, in the short run, institutional reforms are not rewarded by financial markets.

The record of British and French finance during the Napoleonic wars presents the striking picture of a financially strong nation abandoning the gold standard, borrowing heavily, and generating inflation, while a financially weaker country followed more “orthodox” policies. This paradoxical behavior is explained by Britain's strong credibility that allowed more flexible policies, while France's poor reputation forced reliance on taxation.

This paper uses data on height by age drawn from Civil War muster rolls to analyze the nutritional status of the native-born white population during the antebellum period. Preliminary regression results reveal significant differences in adult heights across occupations, regions, urban-rural and migrant status, and birth cohorts. The economic and demographic implications of these findings are also explored.

No Matter which authority we consult on the English Poor Laws in the nineteenth century the same conclusion emerge: the Old Poor Law demoralized the working class, promotedd population growth, lowered wasges, reduced rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on retepayes; the poverty which it relieved; the problem of devising an efficeient public relief system was finally solved with the passaage of the“harsh but salutry” Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. So Unanimous are both the indictment and the verdit of historians on this question that we may forego the pleasure of citing “chapter and verse.”

The Great Depression was marked by a severe outbreak of protectionist trade policies. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade barriers, there was substantial cross-country variation in the movement to protectionism. Specifically, countries that remained on the gold standard resorted to tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls to a greater extent than countries that went off gold. Just as the gold standard constraint on monetary policy is critical to understanding macroeconomic developments in this period, exchange rate policies help explain changes in trade policy.

Much of American legal activity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries centered on the transfer of a continent of natural resources—agricultural land, water, timber, mineral deposits—from public to private control. That transfer was crucial for the development of an economic system based largely on private incentives and market transactions. Legal policy at both the state and federal level regarding natural resource ownership and use has been the focus of work by Paul W. Gates, Willard Hurst, Harry Scheiber, and others. Those studies have generally been aimed at describing the nature and impact of governmental support for private economic activities. This paper is concerned with a somewhat different question—the timing and emergence of particular legal institutions (laws and governments). The framework for the study is that offered by Lance Davis and Douglass North in Institutional Change and American Economic Growth. There they hypothesize that institutions develop in response to changing private needs or profit potentials: “It is the possibility of profits that cannot be captured within the existing arrangemental structure that leads to the formation of new (or the mutation of old) institutional arrangements.” Essentially the same model of institutional change is used by some American legal historians, notably Lawrence Friedman and Willard Hurst. They argue that the law can only be understood by examining the surrounding economic, political, and social conditions. Those conditions mold the law, and as they change, they force legal institutions to change. Friedman ties this view closely to the Davis-North model in A History of American Law, where he argues that competing interest groups are the primary determinants of the nature of the law at any one time. This view of legal institutional change is in sharp contrast to the common law tradition of legal history which sees the law as an autonomous institution passed on from generation to generation—an institution that molds the economic, political, and social inputs from society.

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

The textbook theory of tariffs, and their converse, the movement to freer trade, has more elements than we need for the nineteenth century, but also lacks some. In the usual comparative statics, a tariff may be said to have ten effects: on price, trade, production (the protective effect), consumption, revenue, terms of trade, internal income distribution, monopoly, employment and the balance of payments.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed millions worldwide and hundreds of thousands in the United States. This article studies the impact of air pollution on pandemic mortality. The analysis combines a panel dataset on infant and all-age mortality with a novel measure of air pollution based on the burning of coal in a large sample of U.S. cities. We estimate that air pollution contributed significantly to pandemic mortality. Cities that used more coal experienced tens of thousands of excess deaths in 1918 relative to cities that used less coal with similar pre-pandemic socioeconomic conditions and baseline health. Factors related to poverty, public health, and the timing of onset also affected pandemic mortality. The findings support recent medical evidence on the link between air pollution and influenza infection, and suggest that poor air quality was an important cause of mortality during the pandemic.

How does sovereign debt emerge? In the early nineteenth century, intermediaries' market power and prestige served to overcome information asymmetries. Relying on insights from finance theory, we argue that capitalists turned to intermediaries' reputations to guide their investment strategies. Intermediaries could in turn commit or else they would lose market share. This sustained the development of sovereign debt. This new perspective is backed by archival evidence and empirical data, and it suggests why strong but undemocratic states could borrow.

