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The trend in mean height in the Russian province of Saratov is estimated for birth cohorts from 1755 to 1892 on the basis of newly gathered archival data and published sources. Heights fell in the late eighteenth century due an increasing burden of taxes and feudal dues. Stature increased slowly throughout the nineteenth century, offering no support for the hypothesis of an agrarian crisis that provoked or followed from the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Improving living conditions can be attributed to economic development, rising productivity in agriculture, and diversification of peasant economic activity into other sectors.

I evaluate the effectiveness of financial markets in the early Roman Empire in this article. I review the theory of financial intermediation to describe a hierarchy of financial sources and survey briefly the history of financial intermediation in eighteenth-century Western Europe to provide a standard against which to evaluate the Roman evidence. I then describe the nature of financial arrangements in the early Roman Empire in terms of this hierarchy. This exercise reveals the extent to which the Roman economy resembled more recent societies and sheds light on the prospects for economic growth in the Roman Empire. n this article I use a theoretical hierarchy of financial sources to evaluate the effectiveness of the financial markets in the early Roman Empire. The goal of this exercise is two-fold. First, it reveals the extent to which the Roman economy resembled more recent societies. No ancient historian claims that the Romans operated in a twentieth-century mode, but most of the financial institutions that we take for granted today are less than two centuries old. More relevant is how the Roman financial system compares with the advanced agrarian economies of the eighteenth century. Second, this exploration sheds light on the prospects for economic growth in the Roman Empire. Good financial markets and institutions help people who have ideas for production get resources to implement those ideas. Empirical investigations of recent economic growth have exposed a clear connection between financial institutions and economic growth; without these markets and institutions, the prospects for economic progress appear far more limited.' I argue that the Romans had a sophisticated financial structure, which had the potential to promote growth. Recent archaeological research on various parts of the Roman economy has suggested a capacity for growth.2 This article

It is often suggested that an agricultural revolution, currently defined as a rise in the output of arable workers, was a necessary precursor to industrialization and improved living standards. This article provides the first direct measurement of arable workers' average labor productivity for pre-industrial England. Rates are assessed for those production conditions that it is thought resulted in the lowest agrarian labor productivity rates in the pre-industrial period: c.1300-1348. The rates for English workers before the Black Death either surpassed or met the literature's best estimates for English workers until 1800, well after industrialization was underway. evelopment economists' debate over whether population growth hinders or promotes growth in poor countries is echoed among economic historians interested in pre-industrial Europe.' A key issue is whether the productivity of agrarian labor is and was low, thus acting as a potential barrier to development. It is often suggested that the western European nations, who were the first to industrialize in the nineteenth century, overcame this barrier through an agricultural revolution, which dramatically raised output of food per worker. This freed product and producers for new sectors, permitting industrialization; fostered economic growth; and eventually raised living

Alan Macfarlane is a distinguished British social anthropologist, celebrated for giving that discipline an historical turn. He is the author of important books claiming that the English had become “individualist”—in familial matters as much as in economic life—in the late Middle Ages. This view had the mixed blessing of an endorsement by Sir Keith Joseph, the intellectual powerhouse of early Thatcherism, thereby making Macfarlane a decidedly controversial figure. The present book draws on these early views, but is very much the product of sustained interaction with the thought of the late Ernest Gellner (who spent most of the last years of his life at Cambridge chairing the department in which Macfarlane teaches). What we are offered in this book then is a summary of a particular line of argument, drawing on philosophy and anthropology, which speaks to the interests of economic historians in a slightly abstract but decidedly high-powered manner. The presupposition of the whole is stated in the title, albeit that the “riddle” is in fact twofold. One riddle is the blocking of sustained development: given human ingenuity and obvious early development, why was it that most agrarian civilizations eventually hit some sort of ceiling? The second conundrum then concerns the fundamental breakthrough to capitalist and industrial modernity.

Excess, we learned as children in Glasgow, was the defining characteristic of Americans: big country, big cars, food served by the bucket, big talk, Texas, CGE models. Eccentricity identified the English: bird watching, Bovril, train spotting, the Archers, bus spotting, Women's Institute Teas, the standard-of-living debate. This book represents an interesting merger of all that is American with all that is English. With 2,317 pages devoted to English agrarian history between 1850 and 1914, completed 44 years after the series was initiated, and published only after the deaths of two of the principal authors, it screams American-style excess. But the loving care devoted to duck decoys, the Large Black Pig Society, Church of England music, sand dunes, malaria, Cupiss's Constitution Balls, golf courses, agrarian utopianism, ruderal [sic] habitats, the Rational Dress Society, and much, much more betrays an endearing eccentricity that could only be English.

