The merger movement between the First World War and the Great Depression played an important role in the evolution of the American banking industry. The first complete statistical series on mergers is presented and the factors that contributed to the merger are analyzed.

In discussing Catherine II's proficiency in the Russian language, the historian Kliuchevaskii remarked that “she could make four mistakes in spelling a Russian word consisting of three letters.” According to Peter Toumanoff, we have performed a similar feat by making no fewer than five major mistakes in a single paper.

The technology of charcoal iron manufacture in late nineteenth-century Canada is examined in this paper. Use of a super-heated and hard-driven furnace blast contributed to a resurgence of production after 1890. A lag in the diffusion of these techniques is explained by the small size of the Canadian market. Contrasts are noted with charcoal iron smelting in several regions of the United States.

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

Fire destroyed the Patent Office on December 15, 1836. From the ensuing actions by the Congress and Commissioner, it is possible to create a comprehensive and accurate description of the scope and level of technology and changes therein, as the United States transformed itself into an industrial society. This paper reports the progress made toward that description (in the form of a unified reference work), illustrates some uses of the data, and suggests other uses of the final version in expanding understanding of the processes of sociocultural change, particularly those of capitalist development.

More than a century after its termination the slave trade in Africa remains a controversial topic. In particular, disputes continue to wax strong over the profitability of the Atlantic slave trade, on three major dimensions: first, the degree of competition characteristic of the market in slaves; second, the typical magnitude of the rate of profit achieved by enterprises engaged in the “peculiar” industry; third, the status of Eric Williams's hypothesis on the contribution of the slave trade to European industrialization.

A chronology of invention in farming is given, based on patent data, for England between 1611 and 1850. The chronology is explained using market analysis. Technological constraints determined the timing of some inventions, most notably for fertilizers. Relative input costs explain the early development of the seed drill and the threshing machine. Inventive output also depended on the market for food. The overall level of patents issued was related to the level of population and to changing food prices.The output market for food was influencing invention through of population growth on the advance of farming technology.

In his essay J. E. Inikori argues that the British slavers “had freedom to carry as many slaves per ship as possible” to foreign colonies after 1788.1 He takes issue with my argument in Econocide that the British regulatory acts applied equally to those in the British direct trade to foreign colonies.2 In support of this he cites instances of British slave ships that undoubtedly loaded far more than the allowed slaves per ton in 1803.