In the early nineteenth century, five versions of stationary steam engines were in widespread use. In America, the high-pressure engine was dominant in the West, but on the eastern seaboard the low-pressure engine was viable. In Britain, the low-pressure engine was overwhelmingly dominant. Here we analyze the evidence on cost and performance of high- and low-pressure engines, and show that fuel-price and interest-rate differentials were sufficient to explain the distribution of steam engine types in America.

By a nation's economic growth we understand a sustained increase in its magnitude as an economic unit. Conversely, stagnation and decline can be defined as a sustained failure of the nation's economic magnitude to increase, or as its persistent decline.

My archival studies in Egyptian banks reveal that nominal interest rates charged by foreign financial capital in Egypt fell strongly as compared with European rates throughout the period 1882–1914. Interest differentials declined by 2 to 2 ½ percent. This is explained by the increasing confidence of European investors with British occupation and policies. To explain the large inflow of financial capital after 1900 a sharp decline in real interest rates, related to the upsurge of agricultural prices, is posited. The case offers interesting parallels to present-day problems of excessive indebtedness in Third World countries.

Archeologists assure us that organized social life has existed on this earth for about two hundred and fifty thousand years. How millions of people have sought to satisfy their wants over this tremendous span of time is the acknowledged province of economic history. Yet, for lack of records, the gild of economic historians must, for the most part, confine their attention to the last one per cent of this time span; indeed the great bulk of research in economic history is devoted the last one-tenth of one per cent of the archeologists' two hundred and fifty thousand years of social history. Even then the economic historian is utterly overwhelmed with facts. He who essays to write the economic history of the United States, for example, must depict as best can the economic activities of people for more than a hundred and fifty years, farmers, merchants, manufacturers, wage-earners, rentiers; men, women and children in all walks of life, in all variety of occupations. The task is utterly staggering. An army of economic historians would be required to write a complete economic history of the United States; a regiment at least to write a faithful factual account of a single industry.

The Old South's economic stake in western land expansion and slave migration is examined in a two-region, general equilibrium model of slave mobility. The model separates the effect on the Old South's assets and slave population of more western land from that of slave sales per se. The authors conclude that the Old South had no economic stake in the New South. The most conservative estimate reveals that a doubling of western lands in 1850 would have increased Old South wealth by less than two percent.

In the nineteenth century, the British were popular throughout the west coast of South America as the cultural and economic allies of the ruling elites. The criollos of Peru and Chile, who had inherited the colonial social order, looked to France in matters of art and fashion but viewed the British as the providers of commerce and economic progress. They welcomed Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants as merchants, artisans, and prospective grooms. In Peru, the British played a key role in developing the market for guano (the fertilizer composed of bird excrement and the precursor of the nitrate, salitre, trade), and British ships took Chile's copper and wheat to England from the 1840's through the early 1870's. By 1870, the development of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the London Bank of Mexico and South America assured the British dominance of the commerce along the west coast.

This article explains the emergence of a plantation economy in the antebellum sugar sector. The hypothesis of increasing returns to scale was tested using a Zellner-Revankar generalized production function model. Economies of scale were found using samples from the manuscript censuses, but these scale economies diminished with size. A second important factor in explaining the size distribution of farms was the dual technology in the manufacturing stage of sugar production. Farms with inferior horse-power mills had poorer survival records and less flexibility in expansion than those using steam power mills.

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported in Lloyd's Registers are shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

The economic differences between the Europeans on the eve of industrialization and the currently less developed peoples has assumed a certain degree of importance in the recent literature. It has been argued that West Europeans had significantly higher per capita incomes than do most of the peoples of the world today and that the levels of living of many people fell off during the process of early industrialization. Obviously, the argument is important in that the levels of living found in most of today's less developed peoples could not decline significantly widiout the risk of disaster.

The paper is based upon research over a rather long period into the public activities in railroad construction in the southern states. Table I-A presents a quantitative summary of public contributions in cash, bonds, and other securities; government-endorsed bonds; remission of Federal import duties; and estimated realized values of Federal land grants prior to 1861. It represents an attempt to give a preliminary summary of the public effort. The estimates on public land grants are tentative, and other items are subject to further refinements through additional studies. It does not represent the total of the public effort, since no account is taken in this summary of the investment values of the many important public and quasi-public contributions in services, the uses of public streets and other properties, tax exemptions, and banking privileges. An adequate appraisal of these must await further research. The summary does reflect, however, some of the outstanding features of the public railroad-building effort, which will supply a useful background for the consideration of the main problem of this paper.

