This article proposes to do three things: to test for and date the emergence and integration of regional farm labor markets in Massachusetts; to demonstrate their growth consequences for the preindustrial economy; and to present new wage and labor productivity indices for the agricultural economy of Massachusetts from 1750 to 1855. Together with my previous studies it makes the case that the economy of rural Massachusetts was transformed by and under the subtle dominion of commodity, capital, and labor markets, the simultaneous emergence of which by 1800 is observed in the behavior of relevant prices and ratified in the growth of labor productivity.

When arrayed in time series, the rates of signature literacy of free persons in colonial Perquimans County, North Carolina, exhibit the ∪-shaped pattern found in the records of many other new communities of early America. In Perquimans, the pattern was due to coincident movements in the literacy rates of immigrants and natives of the county. The initial drop was associated with pronounced political and social disorder; the rise, with improved political stability and with demographic and economic growth.

The redemption system transformed the American auction of immigrant servants. The potential for exploiting immigrants was created by search restrictions in the redemption auction. A model of the auction was estimated using 4,455 German and British servant contracts. Average servant compensation equaled resident free labor compensation, and the variance in servant compensation was systematically related to the variance in servant productivity, contract restrictions, and work amenities. Competition among buyers overcame the search restrictions placed on immigrants in the redemption auction.

Nineteenth-century Italy experienced the long swings in migration, capital flows, and construction characteristic of the international Kuznets cycle, but in an unusual combination: its external migration swing may have resembled Britain's, but its capital flows and construction swing resembled America's. Construction in Italy was finance-sensitive rather than population-sensitive, and reacted primarily to exogenous shifts in the supply of foreign capital. The Italian experience suggests that changes in perceived risk altered the relative supply of capital in Britain and abroad and thereby induced the opposite swings in construction and the swing in migration.

Analysis of census data reveals that the size of the average factory in the United States grew more rapidly during the 1870s and 1880s than during any subsequent decade through the 1920s. While the average factory doubled in size between 1869 and 1889, it increased by only about a quarter between 1899 and 1929. These results support the view that the reaping of economies of scale was not an important motive for the great merger wave.