Richard Grassby, an economic historian of Early Modern England now at the Institute for Advanced Studies, has written a sly, slender contribution to the Rowman & Littlefield “Critical Issues in History” series. An extended essay on the question of what capitalism is, it begins by examining the attempts of Marx, Weber, Sombart, and Schumpeter, among others, to locate the essence of capitalism in this or that particular feature of economic, social, or political life. Grassby's method is to select a theory and then debunk it by producing a piece of evidence for which it cannot account. Hence, for example, comparison of “traditional marxist teaching” to the basic facts, as he sees them, of agrarian capitalism in Early Modern England (p. 26). Where a Marxist theorist would assert that a change in the mode of production transformed the rural economy, a dogged empiricist like Grassby finds that the motors of change were “in fact” demographic pressure and “the market with some government support.” To the extent that he allows himself a general theory, it is a non-linear, cyclical one reminiscent of the Enlightenment thinkers: equilibrium and disequilibrium, freedom and regulation, activity and decay all wrestle one another in eternal combat, and there is no final victory to be had (pp. 30, 45).

The enclosure of the open fields is an example of Europeans' willingness to alter long-standing social and economic institutions in the interest of higher living standards. In Scandinavia, England, and Germany the rise in the value of enclosed relative to unenclosed land induced widespread abandonment of open-field forms of agrarian organization by the middle of the nineteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the traditional patterns of landholding maintained themselves until after the First World War. This paper examines some of the ways French farmers responded to the possibilities of agricultural change within the traditional framework of open-field agriculture.

This article deals with a largely Polish speaking region of eastern Prussia which was transformed from a rural, agrarian area in the mid-nineteenth century to a modern mixed agricultural and heavy industrial economy by 1913. This region moved from a condition of high ana fluctuating mortality and fertility prior to the 1860's to a situation with declining mortality and eventually declining fertility after the 1860's. Consideration of detailed patterns of mortality (by age, sex, atid cause of death) and of fertility (by Kreise) helps relate economic factors to these demographic trends and differentials.

For several years now co-conveners of the dissertation sessions who have been interested in non-United States topics have complained of the paucity of dissertations. Questions have been raised about our ability to apply the "New Economic History" to non-American topics. This year's crop of dissertations will not put such worries to rest, but they do indicate among our graduate students a lively interest in, and a considerable capacity for, research in the economic history of foreign countries, including their histories before 1800. While these dissertations demonstrate that the study of foreign economic history is alive and well in this country, they do not demonstrate the existence of an American style, let alone an "American School." On the contrary, the questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the types of sources exploited vary enormously. We have under review a traditional historical study of an industry and its workers, an innovative, statistical study of fifteenth-century demography, a Marxian analysis of agrarian development, and a theoretical and comparative study of early industrialization that is the only one consciously written in the tradition of the "New Economic History." These dissertations are evenly divided between departments of history and economics, and without a scorecard I doubt if many members of this Association could correctly categorize them all. Who would have predicted, even ten years ago, that a dissertation in medieval history would employ a computer to process the data of nearly 15,000 documents. On the other hand, who would have predicted that a student of Jeffrey Williamson would produce a dissertation rejecting neoclassical economics and relying almost exclusively on institutional and descriptive analysis? Schmiechen's dissertation is as much a study of the labor movement as of industrial organization. It fits neatly into a long tradition of British scholarship on working class attitudes and the origins of labor legislation. His main economic thesis, that the innovations in the form of the sewing machine and the cloth cutting machine stimulated the growth of outwork in the London clothing trades, is a clear-cut verification of the fact that industrialization was not an inexorable march toward centralized largescale production. Despite the enormous amount of evidence in support of this generalization, it still needs to be reasserted. Schmiechen's main social thesis is that "unskilled workers, particularly the women workers, could not be organized until outworking was eliminated." This is not very convincing to me. Although the statement is inherently plausible, Schmiechen too readily generalizes from experience. Organization was unsuccessful in the sweatshops of the London clothing trades, but the reasons for that lack of success are perhaps not as obvious as he supposes. Something more could be expected here because in the

Between 1550 and 1730, privileged investors in France—nobles, officers, and wealthy merchants—bought up enormous quantities of land from peasants. The transfer of property has attracted considerable attention from historians, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. The paper invokes the tax exemptions the privileged enjoyed to account for the transfer—an explanation that fits both the chronology of the land sales and the identity of the purchasers. The paper then examines how the tax system throttled growth in the agricultural sector.