The introduction of steam engines in Germany was the work of Prussian state administrators, a body of men who were technically trained, educated in Mercantilist traditions, and guided by the principles of Mercantilist policy. That fact was typical of the German political and economic setup in the late eighteenth century; Prussian administrators also introduced the modern iron industry into Germany. By contrast. English industrial leadership in the same years was already in the hands of co-operating inventors and entrepreneurs, as evidenced by the classical partnership of Watt and Boulton, the prototype of many to come in capitalistic industry.

The process of financial integration has been charted in several studies of the late nineteenth-century U.S. economy but lacks comparable documentation in a European case. This gap is filled through an examination of interregional interest rate trends in the pre-World War I Austrian economy. The Austrian data show a marked trend toward rate convergence beginning in the 1870s. These results are significant for the U.S. case and for the long standing debate on the economic viability of the Habsburg Monarchy before World War I and of the successor states in the interwar period.

New spatial patterns, with areas specializing by function rather than industry, reflect twentieth-century developments in industrial organization, the role of the state, and Britain's system of cities. In the short run, World War II and postwar regional policy increased factory-building and employment in formerly depressed areas. Longer-run effects of both helped concentrate research and development within the South near London and dispersed routinized production to other areas. Organizational links within firms and to government departments, intellectual and commercial contacts in London, and locational preferences of professional and technical workers influenced R & D location.

Between 1815 and 1850, the economic policy of England was marked by several far-reaching reforms advocated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their disciples. Revision of monetary and banking policy, abandonment of the archaic Navigation Acts, and eventual repeal of the Corn Laws, all bear the unmistakable impress of the influence of the classical economists.

We construct an individual-level data set of partnership contracts in late-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro to study the determinants of contract terms. Partners with limited liability contributed more capital and received lower draws for private expenses and lower profit shares than their unlimited partners. Unlimited partners in turn received higher-powered incentives when they contracted with limited partners than when they contracted with unlimited partners. A reform that changed the relative bargaining power further improved the terms of unlimited partners in limited firms. These findings highlight the roles of risk, incentives, and bargaining power in shaping contracts.

The rapid growth of deposits in New York over the late nineteenth century is often attributed to the release of pent-up demand for transactions services. I advance a complementary explanation that emphasizes the market for bank shares. The stock market was important because it generated quotations that signaled depositors about the condition of individual banks as innovations in banking practices allowed confidence to grow. A new database of prices, dividends, and balance sheet items for traded banks and a series of dynamic panel models show that fluctuations in bank prices influenced the course of the expansion.

The opinion that spice prices rose in Europe in the century before 1492 and that that had something to do with Europe's oceanic expansion is remarkably persistent, in spite of the blow delivered to it by A. H. Lybyer more than a half-century ago. A distinct drop, however, in the price of spices, and particularly of pepper, between the decades 1420-1430 and 1440-1450 is indicated by a recent study of Antwerp prices, which thus reinforces the suggestion of older scattered figures from Navarre, England, and Klosterneuburg (Vienna). Pepper fell about 50 percent in that interval and did not return to its former high level until after 1498. In view of Venice's preeminent position in the trade in those decades, Venice is the obvious place to look for the source of a decline of prices generally in the West. Wholesale prices of pepper at Venice, 1363-1510, drawn mainly from diaries, merchants' account books, and letters, are shown in the accompanying Table 1. This explains the fall in prices in northern and western Europe. After selling at between 83 and 157 ducats per cargo in 1411-1426, pepper prices at Venice fell to 50 in 1432 and drifted lower in the 1440's and 1470's, occasionally even going below 40. Rarely did the price rise above 55 ducats a cargo until the interruption of Venetian voyages by the war with the Ottoman Turks in 1499.

Ferguson and Temin criticize my article for only paying lip service to the notion of a twin crisis while providing a story of a pure banking crisis. In fact, I have never claimed that the crisis was a pure banking crisis. The question is whether and to what extent banks contributed to the crisis. Ferguson and Temin take the position that the crisis was a pure currency crisis. I argue that weaknesses in the banking sector existed, which interacted with the currency problems in numerous ways. The focus of my article on banks reflects the nature of the question, rather than any view that currency problems were unimportant.