When blacks began to leave the South, one of their first stops was the West Virginia coal fields. There they met with reasonable success. Until the Depression, high-paying machine jobs were open to them and job segregation had almost no impact on their wages, but management positions were off-limits with a few exceptions for all-black workforces. The findings suggest two patterns worth more attention in studies of other industries.

The first systematic estimates of mortality on immigrant ships are presented in the paper. From passenger lists of immigrant arrivals, a sample of 1077 ships that arrived at New York between 1836 and 1853 was obtained and analyzed. Immigrants died at a rate of about 10 per thousand boarded per month with a significantly higher rate for 1849. Mortality was found to vary by sex, port of origin, and season of arrival. No significant variation was found between mortality and the following variables: crowding, nationality of the immigrant, and year of arrival.

Contrary to the view that the periphery of the world economy benefited from rapidly expanding trade, the Ottoman economy actually faced a distinctly unfavorable world conjuncture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rates of growth of foreign trade dropped, external terms of trade deteriorated, declining wheat prices affected peasant producers, and the establishment of European control over Ottoman finances led to large debt payments abroad.Indirect data indicate that rates of change of agricultural and aggregate production were also lower during the “Great Depression” as compared to the later period.

A literature has developed recently to analyze the disruptive effects on small, open economies of a sudden change in the value of their natural resources. The paper looks to that literature to explain the effect on the Australian colonies of the discovery of substantial gold deposits in the 1850s. The price and quantity adjustments predicted by the model are found to be well supported by the historical experience with one important exception. Immigration played a far greater role in the Australian case than has been suggested in the theoretical literature. The model does, however, allow for a compact description of the confusing decade in Australian history and explains a number of previously unconnected phenomena.

New data on mortality and voyage length in the nineteenth-century slave trade make possible further testing of hypotheses on why slaves died during the middle passage. Mortality rates (defined as death per slaves embarked/voyage length in days × 1000) were higher in the nineteenth century than in earlier centuries and varied markedly between regions of embarkation. In the high mortality regions, all ships in the sample appeared to have experienced a higher death rate, suggesting that epidemics were not of prime importance. Mortality rates do not appear to have fluctuated very much during the voyage nor does the slaves–per–ton variable have much explanatory power. The major explanation is probably endemic disease.

Technological changes in the U.S. pulp and paper industry between 1915 and 1940 are chronicled, and three patterns—evolutionary bias, output-increasing innovation in response to technological disequilibria, and differences in the timing of innovations between the 1920s and 1930s—are identified and explained by means of a theoretical framework for induced innovation. The framework conceptualizes technological change as a means for growth-seeking firms to overcome barriers to accumulation and provides a general explanation of induced innovation that is situated in historical time.

The managerial revolution resulted in the concentration of production decisions in the hands of management. Radical economists and historians have disputed the conventional view that these changes in work organization were necessary to increase production efficiency. Yet curiously there seem to be few issues of fact in dispute between the radical and the conventional accounts. I offer here an interpretation of the radical position which explains why this is so, and why profitable and efficient organizations of work will differ in capitalist economies. The argument hinges on the conditions under which workers were able to act collectively.

The banking crisis of 1930 is one of the central events of the Great Depression. The causes of this wave of bank failures are examined using individual bank balance sheet data. Both real and monetary factors are found to have forced the closure of banks, many of which were already weakened by regulatory constraints and regional economic difficulties. The bank failures in this crisis do not seem to have been different in character from failures in previous years, suggesting that the rise in the number of failures may have marked only the beginning of a recession rather than a depression.

The relative importance of federal and local government was reversed between 1932 and 1940. This changing composition of government expenditures by level of government accounts for the rise of “big” government during the Depression. State governments expanded their fiscal activity, maintaining their share of total government expenditures. Utilizing data on federal grants and state and local expenditures, I find that the relative decline of local governments and sustained growth of state governments can be explained by the financial and administrative provisions of the federal New Deal programs.

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France—a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations upon which early modern historians have tended to rely.

An econometric model is here used to estimate the price and output effect of the Limitation of the Vend, a mineowners' cartel. It is found that when a formal regulation existed the price of coal rose significantly in the London market, whereas there was little output effect. The price effect was relatively small, however, especially when compared to the per unit tax on coal. Although the cartel was deemed to be successful, the existence of substantial monopoly profits was questioned.

France's canal age was largely the outgrowth of the plan proposed by François Becquey, the state administrator who orchestrated a successful campaign to convince influential Frenchmen that a nationwide canal network was one of the essential tasks of their generation. As Becquey originally conceived his plan, canal building would directly contribute to economic growth and help foster a spirit of business enterprise. In the end he had to settle for a scheme under which the government paid a steep price to a handful of financial consortia for the right to assume all the risks and costs of building and operating the system itself.