The theme of the 2005 annual meetings of the Economic History Association has been War and Economic History: Causes, Costs and Consequences. In this essay I will address this theme by briefly examining the ways in which cliometricians have viewed one particular conflict—The American Civil War—over the past four decades. The first part of my essay deals with the attack, which began at the end of the 1950s, mounted by a group of “New Economic Historians” on the existing explanation of the war; the second part deals with my own adventures as I try to make sense of the economic and political factors that produced the conflict we call the Civil War.

This article reassesses the importance of colonial status to investors before 1914 by means of multivariable regression analysis of the data available to contemporaries. We show that British colonies were able to borrow in London at significantly lower rates of interest than noncolonies precisely because of their colonial status, which mattered more than either gold standard adherence or the sustainability of fiscal policies. The “empire effect” was, on average, a discount of around 100 basis points, rising to around 175 basis points for the underdeveloped African and Asian colonies. Colonial status significantly reduced the default risk perceived by investors.

Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differential between the two countries was driven by the higher wages enjoyed in the United States. Additional analysis reveals that the relative price of calories was approximately 20 percent greater in Great Britain than in the United States.

The completion of the undersea Atlantic telegraph cable more closely integrated securities markets on two continents. This article conducts an event study on the introduction of the Atlantic Cable in July 1866. Using daily data on one security with a dual listing on the New York and London stock exchanges, the event study provides some evidence that the information lag between the two markets shortened from ten days to zero days. Cointegration analysis confirms the result. Historical markets priced securities so well that transatlantic steamship crossing times can be recovered from stock prices.

A substantial literature exists claiming the adoption of tractors was inefficiently slow. We develop a linear programming model of farms that specifically incorporates the opportunity cost of the farmer's time and apply it to farms in Iowa during the interwar period. We develop technological coefficients derived at the task level, based on the data and agricultural reports from that period. By valuing the time saved by tractors, we demonstrate that the seemingly slow rate of tractor adoption was in fact wealth maximizing. Tractors were widely adopted only after the improvement in implements that came late in this period.

Private property in the industry of the Third Reich is often considered a mere nominal provision without much substance. However, that is not correct, because firms, despite the rationing and licensing activities of the state, still had ample scope to devise their own production and investment profiles. Even regarding war-related projects, freedom of contract was generally respected; instead of using power, the state offered firms a number of contract options to choose from. There were several motives behind this attitude of the regime, among them the conviction that private property provided important incentives for increasing efficiency.

Despite the widespread acceptance of Friedman and Schwartz's interpretation of the 1936/37 increase in member bank reserve requirements as the major cause of the 1937/38 recession there is surprisingly little straightforward evidence on this issue, perhaps because data limitations and structural instability preclude econometric modeling. We exploit a simple alternative, comparing member banks with nonmember banks not subject to changes in reserve requirements. The results support the hypothesis that the increase in reserve requirements reduced the availability of bank credit and contributed to the recession.

This article describes a newly constructed data set of all U.S. state banks from 1782 to 1861. It contains the names and locations of all banks and branches that went into business and an estimate of when each operated. The compilation is based on reported balance sheets, listings in banknote reporters, and secondary sources. Based on these data, the article presents a count of the number of banks and branches in business by state. I argue that my series are superior to previously existing ones for reasons of consistency, accuracy, and timing. The article contains examples to support this argument.

This note investigates the sources of variation in the growth of per capita personal incomes across U.S. states during the Great Depression. States entering the economic contraction with relatively low per capita incomes tended to suffer larger percentage declines in per capita income than did high income states. By contrast, low-income states tended to experience larger percentage gains during the recovery. Hence, state per capita incomes diverged during the contraction phase and converged during the recovery phase.

Historically speaking, social security systems are a recent development. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was limited state social intervention in the developed world, and even less in Latin America. A remarkable expansion of “social rights” took place in the second half of the century. By the 1970s most Latin American countries had set up at least some form of old-age protection, while others had already developed a wide welfare network. Public social expenditures grew to represent over 20 percent of the gross domestic product in a number of countries, including Argentina.

Writing in 1845 Friedrich Engels (and with him many other informed contemporaries) had few hesitations in pointing out the driving forces of the epochal transformation he was witnessing:

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and the machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognized.

The relocation of Europeans across the North Atlantic during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was the culmination of the longest-lived and most widely documented transoceanic migration of modern times. This enormous population transfer was a great human drama, a major international demographic shift, and a massive historical experiment in cultural transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization. This migration was also a complex and powerful travel business containing both risks and rewards for its three fundamental participants: the movers, the moved, and the sovereign authorities on either side of the borders being traversed. Prior studies have not adequately explained this business nor appreciated the extent to which the various strategies for dealing with its associated risks were crucial, largely congruent, and self-reinforcing elements of the overall migration process.

The integration of women into formal labor markets was one of the most salient changes of the twentieth century. The “female century,” in the words of The Economist, witnessed an extraordinary transformation of women's opportunities and outcomes both in and outside the household. My dissertation explores both the causes and the consequences of women's move from home to market in the United States during three episodes of rapid change. It begins by documenting demand-side shifts during the 1940s that increased the earnings and occupational choices of African-American women; then demonstrates the impact of contraceptive technology on the extent and intensity of women's participation in the formal labor market after 1960; and, finally, estimates the consequences of shifts in women's labor supply for the growth of earnings inequality in the United States during the 1980s.

This dissertation argues that the federal government played an essential role in the shaping of the western economy. American expansion necessitated not only that land be opened up, but also that the regional economy be reorganized. Specifically, the federal government did so in three ways. First, the military wrested control of the western economy from the tribes of the Northwest Territory through warfare, both during the Indian wars of the 1790s and later during the War of 1812. Second, the federal government sponsored the construction of roads throughout the region. Finally, colonial agencies of the federal government attempted to transform the Native American economy from one focused on fur trading to one centered on sedentary commercial agriculture.

Technological progress has long been widely recognized as a crucial source of economic growth. Many countries have, accordingly, devoted considerable resources to promote more rapid generation and diffusion of technology in their economies. Yet recent studies reveal a persistence of stark contrasts across countries and geographic space more generally, not only in productivity, but also in the generation of new technological knowledge. What accounts for these geographic disparities is not well understood.

Before I provide the substance of my remarks, I would like to thank two people. The first, Farley Grubb, who convened this session at last year's meetings, so thoroughly summarized the career of Allan Nevins, that I can skip doing so by providing just a reference. The second is Roger Ransom for asking me to do this. Though I was certain at this time last year that I would be able to say that only with sarcasm, two things have made my gratitude genuine. The first, a result of historical forces much larger than the Economic History Association, was the early elimination, for all practical purposes, of the Chicago Cubs from serious play-off contention. This freed up a great deal of my time in the late spring and early summer. The second was the sheer quality of the seven submissions. They made the reading more a pleasure than a chore, though they left me with one tough remaining task: choosing the three finalists. I will make a few remarks about all three as a group before offering specific comments on each.

Alexander Gerschenkron was a man of many talents, and eclectic interests. He was one of our profession's most venerable scholars, but also, as the statistics on graduate education published in the most recent Clio Society newsletter attest, one of our profession's most venerable educators as well. What more fitting combination could there be in the named honoree for a dissertation prize, an academic exercise that serves as both the introduction to one's scholarly career in research, as well as the culmination of one's formal education. I hope that for the three nominees for this prize brought together today, this occasion marks as much a beginning in our profession as it does closure of their graduate educations.