Study of ante-bellum economic development of the United States has been hampered by an acute shortage of reliable statistical data. Studies of the early capital markets are no exception to this general rule. For the years after 1856, Frederick Macaulay's excellent study provides sufficient quantitative basis for general research; but, in the earlier years, only Bigelow's single unsupported interest series provides the economic historian with statistical information on the condition of the credit market.

A Widespread belief exists that those disequilibrating international capital flows known as “hot money movements” and the associated measures instituted to regulate transactions in foreign exchange were peculiar to the post-1914 era and especially to the epoch of the “Great Depression” that commenced after 1929. It is felt that the “relative” stability of world economic and political conditions associated with the operation of the pre-1914 gold standard precluded “hot money” transfers and obviated the need to control the foreign exchange market.1 The experience of the United States during the depression of the 1890's vitiates the accuracy of this sweeping generalization. To be sure, these phenomena were largely unrecognized before the depression of the 1930's, but they nevertheless existed. The purpose of this article is to examine one such pre-1930 hot money movement, the one that occurred during the American presidential election campaign of 1896. The nomination of William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate on a free silver platform at Chicago in July 1896 gave impetus to a major disequilibrating outflow of short-term funds. This condition, in turn, led to an interesting effort to control the foreign exchange market.

Sir Ambrose Crowley is well known as one of the greatest of early English industrialists. His claim to distinction rests on the immense scale of his operations and on his imaginative approach to the problems of industrial organization. The group of factories he established in County Durham, near Gateshead, constituted what was believed to be the largest ironworks in Europe and was probably the largest industrial unit in the England of his day outside the naval dockyards. Sir Ambrose, whose manufacturing career began in 1682, was an iron manufacturer, converting bar iron into the end products of the iron industry—steel, steelware, nails, and a wide range of iron components and implements. He had entered this branch of the industry as a nailmaker, and nailmaking remained the mainstay of his business.

The Tsarist government played an important and fateful role in the development of the relationship between workers and employers in the early stages of Russian industrialization. Although the general character of this role is well known to historians, further study and reexamination of Tsarist labor policy, in the light of the contemporary concern with economic development, is invited by the Soviet publication in recent years of documentary evidence on nineteenth century labor problems. An attempt will be made in this article to integrate some of the new evidence with data from earlier sources in an analysis of the methods used by the Tsarist government to cope with the problem posed by internal government of industry in an era of growing labor unrest. It will focus on the period between the Emancipation and the 1905 Revolution. Russia did not become an industrial state during this period, but industry made enough progress to bring the country face to face with the modern labor problem. It was a period in which social and economic relations, rooted in feudal traditions, began to undergo significant changes in response to industrial growth. Labor unrest and protest are one of the chief symptoms of the problems inherent in this socio-economic readjustment. To understand the Tsarist approach to these problems it will be necessary to begin with a brief outline of the social milieu of Russian industrialization and of the governmental attitude toward industrial discipline and unrest before the Emancipation. The second section of the article covers the period between the Emancipation and the mideighties, during which the government did not formally regulate the internal order of the factory but was not unconcerned with the relations between employers and workers. The third section covers the period after 1886, when the internal factory order was subject to formal regulation and official inspection.