For many Western countries the history of the last two centuries reveals both a sustained rise in per capita output and a tendency toward a more equal distribution of the economic product. The experience has been characterized, however, by repetitive fluctuations in the levels and growth rates of aggregate production and its components. The length of the shorter of these fluctuations, the business cycle, ranges from the 40- to 45-month inventory cycle to the so-called Juglar of seven to ten years. Two other classes of interruptions in the secular trend have also been singled out for study by economic historians. The first is the Kondratieff cycle, a movement of roughly fifty years which has been primarily identified in price series. The second is the Kuznets cycle, or “long swing,” which in length is between the Juglar and the Kondratieff. The long swing constitutes the primary theme of this study.

The success with which capital funds are mobilized and transferred to industrial and related activities is widely regarded as a critical determinant of both the timing and the pace of industrialization in the modern era. Gerschenkron, for example, has suggested that institutional developments which increased this type of capital mobility played an important role in the varying degrees of industrial progress of nineteenth-century European countries. A functionally similar development, resulting from government intervention at the time of the Civil War, occurred in American banking and provided a powerful capital-supply stimulus for the United States's postbellum industrialization. This study deals with the origins of this banking development, presents an analysis of its potential effects on patterns of capital movement, and tests the hypotheses arrived at in the theoretical analysis using banking data derived primarily from the Reports of the Comptroller of the Currency.

By-Employments, one may suppose, tend to ready preindustrial people for modern economic roles since they represent an incipient shift from agriculture to other occupations, spread skills useful to industrialization among the most backward and numerous part of the population, and stimulate ambition and geographical mobility. Although widespread in Western preindustrial societies, by-employments have been mainly treated there from the standpoint of the history of industry to the neglect of their effect on the habits, aptitudes, and outlook of fanners and their wives and children. This is partly due to the scattered and widely varied and changing forms of by-employments, which make it all but impossible to know what proportion of farmers practiced them and what part of their income they earned in this way.

This Article summarizes the main findings of a detailed. study of the changing occupational and industrial structure of Mexico's non-agricultural labor force from 1895 to 1930 and from 1930 to 1950, based on a comparison of population censuses, especially those of 1895, 1930, and 1950. Structural changes in Mexico's labor force have never been adequately studied, and the results of the present research shed considerable new light on Mexico's development. The findings also suggest important paradoxes and discontinuities in the early stages of industrialization that merit systematic recognition in models and measurements of structural change over the course of development.

NEXT to John Law's Banque Royale, the most important mercantilist monetary experiment attempted in western Europe during the pre-Adam Smith era took place in Sweden. The Bank of Sweden (Riksens Ständers Bank), which had been established as a national bank in 1688, was used by the Swedish government in the mid-eighteenth century as an engine for economic development. Sweden's experiment in paper money mercantilism gave rise to an active debate which may be called the “Swedish bullionist controversy” because of its similarity to the monetary debate in England at the outset of the nineteenth century. This controversy took place in a highly charged political environment. Political power in Sweden from 1739 to 1772 was centered in the Swedish Riksdag, a representative body composed of the Four Estates: burghers, nobles, clergy, and peasants. Within this organization, the mercantile class predominated by virtue of its control of the influential House of Burghers when the Riksdag was in session and its control of the Secret Committee, which directed government policy when the Riksdag was not in session. The two political parties—the Hats and the Caps—vied with one another for control of the government from 1739 to 1772, a span including most of the epoch known in Swedish history as the “Age of Freedom,” 1719–1772. Participants in the bullionist controversy typically fell into one or the other political camp, and the political element is strong in most of the economic literature of the period. The two political parties locked horns on the issue of the “correct” monetary policy. At stake in the struggle was not only the correctness of economic theories and policies but, ultimately, also the viability of the Swedish parliamentary form of government. It is the purpose of this article to review the policies of the Riksbank in the mid-eighteenth century and to examine the economic theories of the two contending political parties.

Nazi Germany was not the only enemy the British faced in the fall of 1940. While the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over southern England, an equally important struggle took place at the diplomatic and financial level. This time Britain's foe was far more nebulous: American distrust of things European and the memory of World War I. Although Britain eventually withstood the blitz on her own, British leaders knew full well by the summer of 1940 that continued resistance to Hitler depended upon aid from the United States.