¹ Smith, Adam, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776; reprint: New York, 1937), p. 538.Google Scholar

² Harte, N. B., ed., The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures 1893–1970 (London, 1971), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar

³ Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York, 1925).Google Scholar

⁴ McMahon, Theresa S., Social and Economic Standards of Living (New York, 1925).Google Scholar

⁵ Kyrk, Hazel, A Theory of Consumption (Boston, 1923).Google Scholar

⁶ Wright, Chester W., Economic History of the United States, 2nd Ed. (New York, 1949).Google Scholar

⁷ Lynd, Robert S. and Hanson, Alice C., “The People as Consumers,” President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York, 1933), Vol. 2, pp. 857, 896–906.Google Scholar

⁸ I still have fat notebooks I could not bear to discard of notes and sketchy write-ups on crops, gardens, food preservation, candle making, medical care, houses and furniture, transportation, recreation, and more.Google Scholar

⁹ Earle, Alice Morse, Homelife in Colonial Days (1898; reprint: Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1974).Google Scholar These and other books by Earle are authentically researched, though the dates and specific sources are not shown. See also, Langdon, William Chauncy, Everyday Things in American Life (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

¹⁰ National Resources Committee, Consumer Incomes in the United States: Their Distribution in 1935–36 (Washington, D.C., 08. 1938).Google Scholar Also see, Kaplan, A. D. H., Williams, Faith M. and Hanson, Alice C., Study of Consumer Purchases, Urban Series: Family Expenditures in New York City, 1935–36, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 643, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1939).Google Scholar

¹¹ The Worker's Standard of Living, International Labour Office, Studies and Reports, Series B. Economic Conditions, No. 30 (Geneva, 1938), Ch. 3.Google Scholar

¹² Hanson, Alice C., “Living Conditions of Workers in Puerto Rico,” Monthly Labor Review, 52 (04 1941), 785–809.Google Scholar Also see Hanson, Alice C. and Perez, Manuel A., Incomes and Expenditures of Wage Earners in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Department of Labor, Bulletin No. I (San Juan, P.R., 1947).Google Scholar

¹³ Hanson, Alice C. and Cornfield, Jerome, “Spending and Saving of the Nation's Families in Wartime,” Monthly Labor Review, 55 (10. 1942), 700–13;Google Scholar reprinted with additional material as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 723 (Washington, D.C. 1942).Google Scholar Also see Hanson, Alice C., Cornfield, Jerome and Epstein, Lenore A., “Income and Spending of City Families in Wartime,” Monthly Labor Review, 55 (09 1942), 419–34;Google Scholar reprinted with additional material as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 724 (Washington, D.C., 1942).Google Scholar Also Hanson, Alice C. and others, Family Spending and Saving in Wartime, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 822 (Washington, D.C. 1945, 79th Congress, 1st Session, House Document No. 147).Google Scholar

¹⁴ National Bureau of Economic Research Inc., National Accounts Review Committee, The National Economic Accounts of the United States; Review, Appraisal and Recommendations, A Report to the Office of Statistical Standards, Bureau of the Budget (Washington, D.C., 1958).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Hanson, Alice C., Helping Families Manage Their Finances, USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Home Economics Research Report No. 21 (Washington, D.C., 06, 1963).Google Scholar

¹⁶ United Nations, Report on International Definition and Measurement of Standards and Levels of Living (New York, 03 1954. E/CN.3/179, E/CN.5/299. Sales Publication No. 1954. IV. 5).Google Scholar

¹⁷ A.A.G. Bijdragen, 23 (Wageningen, The Netherlands, 1980) contains articles by eighteen European scholars on use for research of probate inventories in their countries.Google Scholar See Alice Hanson Jones, “American Probate Inventories: A Source to Estimate Wealth in 1774 in Thirteen Colonies and Three Regions,” Ibid., pp. 239–56.

¹⁸ Wimmer, Larry T. and Pope, Clayne L., “The Genealogical Society Library of Salt Lake City: A Source of Data for Economic and Social Historians,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 8 (1975), 51–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Goldsmith, Raymond W., “Historical and Comparative Rates of Production, Productivity and Prices,” Hearings before the Joint Economic Committee, 86th Congress, 1st Session, Pt. 2 (Washington, D.C., 04 7, 1959);Google Scholar reprinted as “Long Period Growth in Income and Product, 1839–1960,” in Andreano, Ralph L., ed., New Views on American Economic Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965), pp. 337–61.Google Scholar

²⁰ Gallman, Robert E., “Commodity Output, 1839–1899,” in Parker, William N., ed., Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Studies in Income and Wealth, 24 (Princeton, 1960), pp. 13–71.Google Scholar

²¹ Clapham, J. H., “Economic History as a Discipline,” Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, 5 (New York, 1931), p. 328.Google Scholar

²² Sutherland, Stella, Population Distribution in Colonial America (New York, 1936).Google Scholar

²³ Land grant and deed search by genealogists supplemented data on land missing from the probate inventories for the Middle Colonies and the South. Regression analysis proved helpful to utilize this land evidence and to complete estimates of debts owed.Google Scholar

²⁴ Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913; reprint: New York, 1960).Google Scholar

²⁵ “Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1968).Google Scholar Published, with revisions, under the same title in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 18, No. 4, Pt. 2, supplement (1970) 172 pp. The final thesis chapters were mailed from Korea where I was detailed by the USAID as advisor to the Economic Development Board and the Bank of Korea in preliminary planning of a study of Korean national wealth.Google Scholar See Jones, Alice Hanson, “Studies of Income and National Wealth in Korea,” U.S. Operations Mission to Korea (Seoul, 06 1968), mimeo.Google Scholar