Improved techniques of production have been an important part of the history of agricultural change in all modern economies. The search for policies to bring about the rapid introduction of improved techniques of production in traditional or less developed agricultural sectors has been a central focus of development agencies for the past two decades. It has proven to be a very difficult task, however, to develop policies which actually achieve the transfer of new techniques. The record of success in development efforts towards this end in agriculture has been, on the whole, rather poor.

This article summarizes recent research on the agrarian depression in seventeenth-century Spain, relying primarily upon data from the provinces of Segovia and Toledo. Both regions suffered sustained losses of population and stagnation of production and failed to develop a permanent interior market structure. Due to its reliance upon sheepherding, the Segovian rural economy recovered slightly by the end of the century, but in Toledo, an economy almost entirely dependent upon grain production, demographic and economic indices were negative throughout the entire period.

The seasonality of weddings molded itself to regionally specific patterns of labor in early-modern England. Advantage can thus be taken of the widely available if unlikely source of parish registers of marriages to reveal the timing of regional specialization, defined narrowly as the ability of regions to forgo the production of the staples of local consumption and concentrate on whatever production best suited local resources of land and labor.

The Wealth of Nations does not recognize the fact of industrial production, and its analysis of price does not account for the fundamental feature of industrial markets, falling price per output unit based on exponential growth obtained by technological applications. Smith's laissez-faire doctrine contains distinctive value postulates intended to promulgate an egalitarian agrarian capitalism in the spirit of physiocracy. Criticisms of Smith by Alexander Hamilton, J.-B. Say, Andrew Ure, and Friedrich List are instanced to support the present interpretation.

The traditional view of cotton mechanization, first advanced by rural sociologists in the 1920s, is that southern agrarian institutions impeded progress. Recently their view has been questioned. New studies attribute much of the southern lag to factors like small-scale production, cheap labor, the cotton crop, and environment. I contribute to the debate by emphasizing how the structure of the southern economy encouraged landlords to use annual labor contracts that hindered attempts to mechanize. I present evidence that supports the traditional view and suggest how the incentive structure of annual labor contracts delayed invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

The hypothesis that the fear of foreclosure of farm mortgages provided an important impetus to American agrarian reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reconsidered. This hypothesis is consistent with the observation that farm income, although volatile, on average improved over this period.Indeed, despite low average foreclosure rates, the temporary effects of foreclosures on specific regions in which there was unrest appears to have been dramatic. An examination of indebtedness data and measures of unrest both for the period of the Alliance movement and for the era of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota appears to support the hypothesis linking the fear of foreclosure to agrarian unrest.

Agrarian growth was related to overall development in Regierungsbezirk Oppeln in Germany between 1846 and 1913. Oppeln was characterized by an ethnically mixed population (Polish and German) as well as by both agricultural and industrial development. Using new estimates of agricultural output, acreage, and yields, agrarian growth and its sources are described and its linkages to the nonagrarian sector are explored. Variation among subdistricts (Kreise) is also studied. Agriculture experienced uneven growth, but it supported overall growth through rising incomes, provision of labor to the nonagricultural sector, and helping to restrain growth in food prices.

The mainstream of Russian historiographical studies holds that at the turn of the century peasant economic conditions were in a state of near collapse. In one of the poorest parts of the empire three measures of that economic impoverishment were seriously in error: draft animals were incompletely inventoried, and the meanings of both land leasing and fallow reductions were misinterpreted. These methodological errors have systematically distorted prevailing discussions about the wealth and poverty of peasant farms in Voronezh. Accumulating evidence is beginning to suggest reopening the question of the severity of the Russian “agrarian crisis” on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

A revised view of the nature of Russian industrialization is proposed. It is argued that economic conditions on the serf estates did not hinder industrialization; they in fact facilitated proto-industrialization by promoting the nonagricultural pursuits of the peasantry. In opposition to the traditional view that industrialization took place after the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and that there was an “agrarian crisis” in the nineteenth century, it is argued that industrialization was well underway on a wide scale on the basis of serf labor before 1861. The so-called agrarian crisis may really have been a period of increased proto-industrial activity by the peasants.

