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Inflation and Deflation in Early America, 1634–1860: Patterns of Change in the British American Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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For more than six decades recurrent efforts have been made to establish the trends of early American prices. Following the lead of Arthur Harrison Cole and other members of the International Scientific Committee on Price History, who foresaw the need for worldwide evidence on prices as an essential foundation of economic and historical analysis, scholars began to develop series for major market centers such as Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati (Warren et al. 1932; Taylor 1932a, 1932b; Bezanson et al. 1935, 1936; Cole 1938; Berry 1943; Bezanson et al. 1951). Modern refinements of these largely wholesale and urban price indexes for the years before the Civil War have yielded reliable long-term insights against which to interpret basic issues of American economic growth (U.S. Congress 1959–60; David and Solar 1977). Meanwhile, researchers focusing on the evolution of particular parts of the country or on the economic milieus of specific organizations have felt the need to determine local price movements for the historical contexts that interest them. To do so, they have used evidence from the accounts of merchants and farmers (Rothenberg 1979; Adams 1986, 1992), from probate inventories (Anderson 1975; Main 1985), and from the records of public institutions as diverse as the Philadelphia almshouse and Harvard College (Smith 1990; Foster 1962). John J. McCusker (1991, forthcoming) has contributed an overview of the key elements of this literature and has constructed from selected series a deflator that can be used to compare American economic values over time between 1700 and now.
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