In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income in the post-bellum South. The Civil War itself had a much smaller and less lasting effect on southern income than Coldin and Lewis assumed; in the long run, it was the least important of the three shocks.

This paper aims to provide an economic explanation of the pace and causes of the diffusion of the mechanical reaper in Ontario, 1850–1870. The analysis is based on Paul David's diffusion model, extended by the introduction of the size distribution of farms. The model is able to capture the reaper's S-shaped diffusion path. The major explanatory variable is improvements in reaper design, followed in importance by increased scale of operations and changes in factor prices. A third finding is that the effect of change in one of the three explanatory variables depends on the level of the other variables.

Scholarship on African “underdevelopment,” its antecedents, manifestations, and consequences, is now limited in focus and method. This article suggests a broader approach and emphasizes insights that might come from combining aspects of economic anthropology with analysis of institutions. A modest case study then sketches some monetary perceptions and policies of Tanganyika's colonial bureaucracies (German and British) and their reception by Tanganyika's diverse population. Indigenous reaction to alien media was rational within a neo-classical tripartite demand-for-money framework. The combined consequences of all parties'actions for both the territory's “underdevelopment” and “under-growth” receive final but not definitive scrutiny in the last section.

This paper examines the workings of the Imperial Russian gold standard, presents annual estimates on money supply under three definitions, and compares changes in money with changes in gold reserves, finding no relation. The Russian monetary system was insulated from gold movements in at least seven ways, of which three were accidental and four were deliberate. The article concludes on a note of speculative skepticism about the macro-economic significance of the rate of monetary growth, and of the gold standard itself, during the period.

This paper analyzes 1850 cost data for a sample of 36 steamboats operating on five routes. The results indicate no economies or diseconomies of scale. Substantial differences in the cost per ton-mile are found between routes. These differences are largely explained by differences in capacity utilization.

Was there an ample supply of low-skilled, free labor in the antebellum Southeast to develop a textile industry producing coarser goods? Using county-level data from the 1850 and 1860 manuscript censuses and other historical sources, we found there was a surplus of low-skilled, free (mostly white) labor in Edgefield County, South Carolina, where the textile industry was firmly established before the Civil War. If Edgefield County was not a unique case, then potential investors in southern textiles were probably not restrained by an inadequate labor force. Moreover, our Edgefield study reinforces other analyses which indicate that many whites hovered on the margins of southern society even in its most prosperous decade before the Civil War.

Aside from their studies of the iron industry, historians have given relatively little attention to the non-household manufacturing industries of colonial America—perhaps, many would say, for the very good reason that there was not much activity along these lines before the conjuncture of the American and the Industrial Revolutions. Yet there were manufactures that reached significant volumes for those times. One of these was the colonial shipbuilding industry which not only provided most of the vessels that carried North American commerce with the West Indies and the Old World but also provided the capital starved colonies with a significant export. In spite of its importance this trade has not received much attention from modern economic historians, including those who deal with the balance of payments. One reason is, perhaps, that the British government in the eighteenth century did not consider colonial built ships as foreign in any sense and did not regard their transfer to metropolitan ownership as “imports.” Thus the values of such transfers were not included in the Inspector-General's accounts of imports from the colonies nor were any other records kept of them, except for the ship-by-ship entries in the Registries of Shipping (which for the most part have not survived).

Our tentative estimates indicate that total factor productivity growth in the agricultural sector advanced at a rate between 0.2 and 0.3 percent per year during the colonial period and then remained constant for the remainder of the century, while labor productivity advanced at an average rate of about 0.4 percent over the colonial period. We point out the many difficulties encountered in making such estimates and hope that our contribution will serve as a guide for further research in early American agricultural history as well as help to increase our understanding of the rate and trend in growth of the early American economy.