The economy of North Carolina in the early colonial period was agrarian. Land was a central element in the wealth stock and it was distributed unevenly among households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. This paper analyzes the distribution of land by means of multiple regression models employing measures of the principal life events of households. The data are drawn from an eastern community, Perquimans County, and refer to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

Several economic historians have suggested that economic instability in American agriculture was a primary cause of agrarian discontent during the late nineteenth century. This paper, in providing a rigorous analysis of the issue, presents estimates of economic instability in agriculture and evidence on the location and intensity of agrarian unrest for 14 northern states from 1866 to 1909. I statistically test for a relationship between the two. The results strongly suggest that late-nineteenth century agrarian unrest was directly related to a state's degree ofeconomic instability. This conclusion holds for the entire last third of the century and for several subperiods.

Racial discord, political violence, and agrarian unrest are integral to the history of the American South from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. The economy of the region had undergone traumatic changes during the war, not the least of which were the destruction of large amounts of physical capital and the transition of the black agricultural labor force from slavery to freedom. The disruption of production during the war was followed by attempts to reorganize agriculture through a variety of institutional arrangements, including wage labor, cash renting, and widespread use of the sharecropping form of land tenure. Many of the legal and cultural manifestations of the racial prejudice which has long outlived chattel slavery made their appearance during these years. Both contemporary observers and modern historians have recognized possible connections between the economic conditions and the political or institutional developments of the period, yet certain basic characteristics of the post-bellum southern economy have never been adequately determined. Consequently, the influence of economic forces in southern society and political life has remained obscure.

In a recent paper in this JOURNAL, Robert A. McGuire has revised and extended the view that "the amount of uncertainty (risk) in agriculture was a major factor in fomenting agrarian unrest. ' By measuring the relative variability of prices, incomes, and yields using time series data from the period 1866-1909, McGuire has found that the states with the highest relative variability had, in general, the highest levels of agrarian protest.2 Since McGuire's view is that relative (as opposed to absolute) variability, of prices and incomes especially, and of yields to a lesser extent, was an important determinant of the location of farm protest, he used as his measure the Random Variability Coefficient (RVC), expressed as a percentage and defined as

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.

The flurry of British investment in American manufacturing industry from 1887 to 1891 was viewed with alarm, particularly in the West. At this time the farmer was preoccupied with the economic power of monopolistic industries and trusts, and so die British investor became deeply involved in this phase of the agrarian battle. In the past, capital from die United Kingdom had entered industrial concerns, chiefly railroads, without wresting the management out of American hands. More recently British investors had been building up and controlling dieir own enterprises in the West. Now, well-established and profitable American businesses were bought and directed from Britain. The farmer regarded this unaccustomed interest in American industrials either as a step toward die formation of great monopolies, or, even worse, as part of an imperialistic design conceived by London bankers to enslave the American people.

It is indeed a pleasure to be invited to address economists and economic historians regarding the dynamics of peasant economic integration into a national economic system. The particular subject of these meetings, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and their Evolution,” is an appropriate one for us since, as anthropologists, we are generally interested in the “Evolution of the Organizational Forms of Life.” Today we will examine the organizational form of peasant economic life in Brazil in an effort to develop a fuller understanding of the socio-economic transactions which take place within this traditional—better, transitional—agrarian society.

The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.

The revolution of 1848, by ending the system of serfdom, had created the basic conditions of Hungary's industrialization; however, since the revolution had remained incomplete and the War of Independence had been lost, the ensuing suppression by Austrian absolutism and the considerable feudal survivals proved a strong barrier to the way of social and economic progress. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a product of the Compromise of 1867, offered somewhat more favorable conditions for economic development. Nevertheless, the structure of the dual monarchy kept Hungary's industrialization within rather narrow limits: the absence of independent statehood and the existence of a common customs area with Austria exposed the Hungarian market to devastating competition from Austria's more advanced manufacturing industry; and since these circumstances helped to consolidate the political and economic power of the large landowners, the capital accumulating within the country served above all the capitalist development of agriculture. So towards the end of the nineteenth century, nearly half a century after the bourgeois revolution, Hungary was still a wholly agrarian country whose major exports were foodstuffs and agricultural produce. The rapid development of manufacturing industry began as late as the last decade of the nineteenth century and continued until the beginning of World War I, over a span of some twenty-five years.

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.”

This paper endeavors to explain the economic and social forces underlying the economic transformation of three Southeast Asian countries from agrarian societies to commercial ones. In particular, a model is used to explore this historic behavior over the period 1870 to 1938 for Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand. It is also suggested that the varying economic consequences of the model were dependent on the respective pre-colonial history and the type of colonial or governmental rule.