²⁶ Jones, Alice Hanson, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980). It compares results by region and for the Thirteen Colonies as a whole. It contrasts the assets of free wealthholders of high-, medium-, and low-wealth class, and also those in some occupation groups of major interest, those of men and women, and of older- and younger-age groups. It measures inequality both in numerical coefficients and in Lorenz graphs.Google Scholar

²⁷ Jones, Alice Hanson, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, 3 vols., 2nd Ed. (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

²⁸ Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106. Tape of Alice Hanson Jones, “American Colonial Wealth.” It gives values for each major wealth category, for “total physical wealth,” and “net worth” (in pounds sterling) of each wealthholder in the sample. it also indicates in code the personal characteristics of age, sex, place, and occupation, and so on, for each wealthholder. Shammas, Carole, in “Consumer Behavior in Colonial Ameria,” Social Science History, 6 (Winter 1982), 67–86, has used the tape for regression analysis of relationships among some of the variables in the New England sample.Google Scholar

²⁹ The appropriate exchange rates to sterling are shown in a table.Google Scholar

³⁰ Exact titles of books, some of considerable philosophical sophistication, are rather frequent and there was near universal ownership of Bibles. Women's extensive household production contributions without monetary reward are suggested by such entries as skimmers, butter tubs, cabbage planes, cutting boxes with knives, dough troughs, candle molds, soft soap, carding combs, and pounds of feathers. The presence of inventories for widows and “singlewomen” but not for married women and references to “the widow's thirds” in intestate cases (ones without valid wills) are clues to the legal status of women and their limited independent economic activities. But some inventories show that some women of wealth ran businesses and others owned and perhaps managed plantations of considerable size. For some southern widows, slaves whom they could rent out if they did not manage themselves were a major form of wealth bequeathed by their husbands. To compare with consumer goods available today, we find no entries of ready–made clothing or pre–packaged convenience foods and, obviously, no electronic gadgets. Instead there were casks, firkins, sacks, meal chests, gill to gallon measures, and whale oil lamps. A merchant's inventory includes “a pattern for silk trousers” and a wide array of imported fabrics. His or other merchants' inventories list “Persian cloth,” “India taffeta,” “striped Barcelona handkerchiefs,” “Holland tape,” “Swiss spotted lawn,” “India calico,” “Russian toweling,” and “German Dowlas,” to name only a few of the many fabrics they carried (although an occasional one was reported “badly moth eat”). The specific consumers' goods suggest quite clearly how opulently or simply each owner lived.Google Scholar

³¹ Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary's County, Maryland, 1658–1777,” Historical Methods, 13 (Spring 1980), 81–104;Google Scholaridem, “Changing Lifestyles in Colonial St. Mary's County,” Working Papers, Regional Economic History Research Center, Eleutherian Mills Library, Vol. I, No. 3 (Greenville, Delaware, 1978), 73–118.

³² Kuse, Jan, “The Swedish Probate Inventories as a Source for Research in Economic and Social History,” A.A.G. Bijdragen, 23, 217–27.Google Scholar

³³ Blodgett, Samuel, Economica: A Srarisiical Manual for the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1806; reprint: New York, 1964).Google Scholar

³⁴ There were some exquisitely crafted furniture pieces of quality as found today in museums, and also silk stockings, silver knee and shoe buckles, gold and silver buttons, gold watches, wigs, imported chinaware, sterling silver tea services and silver plated bowls and platters, gilt-framed mirrors, diamond jewelry, and other exotic items. Fifteen pages were required to list the possessions of Peter Manigault of South Carolina, the richest case in the sample, whose net worth was equivalent to 32,700 pounds sterling. He was an attorney, had been a provincial officeholder, and owned several plantations and many slaves. A large looking glass was valued at over 7 pounds sterling. He had a “suit of blue and white cotton bed furniture” consisting of four window and four bed curtains, head cloth, tester, valance and base with white chintz lining, valued at more than the looking glass. He also had mahogany bedsteads, mahogany dining and tea tables, china wash basins and stands, mahogany desks, damask table cloths anti napkins, Queensware dishes, French plates, “Jappaned tea waiters,” ivory-handled silver knives and forks, a gold watch, a gold-headed cane, as well as a coach, a post chaise with harness for four horses, clocks, paintings, several Scotch carpets and an India carpet. In contrast, the one-page list of Mary Dwinell, a widow in Topsfield, Massachusetts, had a looking glass worth less than a fifth of a pound sterling, 25 pounds of pork, a quilted petticoat, two old chairs, two pair of sheets and two pillow cases, three pewter platters, a pewter plate and pewter basin, two iron pots, an iron kettle, and “old books.”Google Scholar

³⁵ We have, for example, Joseph Gillander, watchmaker, surprised by the grim reaper with an inventory on hand of 31 ½ dozen watch glasses, 26 watch springs, and 48 knots of “smal catgut.” John Gaudin, “marriner,” was possessed of a Hadley's quadrant, “one–third and two–ninths of the sloop Three Friends,” a feather bed, a duffel coat, a barrel of pork, and a silver watch. His fractional share in the sloop suggests not only joint ownership with possibly changing partners, but perhaps also joint trading ventures. For the importance for family survival of women's work in the household, see Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 34 (10 1977), 542–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also Main, Gloria L., Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982).Google Scholar