The purpose of this article is to investigate trends in the quality of British cotton textile exports during the period 1815-1913. “Quality” is defined as real value per yard of cloth and pound of yarn exported. Thus, a reduction in export quality does not mean that a specific type of cloth has deteriorated. Rather, it means that there has been a shift from more expensive to less expensive types of cloth. It may also mean that the same type of cloth is being ex-ported in a different state—white instead of printed or gray instead of bleached.

The subject of unemployment in general came into its own in the age of mercantilism. Mercantilist authors saw in unemployed who might be set to work a source of additional economic power. The subject of accessibility to employment, though always of concern to social philosophers, commanded greater attention as the medieval economy gave place to the modern.

The long and glorious commercial history of Amalfi, which began some time about the middle of the eighth century, came to an abrupt end on November 24, 1343. On that day a raging storm accompanied by a tidal wave destroyed the lower town and swallowed all the harbor installations, including the famed sea fortifications. From that blow Amalfi never recovered. The present lovely resort appears as a most unlikely setting for a republic which was once a great maritime town in the western Mediterranean.

Much interest andthe economic progress made in Taiwan since the end of World attention have been recently focused onWar II. A major factor in Taiwan's postwar economic development is that the island already possessed a progressive and productive agricultural sector when it was returned to Chinese rule in 1945. The transformation of Taiwan's agriculture was the major accomplishment of the Japanese Colonial Administration. When Japan acquired Taiwan in 1895, its agriculture was stagnant and its peasants were engaged almost exclusively in subsistence farming. To enable Taiwan to make a contribution to Japan's efforts at industrialization, the Colonial Government was given the task of rationalizing and modernizing Taiwan's agriculture. Taiwan was to be integrated with the Japanese economy to provide a food surplus to help maintain the Japanese laborers diverted from agricultural to industrial activities. Foreign exchange that Japan would otherwise have spent on food imports would be used to finance more strategic imports. More explicitly, the Japanese had two objectives: to increase Taiwan's agricultural output and to divert the increase away from agriculture in Taiwan without committing an equivalent transfer of production value to agriculture in Taiwan.

The importance of the international sector in initiating the nineteenth-century economic development of the United States has been widely acknowledged. Its influence on American economic stability, however, is by no means as well established. Controversy persists concerning the interrelationships between the international flow of liquid funds evidencing balance-of-payments disequilibrium and the American monetary system during the period from the 1830's to the Civil War.

The American people have usually been regarded as forward-looking and progressive, willing frequently to move their activities from one place to another to attain their hopes and inclined to be impatient with the heritage of the past. But there seems to have been, almost from the beginning, a minority of people in this country who found pleasure in looking back over the road that they and their forebears had traveled and in encouraging a scholarly chronicling of such progress. Perhaps the fact that so many early immigrants came from western Europe, with its much longer high-ways of economic and cultural advance, had something to do with this. But there was also the circumstance that the early settlers in America, as well as many later migrants to our West, were a Bible-reading people. The Bible is, after all, a record of movements among peoples through the centuries, and the duty placed on members of Protestant churches to become thoroughly familiar with their source of divine guidance could well have implanted a bias toward, or a fondness for, historical ideas and writings. And the citizens of a new country, it may be suggested, could hardly fail to be conscious of change through time as a true fact of life.

The countries of non-Russian “Communist Eastern Europe” present the economic historian with a fascinating field for study. This opportunity has, judging from English-language journals at least, largely gone unexploited. Moreover, although Eastern Europe remained a predominantly agrarian region up to the most recent times, the existing literature concentrates heavily on finance, trade, and industry. It is in the hope of contributing to the discussion of Eastern European economic history, most particularly some of its agricultural aspects, that this article has been written.

For many years a relatively small number dominated the private sector of the American of the American economy. Most of the nation's goods and a substantial part of its services are produced and distributed by very large corporations. Of late, most Americans seem unconcerned about this fact. They regard big business with equanimity, even approval, and as Richard Hofstadter points out, antitrust has become “one of the faded passions of American reform.”

Recent articles have drawn attention to the general significance of the American export “invasion” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novack and Simon have concentrated on the origins of the invasion and on the attitudes of American businessmen, and to a lesser extent of others, to it. Elsewhere, Saul has considered the impact of intensified American competition upon British industry, underlining the need to reexamine the process of industrial transformation particularly during the two decades pre-ceding World War I. In the latter connection, the fundamental changes that occurred in the British boot and shoe industry, both in terms of rapidity and extent, make a case study of its history during this period especially rewarding, culminating, as it did, in a “Victory for British Boots”—the title of an article in The Economist in 1913. While the fact of successful response on the part of the industry is well known, the circumstances under which the trans-formation took place and the various elements which together produced the effective industrial counterattack have received less attention. In this article an attempt is made to remedy these deficiencies, to explain why the industry responded so successfully, and in particular to examine the role of American shoe machinery makers in this process, for in terms of control they virtually monopolized the supply of boot and shoe machinery in Britain toward the end of our period.

The opinion that spice prices rose in Europe in the century before 1492 and that that had something to do with Europe's oceanic expansion is remarkably persistent, in spite of the blow delivered to it by A. H. Lybyer more than a half-century ago. A distinct drop, however, in the price of spices, and particularly of pepper, between the decades 1420-1430 and 1440-1450 is indicated by a recent study of Antwerp prices, which thus reinforces the suggestion of older scattered figures from Navarre, England, and Klosterneuburg (Vienna). Pepper fell about 50 percent in that interval and did not return to its former high level until after 1498. In view of Venice's preeminent position in the trade in those decades, Venice is the obvious place to look for the source of a decline of prices generally in the West. Wholesale prices of pepper at Venice, 1363-1510, drawn mainly from diaries, merchants' account books, and letters, are shown in the accompanying Table 1. This explains the fall in prices in northern and western Europe. After selling at between 83 and 157 ducats per cargo in 1411-1426, pepper prices at Venice fell to 50 in 1432 and drifted lower in the 1440's and 1470's, occasionally even going below 40. Rarely did the price rise above 55 ducats a cargo until the interruption of Venetian voyages by the war with the Ottoman Turks in 1499.

