Meat transformed North Atlantic shipping, leading to dominance of liners and changed the economics of freight rates. Management coordination of meat shipment led to concentration in shipping. Only liner companies could provide specialized ships with the regularity needed and they dominated North Atlantic shipping. The cargo capacity of cattle ships, beyond that used for animals, lowered freight rates on grain below levels that would otherwise have prevailed. The berth rate on wheat from New York to Liverpool was most affected. Consequently, this readily available freight rate can be potentially misleading as an indicator of ocean shipping developments.

The Journal of Economic History completed another successful year in 2002/03, marked (for a change) by an absence of dramatic change. Most contributors and some book publishers have by now adapted to our tripod office system: North American materials go to Wright at Stanford, all other geographic areas go to Harley at Western Ontario, with Susan Isaac handling production editing tasks at Florida State. If your paper or book does not fit neatly into this classification system, you can send it wherever you want, but we reserve the right to reallocate afterwards.

A general equilibrium arbitrated by prices arising from consumers and firms interacting in markets is a core idea in economic analysis and provides powerful insight into many historical issues. Modern computational models permit investigators to exploit the insights of general equilibrium. This article outlines the ideas of general equilibrium and of computational general equilibrium models. In the process, strengths and limitations are discussed. The discussion is given focus by using the Harley-Crafts model as its focus and explores briefly the consequences of changing the allocation principals in the agricultural sector of the model from a capitalist arrangement to a peasant arrangement.

Doug Irwin and Peter Temin offer a welcome study of the tariff and American industrialization. Although largely overlooked, the tariff significantly influences our interpretation of early American industrialization. If the tariff had no substantial effect, as Irwin and Temin argue, we view early American industrialization quite differently than if the tariff induced industrialization by diverting trade to otherwise noncompetitive firms within a customs union, as I believe. Although I welcome attention to the tariff, I feel that Irwin and Temin's argument rests on a misconception of the British cotton industry and of the nature of potential competition between American and British cloth in the absence of protection.

This study examines technical change, trade, economic structure, and growth during the British Industrial Revolution by means of computational general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. It rejects Peter Temin's contention that our “new view” of sectorally concentrated productivity growth is inconsistent with industrial export data. A CGE trade model with diminishing returns in agriculture and realistic assumptions about consumer demand shows that while technical change in cottons and iron were major spurs to exportation of those specific goods, the need for food imports also stimulated exports generally. Incorporating trade data thus enriches our “new view.”

Aggregate estimates of British growth during the classical Industrial Revolution have been reassessed in the past decade and present a significantly revision of earlier views of British growth. Growth was slower dian previously believed and industrial change more localized and with a smaller impact Agricultural improvement and die relative ease with which labour moved to urban industry seems central to the experience. Although industry's impact now seems less than previously believed, industrial cities transformed society because die cotton textile industry expanded to exploit the advantage of its new technology and labour moved to the cities. But while exports expanded the share of industry and caused urbanization, they did not raise per capita income much because competition ensured that the benefits went to consumers. Finally, die specific features of die British industrial revolution seem to provide only weak guide to die growth process elsewhere.

Although the American cotton textile industry was heavily protected, most commentators, following Frank Taussig's lead, have concluded that indigenous technological advance made large branches of the industry internationally competitive by the 1830s. The prices of equivalent fabrics in Britain and America in the late 1840s and 1850s challenge that conclusion. “Domestic” fabrics, in which American mills had supposedly become competitive, cost 20 percent more in America. Critical reexamination of other evidence—cost comparisons from the 1830s and American exports—supports the conclusion that an unprotected American industry could not have competed.

This article demonstrates that new industrial technology caused a revolutionary decline in nineteenth-century freight rates. This overturns Douglass North's well-known conclusion that organizational improvements were the dominant source of savings. While North's American freight rate series declines prior to the use of the metal steamship, British rates decline only modestly prior to 1850 and then rapidly as metal steamships come into use. Cotton freights dominate North's index and declined when cotton became more tightly packed for shipment. Metal ships and steam propulsion, however, caused a general decline in freight rates after 1850.

The railroads in the American West were constructed in a few concentrated building booms. This timing of construction resulted from the alternate creation and collapse of imperfect property rights to rights of way in partially settled areas. These “property rights” arose from strategic behavior within the railroad oligopoly. When enforcement costs of cooperative action were low, the railroads were able to create rents by avoiding construction ahead of demand. When enforcement became difficult, however, construction was the only way to capture rents on unbuilt lines so a construction boom ensued.