Having had no previous experience in giving presidential addresses, I spent most of the last year on a study of such addresses, delivered before our own and other scholarly associations. The conclusion of my research was that most of those addresses could be readily classified under one of two headings. The subject matter was either “The Discipline and I” or “The Discipline, Its Past, Present, and Future.“ Faced with this alternative, I found the choice between being either frankly egotistic or grandly universalistic rather hard. Although naturally leaning toward the former, I could not quite suppress my interest in the latter. Finally, I resolved my doubts by recalling the well-known proposition that since chocolate is good and oysters are good, chocolate and oysters together must be excellent indeed. What this means is that I should like to make a number of remarks—some anticritical, but some also self-critical—about my approach to the industrial development of Europe in the nineteenth century; but in doing so I shall select those aspects of the matter which have more general significance and try to connect them with some methodological observations.

If we were to reconstruct a blueprint of the Russian government's goals and priorities for industrial development in the late nineteenth century, it would include the following: (1) development of a network of internal transportation, (2) stabilization of the ruble in foreign exchanges through convertibility and the buildingup of an export surplus as a prerequisite for enabling the Russian government to borrow abroad, and (3) stimulation of the development of new industries in Russia and their protection in their “infancy.” Given the relative success of Russia's industrialization during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and the important role that the government played in this effort, there is no justification for outright rejection or condemnation of Russian government economic policies. There were, however, serious shortcomings in particular government policies, and the presumed effects that they had upon the industrialization process were not always desirable. This essay is a modest attempt to reexamine Russian government policies on the assumption that the industrialization of Russia was a continuing goal of the state policies beginning with the 1880's and one of relatively high priority. The implication of the analysis is that if some of the defects of the state's policies had been avoided, the process of industrialization in Russia would have proceeded at least at as fast a pace and the economic costs to Russian society would probably have been smaller.

Few generalizations find wider acceptance among specialists onChina than that which holds that the Chinese Imperial Government was hostile to commerce and industry and that this hostility was a major element in the country's failure to achieve modern economic growth. There is, of course, an important element of truth in this generalization, but analysis of the issues involved has generally suffered from a failure to make clear just what it was that the Chinese government in the nineteenth century should have done to promote development.

State intervention as an obstacle to economic growth and development is a proposition that is especially intriguing in connection with the Habsburg monarchy of the eighteenth century. The posing of the question forces the historian to consider whether it can be applied to the problem of a static society ruled by a dynasty and controlled by a large agglomeration of urban-corporate and rural-manorial structures. What is a state in this context and what are obstacles to economic progress?

Every economist must be pleased to start some hares; it can become embarrassing, however, when they begin to breed like rabbits. In the ten years since we first tried our slavery model in public, in Professor Gerschenkron's history seminar, more than thirty published arguments addressed to that model have come to our attention. We don't pretend to know whether that represents an increased output over preceding decades. Besides, in our youthful enthusiasm we gave the impression that we were disposing, once and for all, of a piece of intellectual game that was already rather high. In any event, the apparent egocentricity that turned up all those papers and articles may be explained, if not justified, by Ralph Barton Perry's dictum that every reader looks up two references in an index: sex, and his own name.

The story is told that Dean Donham of the Harvard Business School once asked Professor Schumpeter, after a lecture on the entrepreneur—Schumpeter's plumed knight of economic development–what was the most important single factor in accounting for the success of the businessman. Quick as a shot came the answer: “Good health.” For purposes of this inquiry into certain aspects of American social structure and American values which seem to have been of decisive importance in contributing to American economic growth, certain variables–like the health of the businessman and the endowment of the country with respect to natural resources –will not be considered.