This article introduces the Americas in the Great Divergence debate by measuring real wages in various North and South American cities between colonization and independence, and comparing them to Europe and Asia. We find that for much of the period, North America was the most prosperous region of the world, while Latin America was much poorer. We then discuss a series of hypotheses that can explain these results, including migration, the demography of the American Indian populations, and the various labor systems implemented in the continent.

Between 1830 and 1860 the United States experienced rapid economic growth but declining stature and rising mortality. Debate has centered on whether the American diet deteriorated in the mid-nineteenth century. Employing census and muster records, this article tests the hypotheses that adult height was positively correlated with local production of nutrients in early childhood and negatively correlated with local mortality conditions, urbanization, proximity to transport, and population mobility. Results indicate that antebellum economic growth was accompanied by an increasing nationalization and internationalization of the disease environment, which affected the health and longevity of the population.This article is based on two earlier papers presented at the conference “The Biological Standard of Living and Economic Development: Nutrition, Health, and Well-Being in Historical Perspective,” held at the University of Munich, Munich, Germany, 18–21 January 1997. They have been published in The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective edited by John Komlos and Jörg Baten (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), pp. 155–80 and 190–207. This research was funded in part by the National Institute of Aging (AG 10120) and by the National Science Foundation (#SBR-9408525). The authors wish to thank Brian A'Hearn, Markus Heintel, and Robert Fogel for data and Jörg Baten, Timothy Cuff, Richard Easterlin, Stanley Engerman, John Komlos, John Murray, Richard Steckel, Robert Whaples, and participants at the Economic History Seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, the Economics Seminar at the College of William and Mary, the NBER Summer Institute, and the Social Science Colloquium at Colgate University for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions. In addition two anonymous referees provided very useful suggestions. The late Robert Gallman also provided valuable comments at an early stage of the project. Part of this research was conducted by Craig while he was a German Marshall Fund Fellow at the Seminar fuer Wirtschaftsgeschichte at the University of Munich.

Around 1850 Sweden had a stock of human capital wildly disproportionate to its very low income level. This situation contributed significantly to the speed of the growth spurt that occurred between that time and World War I. In the short run, this large human capital stock allowed Sweden to take fuller advantage of the new opportunities for exports which appeared around 1860. In the longer run Sweden benefited because it is easier to achieve a rapid accumulation of physical than of human capital. The disproportionate early accumulation of human capital is explained in terms of religious, political, and military events of the previous three centuries.

Manufacturing firm data for 1820 to 1850 are employed to investigate the role of women and children in the industrialization of the American Northeast. The principal findings include: (1) Women and children composed a major share of the entire manufacturing labor force; (2) their employment was closely associated with production processes used by large establishments, both mechanized and non-mechanized; (3) the wage of females (and boys) increased relative to that of men with industrial development; and (4) female labor force participation in industrial counties was substantial. These findings bear on the nature of technical change during early industrialization and why American industrial development was initially concentrated in the Northeast.

We employed data on the heights of English and Irish male convicts transported to Australia to assess the living standards of workers between 1770 and 1815. Falling heights of urban-and rural-born males after 1780 and a delayed growth spurt for 13- to 23-year-old boys revealed declining living standards among English workers during the Industrial Revolution. This conclusion was supported by the fall in English workers' heights relative to that of convicts transported from Ireland. Significant urban-rural and regional variations in English living standards were revealed by using regression techniques.

The success with which capital funds are mobilized and transferred to industrial and related activities is widely regarded as a critical determinant of both the timing and the pace of industrialization in the modern era. Gerschenkron, for example, has suggested that institutional developments which increased this type of capital mobility played an important role in the varying degrees of industrial progress of nineteenth-century European countries. A functionally similar development, resulting from government intervention at the time of the Civil War, occurred in American banking and provided a powerful capital-supply stimulus for the United States's postbellum industrialization. This study deals with the origins of this banking development, presents an analysis of its potential effects on patterns of capital movement, and tests the hypotheses arrived at in the theoretical analysis using banking data derived primarily from the Reports of the Comptroller of the Currency.