The section on colonial commerce in most textbooks oh American Economic History has changed little in the last three or four (or more) decades. Of course, slight variations exist, but they are usually for style, with the core of the subject seldom varying. In fact, a traditional view of American colonial commerce has been solidly formed, and it is widely read and taught in our universities and colleges.

Since at least the seventeenth century the economic development of Spain has been limited because the rates of growth achieved in the peripheral areas of Catalonia, Valencia, and Vizcaya were greater than that of the interior under the old Crown of Castile. The stagnation of the Castilian interior not only created a dull market for manufactured goods, but conserved a persistently strong traditionalist faction which long hampered Spanish political development. The resulting tension between the interior and the more modern peripheral sectors of society dominates Spanish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Agricultural improvement, as analysts of economic growth often stress, plays an important role in a developing economy. Recent quantitative research has expanded our knowledge of developments in American agriculture during the period when the economy was becoming industrialized. The purpose of this article is to compute new estimates of average milk yields (output per milk animal) in American dairy agriculture and to analyze the sources of changes in these yields between 1850 and 1910.

Austria was among the countries that began to develop modern industry at the turn of the eighteenth century and in particular during the Continental Blockade. Cotton spinning was mechanized and construction of textile machinery began. Similarly, when in the late 1820's horse-drawn railroads were constructed on the European Continent, Austria was among the pioneers. This onset of modern economic growth followed a long tradition of handicraft and manu-factories in several regions of the Habsburg domain. Notwithstanding these early beginnings, in 1900 about 58 percent of the economically active population was still engaged in agriculture, as against 22 percent in industry. According to estimates based on Colin Clark's figures Austrian national product per head of the “working population” was in 1913 about 47 percent of the corresponding British product, almost 60 percent of the German, and above 70 percent of the French. Population growth throughout most of the nineteenth century was rather steady, at an average annual rate of below 1 percent. When at the turn of the century the rate increased, Austria became one of the major sources of European emigration.

The Reciprocity Treaty between the British North American Provinces (Canada) and the United States was ratified in February 1855 and terminated in March 1866. It provided for free trade in all natural products, free access for United States fisheries to the Atlantic coastal waters of British North America, and access to the St. Lawrence River for American vessels under the same tolls as native vessels.

The compound steam engine was one of the majorthe substitution of steam for sail in ocean transportation. This factors inarticle is an inquiry into the productivity effects of the adoption and diffusion of this innovation in the German merchant marine fleet between 1871 and 1887. A number of relevant questions may be raised: What was the change in total industry productivity? How much of the total productivity change resulted from the diffusion of the compound engine? How much resulted from improvement of the engine itself during this period and how much from improvements in sailing ship technology? Answers to these questions may provide fresh insight into the controversial issues of the ascendancy of the sailing ship in ocean transportation and the contribution of changes in sailing ship productivity to the decline of ocean freight rates after 1870.

The September 1966 issue of this Journal contains a study by Professor Irwin Feller on the rate of adoption of the Draper Automatic Loom in the New England cotton textile industry. I have no quarrel with his central conclusions concerning the economic rationality of the New England cotton manufacturers. I do, however, have some comments on his analysis of the relative costs of producing cloth on plain (power) as opposed to automatic looms.

Recent scholarly work in the economic history of the precivil War United States has produced an impressive array of statistical data. Estimates of income, output, capital stock, and population growth and distribution have been generated utilizing a variety of empirical sources and statistical techniques. But, despite these welcome advances in our knowledge and understanding of the early American economy, a number of important statistical records continue to elude scholars of the period. Information concerning immigration before 1820, the occupational distribution of the labor force, employment statistics, the cost of living, and the level and movement of retail prices and wages would, if available, prove valuable additions to our growing knowledge of the United States economy before 1860.

Robert Fogel and Albert Fishlow have attempted in recent studies to measure the net contribution of the railroad to American economic growth in two specific years: 1890 and 1859. Both their methods and conclusions have confused, if not dismayed, more conventional historians. This article has two objectives: The first is to provide a simplified guide to the analytical framework underlying their calculations and the second is to suggest to both old and new economic historians that the measurements employed by Fogel and Fishlow bear no direct relationship to what they claim to measure—the benefits to the nineteenth-century economy from the existence of the railroad.

The most recent representation of “British” economic development over the century from 1855, as given in Kuznets’ Modern Economic Growth, does not suggest much vitality in this important economy. This representation is not new. Since it became fashionable to villify the “Britain” of the 1950's and 1960's as the laggard country of Europe, attempts have been made to justify or rationalize recent British performance by claiming that recent slow growth rates have been long established. The justification is based merely on the fable of the tortoise and the hare: slow but steady growth in Britain versus the erratic path of foreigners. Kuznets’ picture of Britain over the past century would, however, suggest a country in which population growth competed only with France for lowest place among developed countries; omitting Netherlands from his list because of its limited period, Kuznets showed that the decade average rate of increase of British gross product, at 21.1 percent, was third lowest and only slightly above that of France with its special population experience; and British increase in product per head, at 14.1 percent decade average, ranked only above that of Australia, with its very low rate of growth at 8 percent. No race was being won here; rather the judgment on the recent past, from the perspective of a century of growth, is that Britain has always had it so bad. The question is whether this perspective is open to reasonable doubt.