Skilled textile workers migrated from Scotland to Massachusetts in the 1850's because of a large wage differential and low steerage rates for the transatlantic passage. For each one of 56 women weavers in the Lyman Mills, expenditures on current consumption took less than 75 per cent of income. But the circumstances were unusual, so this sample does not permit any conclusions about the role of wage-earners' savings in the accumulation of capital in New England. In this mill, two-thirds of the labor force in 1860 had been working there less than three years. The impact of this high degree of labor mobility on labor relations and on the technology of the industry is tentatively assessed.

The great expansion of American blast furnace capacity since 1938 has worked significant changes in the geographical distribution of the industry. Many persons have assumed that the furnaces erected at new locations have abnormally high costs for their mineral raw materials, and that their survival, like their origin, is dependent on the boom market of wartime and postwar, Federal financing, and accelerated amortization for tax purposes. This analysis is not correct. From the viewpoint of raw materials cost, the furnaces at relatively new locations in Utah, California, and northeast Texas, are lust as efficient as the furnaces at older locations such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. The data for the cost analysis which follows were collected directly from the firms involved.

A heal tithing office or bishop's storehouse was found in every Mormon settlement of the Mountain West during the nineteenth century. Besides functioning as collector of revenue for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the tithing house played a major role in the economic life of the community. It served as communal receiving and disbursing agency, warehouse, weighing station, livestock corral, general store, telegraph office, employment exchange and social security bureau. These functions carried it into banking, the fixing of official prices, and bulk selling. Thus the history of this institution shows, in a much different setting, counterparts of many procedures and problems open regarded as distinctly modern.

The development of industry in South Carolina to 1860 is analyzed carefully, using information culled from manuscript census returns and the correspondence of businessmen. The failure of manufacturing to grow more rapidly is ascribed to a shortage of capital and skilled management, an unfortunate geography, competition for factors of production by local agriculture, and competition in the product markets by Northern industry.

Twenty-one years ago Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, acquired the early records of Pierson & Company, dealers in iron and makers of nails and screws, at Ramapo, New York. But only now has the organization and listing of these materials, dated from 1795 to 1865, been completed.

The Piersons began making cut nails in New York City in 1787 or 1788. In 1795 Josiah G. Pierson obtained a patent on a nail-making machine which is reported to have been the first such device “that produced satisfactory results and was generally used.” That same year Pierson established a plant at Ramapo, a village in Rockland County, New York, not far from the New Jersey line. The plant included a rolling and slitting mill; raw materials were received through Haverstraw, and finished goods were shipped by the same route to New York City, where an office and store were maintained at 107 Broad Street. Josiah Pierson died in 1798, and shortly Jeremiah H. and Isaac P. Pierson were carrying on the business under the firm name of Josiah G. Pierson & Brothers.

The earliest printers in Europe faced financial, storage, and marketing problems not unlike those of new industries today: how to attract operating capital for production and for carrying inventories, where to store a slow-moving and bulky stock, and how to overcome the prejudice against a new product, in order to create an extensive market. These were the three major difficulties that the first printers in Italy as well as elsewhere had to surmount.

In the Benedictine monastery, at Subiaco, south of Rome, in 1465, two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, had set up a printing press, which two years later they moved to Rome. Other Germans introduced printing into Milan and Venice in 1469 and the following year into Foligno and Trevi. By 1472, Venice had over a half dozen competing printing offices established by German and by French printers. About fifteen other Italian cities had at least one printing office.

In the years after the Civil War, American industrial development was rapid. Mushrooming factory towns became, with the exploitation of timber and mineral resources, a characteristic feature even in frontier areas. The Saginaw Valley of Michigan mirrors this phenomenon. A lumberman's frontier, it grew to be a major center of lumber production for the nation.

An essential factor in this industrial expansion was the growth of the labor force. In 1850 a single mill of the Valley employed 12 or 14 men; by 1885 it required the services of 75 to 150 men and in some cases of 200. In 1885 over 4,000 men were employed in the mills of the Valley. Such growth of the industry and of the labor force introduced serious problems of labor relations.

This article is concerned with a description and analysis of labor relations in the sawmills of the Saginaw Valley from 1865 to 1885. Labor relations rest to a great extent upon attitudes; the attitudes of the employer, of the employee, and in some cases of the rest of the community. Presumably these attitudes have a basis in the conditions under which the industry is operated and under which the labor force works and lives.

The profits of and the amount of capital sunk in the Lauchhammer Iron Works are not revealed in the Festschrift, the history of that firm which has served as the main source of this article. (The omission is hardly surprising, since this company was owned by noblemen, one of whom was the most powerful official in the Kingdom of Saxony, and since its history was written by the general manager of the Works and was published in 1825.) But profits must have been considerable. Otherwise the Works' continuous improvement and expansion, described earlier in this article, would have been impossible. In 1818, the Lauchhammer Iron Works was even able to lend to the Gröditz plant the funds it needed to expand into an integrated iron enterprise. Whether the Works had any bank connection prior to 1825 is not known; none is mentioned in the history, but that fact is not conclusive. Cash holdings were probably rather large; this, however, was not the case in 1776 (see the inventory on page 233). It seems certain that both expansion and improvement in the eras of both Einsiedels were financed by ploughing back profits.