The current controversies about production and yields of medieval agriculture may give an outsider the impression that on this subject historians are more at variance than they actually are. Some historians may still cling to the Victorian belief that things economic were perpetually on the rise; historians thus minded are inclined to take it for granted that both the aggregate product of agriculture and agricultural output per head improved all through the Middle Ages. Other students, for example, Beveridge or Bennett, derived from the imperfectly selected data of the Bishop of Winchester's manors the impression that output per acre, and probably also per unit of seed, stayed put all through the Middle Ages. More recently other historians, including myself, have argued that output per acre tended to slump in the earlier, that is, pre-Black Death period, and may have picked up somewhat in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The concert of historians may therefore strike the ear as being even more cacophonous on this theme than on most other medieval themes.

There are two widely held explanations for South Asia's failure to attain the level of economic performance achieved by the now developed countries of the world: One is that British imperial policy frustrated economic growth after 1750; the other is that the Indian value system and die social structure that reflected that value system were obstacles to economic growth. It is worthy of note that both interpretations tend to visualize pre-1750 South Asia at a level of economic organization and performance at least equal to that of western Europe in 1750, with the economic gap appearing only subsequently.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate more thoroughly the experience of the urban and agricultural wage earner during the first four decades of American history by focusing on one major city and its environs. While the majority of Americans were engaged in independent agricultural pursuits during this period, the proportion of wage earners to total population was much greater in urban areas. Artisans, laborers, domestics, and mariners were among the largest of wage-earning groups.

In spite of the recognized difficulties of dividing the white population of the antebellum South into two distinct classes—slaveowners and poor whites—historians have persisted in differentiating the roles of the small slaveholder and nonslaveholder vis-à-vis that of the large slaveholder or plantation owner. It is the purpose of this dissertation to evaluate the roles of the nonslaveholding and small slaveholding farmer in comparison with that of the large slaveholder in the westward expansion of the antebellum cotton economy.

One of the most important problems in the study of economic development is the role of technological change in the growth process. My dissertation is an analysis of some of the major variables which influenced the timing of the invention, adoption, and diffusion of the compound marine steam engine. The problem was divided into three parts: (1) all those variables pertaining directly to the invention of the engine, and the very first effects on the cost structure of the steamship industry; (2) the role of the compound marine steam engine in the growth of the German merchant fleet, 1872–1887, with special emphasis on the diffusion of the invention and its productivity effects; and (3) the effect of the compound steam engine on the sailing ship component of the German merchant fleet.

The explanations put forth during the nineteenth century to account for Ireland's economic condition may be grouped under three heads. The first was associated with the conceptual framework of the English classical economists and stressed overpopulation and excessive subdivision. A second approach, which might be called the underdeveloped-country explanation, emphasized the need for social overhead capital—drainage, flood control, communications, and education. The third approach argued that defects in the land tenure system were at the root of Ireland's failure to develop a prosperous economy.

The connections between financial development and economic growth are drawing increased attention on many fronts. This dissertation studies ways in which the American financial system functioned to aid in the accumulation and mobilization of capital in the second half of the nineteenth century. The evolution of the banking system, by far the dominant nineteenth-century financial intermediary, is emphasized, but the role of Federal government finance is of scarcely less importance. The interrelated actions of the banks and the Treasury did much to set the tone in various financial markets during most of the period. While considerable study has been devoted to these actions and their short-run effects, much less has been written about their long-run implications. A major contention of the work is that financial strains caused by the Civil War and the various responses to these strains were accompanied by significant changes in the banking system—in its structure, the types of assets in which it dealt, and in its relations with the Treasury—all of which increased its potential for satisfying the demands placed upon it by a rapidly expanding economy. These changes helped to make capital, which may well have been the relatively scarce factor in the antebellum era, more abundant in the postwar Gilded Age, and they therefore abetted the rapid industrialization of those decades.

The dissertation is a study of the service industries in the United States during the period 1839 through 1899. The primary purpose of the study is to provide three series relating to the quantitative development of the sector. These series—value-added, gainful workers, and capital stock—provide benchmark estimates at decade intervals centered on census years. Series are presented for the aggregate sector; the major components, final and intermediate services; and eight industries. These eight industries, defined as the service sector, are trade, transportation and public utilities, finance and insurance, professional services, personal services, government, education, and the independent hand trades.