An improvement on Mark Overton's method of computing crop yields from probate inventories is proposed. Harvesting costs are explicitly allowed for and a new procedure for eliminating cost-of-production valuations is offered. Applying these methods to a sample of Oxfordshire probate inventories generates higher yields than Overton's investigation of East Anglian inventories. The finding lends support to the view that most of the yield increase in early modern England occurred in the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth.

The article examines the diffusion of waterworks in one hundred Rhenish Prussian towns. It exploits features of the institutions of local political representation to develop and estimate a median voter model of demand for water capacity. The results suggest that rising income of the median voter and demand of industrial users, rather than crises in public health, spurred the installation of improved water supply.

The article examines the development of the insurance function of trade unions. It analyzes how such policies worked, and why union benefit packages differed across occupations. It also addresses the impact of insurance policies on union organization. Insurance benefits increased the ability of unions to attract and retain members. They did not, however, significantly increase the power of union leaders relative to employers or union rank and file.

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.

I investigate health as determined by nonsurvival in manuscript schedules of families matched in successive censuses. Losses were systematically greater for infants of the unskilled and of residents in large cities; for young children who lived on the frontier or had more young siblings; and for women who lived on the frontier or in the South. The findings have implications for fertility studies based on child-woman ratios, estimation of interregional migration, generality of regional mortality studies, slave-white differences in health, the modern rise of population, and wealth estimation from probate records.

In terms of revenues and expenditures, local government was the largest component of the U.S. federal system in 1902. Although it has been conjectured that this was also true during most of the nineteenth century, the evidence to support the conjecture is weak. We present a summary of a large sample of data for individual cities in 1850, 1860, and 1870, and link it to census data for 1880, 1890, and 1902.We study effects of city size and geographical location, and trends over time in city fiscal activity. Our provisional conclusion is that local government became the largest of the three components in the federal system only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

In the Netherlands a kind of urban system emerged very early in the sea provinces, but inland the country cities functioned as regional capitals without many links to cities outside their regions. After 1800 political and economic unification accelerated and the peripheral towns lost their independence. Using two indicators—the division of labor and migration—the article analyzes how this process of integration took shape after 1850.