The relative dynamism of English and Scottish foreign trade from 1675 to 1775 can largely be explained by the interrelated phenomena of the growing domestic demand for American and Asian consumer goods and North European raw materials; the growing market in northern and western Europe for re-exports of American and Asian consumables; and the growing protected market for British manufactures in the American colonies and Africa. Trade growth depended on development of a wide variety of credit practices, supported primarily by big wholesalers and export merchants. Wholesalers and merchants also accounted for important institutional innovations.

Like many land-abundant, labor-scarce economies, Thailand had a well-developed system of property rights in man. Over the nineteenth century corvée and slavery were abolished and replaced by military conscription, a head tax, and more precise property rights in land. Concomitant trends included extensive commercialization, the growth of international trade, imperialist threats to Thai sovereignty, and the growth of a centralized unitary state. Both domestic and international political motives influenced monarchs in the abolition of human-property rights. Economic change greatly facilitated these institutional changes.

The literature on national capital market integration in nineteenth-century America has overlooked the role of markets at a regional level. Such markets were important in reducing the possible burden of isolation by efficiently recycling local savings, and in promoting eventual integration into a national financial market. This article presents evidence that a commercial market centered on San Francisco extended into the Pacific Coast states and formed the basis for a regional financial market. The degree of market integration is measured through tests of interest rate covariability and convergence.

Paper money, a major component of the colonial money supply, was critical to the economic policies of the colonial legislatures. Why did the state legislatures relinquish the power to issue money to the new federal government through the ratification of the Constitution? Hostility between states with radically different philosophies regarding paper money raised concerns about the viability of the union, and it was this fear which led to the clause in the Federal Constitution that prohibited state paper money issues.

This article considers whether natural monopoly conditions or AT'T's market power was responsible for the formation of a single, standardized network in the United States telephone industry. It shows that AT&T was able to move the industry towards a single system under its management through a strategy of competition and compromise with competitors. The article also examines the impact of AT's actions on state regulators, concluding that public officials, lacking necessary knowledge and authority to set policy, ended up supporting AT's position in the industry.

During the nineteenth century, under free labor market contracting, apprenticeship persisted in Britain but declined in the United States. This article argues that apprenticeship endured in Britain because of its efficiency advantages and because of customs, inherited from the guilds, that favored training certification for entry into skilled jobs. By contrast, within the United States guild traditions were weaker, occupational certification was seldom required, and, as a result, indenture obligations were hard to enforce. Understandably, U.S. employers refrained from making training investments in potentially mobile apprentices.

Analysis of 80 skeletons from Cedar Grove, Arkansas, permits comparison of the skeletal data with historic accounts and interpretations of textual data. The high frequencies of skeletal lesions indicating dietary deficiencies and infectious disease demonstrates that this was a highly stressed population and that Cedar Grove participated in the historically documented nationwide decline of Afro-American health. The evidence is overwhelming that congenital syphilis was a major contributor to high infant mortality and population decline.

The early history of the American automobile industry provides fertile hunting grounds for theorists seeking corroboration of various, conflicting theories of vertical integration. An examination of the whole history suggests that no single theory always fits the facts perfectly. A complete explanation must combine specific theories in a way that is attentive to such factors as industry life-cycle, demand, economies of scale, and appropriability. If there is any “general” theory, it lies in the set of “dynamic” transaction-cost approaches rather than in the asset-specificity approach now dominant.

Credit financing of automobile sales and dealer inventories was provided primarily by hundreds of sales finance companies in the interwar United States. The few finance companies tied to auto manufacturers wrote 90 percent of credit business. Manufacturers initially established finance companies not to bolster retail sales but to finance dealers' wholesale inventory so manufacturers could lower average costs by smoothing seasonal production patterns. Moreover, until the Justice Department intervened, manufacturers apparently illegally coerced franchised dealers into using the manufacturer's preferred finance company rather than an independent.

Over the course of two hundred years Chesapeake planters sought to make the most of scarce labor while exploiting abundant land. Large planters were able to offset a secular decline in tobacco crops per laborer with productivity gains in grains, thus maintaining or enhancing revenues per hand in constant value. Intensification of the labor process and a switch from hoe to plow culture account for most of the increase; agricultural improvements, very little.

Seventeenth-century planters developed a new system of husbandry, a long fallow, hoe-based agriculture that raised tobacco for export and Indian corn for subsistence. Plentiful land and shortages of labor characterized the system, which had few economies of scale. It provided rapid increases in wealth during the farm building stages, but its land and labor constraints set limits on growth. Eighteenth-century adaptations created economies of scale that permitted planters to grow grains for export without reducing tobacco crops. Planters who did not adopt these changes did not share in the resulting prosperity, and many left.

The history of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate before World War I demonstrates that a cartel can be established and maintained in the face of significant disintegrative forces, including many members, heterogeneous production and cost conditions, dynamic markets, competition from outside producers, and cheating. Opportunities for individualistic behavior, including contractual loopholes and horizontal combinations, combined with a collusive objective function that emphasized overall control and stability, allowed the cartel to survive for over two decades without government interference or support.

The International Steel Cartel of 1926 was a necessary step toward a coordinated system of cartels to govern steel exports. Like the present industrial policies of the European Community, however, differences in the aims of the domestic industries caused rivalry among the members of the 1926 agreement. Although thecartel was not able to fix its members' production shares, it was able to limit tradebetween them, which allowed for the formation and operation of their domesticcartels.