Search

Literature assumes that German parents financed their passage to colonial America by selling their children into servitude, suggesting that children were regarded as a saleable asset with no emotional familial value. Evidence shows that literary sources exaggerated the practice and it existed only on a limited basis affecting children within a particular and narrow age range and intra-family debt shifting emerged from the relationship between profit-oriented market competition and colonial welfare law and not the callous attitude of parents.

Convicts account for at least one-quarter of British migration to mid-eighteenth-century America. Their transportation to and disposal in America was essentially an experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice. A model of this trade is developed that yields testable implications regarding the relative distributional moments of convict auction prices, the size of shipper profits, and how convicts were selected for transportation. Quantitative evidence is assembled to test these implications and to measure the labor value of criminality. The results support the model and are used to explain the political economy of British penal policy.

Laws regarding indentured servants in colonial America required giving them various goods when their contract was completed, possibly as a means to prevent early departure and reliance on welfare. However, a more likely reason for this innovative provision was due to interaction between market, custom, and law.

Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. By Leah Platt Boustan. NBER Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development. (Princeton and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton [...]

Europeans stopped using servitude to finance passage to America sometime in the early nineteenth century, but exactly when and why immigrant servitude disappeared is a mystery. Hypotheses abound, but no consensus has emerged nor have scholars tested hypotheses. In this study, quantitative evidence for the final sixty years of immigrant servitude establishes when and why it disappeared. Servitude did not end because of insufficient demand, legal restrictions, or declines in passage fares. It ended because superior methods of financing migration developed. Chance historical events, however, determined the exact timing of the end.

The increasing number of wars during the age of Queen Anne encouraged an abrupt transition from emigrant European servants to African slaves in the southern states of the US. Servant labor declined due to inefficient servant supply caused by military recruitment and a decrease in servant demand due to lack of exports. Slave labor originated in Chesapeake and this became the primary cause of North-South conflicts.

Education clauses in 3,478 immigrant servant contracts are used to measure the incidence of schooling versus informal instruction by location, age, and sex. The proportion of servants receiving education was high, over 20 percent being taught outside of schools. Education expanded between 1770 and 1800 through a net increase in schooling rather than because of a substitution of schooling for informal instruction. In the 1770s formal schooling in rural areas lagged behind that in urban, but achieved parity by 1800. Little difference in education was found based on gender.

The details of the panel discussions held to identify the three best dissertations on North American economic history for the Nevins prize are presented.

The quantity of specie in circulation is estimated using the market transaction data, which provides the first comprehensive measure of a colony's money supply and to retest the quantity theory of money and measure output growth using the equation of exchange. It was found that output growth is dependent on periodization and the extent that rising commercialization increased the velocity of circulation.

The trend in height among indentured servants during the 18th century is examined, focusing on the reliability of height estimates. Topics include nutrition, Malthusian theories of population, variation in statistics from different colonies, misuse of average age of subjects, and data pool from which statistics are drawn.

Colonial Virginia's legislature introduced an inside paper money into its domestic economy that was, at that time, primarily a barter economy without any government or bank-issued inside paper monies in circulation. I decompose Virginia's paper money into its expected real-asset present value, risk discount and transaction premium. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts occurred in years when monetary troubles were suspected, namely worries that the government would not redeem the paper money as promised. Counterfeiting, however, was not one of these worries. The legislature had the tools and used them effectively to mitigate the effects of counterfeiting on the value of its paper money. Colonial Virginia's paper money was not a fiat currency, but a barter asset, with just enough transaction premium to make it the preferred medium of exchange for local transactions. It functioned like a zero-coupon bond and traded below face value due to time-discounting, not depreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author reconstructs the data on Virginia's paper money regime using forensic accounting techniques. He corrects the existing data on the amounts authorized and outstanding, and reconstructs yearly data on previously unknown aspects of Virginia's paper money regime, including printings, net new emissions, redemptions and removals, denominational structures, expected redemption tax revenues, and specie accumulating in the treasury for paper money redemption. These new data form the foundation for narratives written on the social, economic, and political history of Virginia, as well as for testing models of colonial paper money performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I decompose the market value of Colonial New Jersey's paper money into its component parts, namely its real-asset present value and transaction premium. Its market value was predominately determined by its real-asset present value. I also find a small transaction premium that is positively associated with the quantity of paper money in circulation and with the land-bank method of paper money injection. This paper money was not a fiat currency. It traded below face value due to time-discounting not depreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Maryland's non-legal-tender paper money emissions between 1765 and 1775 are reconstructed to determine quantities outstanding and redemption dates, providing a substantial correction to the literature. Over 80 per cent of this paper money's current market value was expected real asset present value and under 20 per cent was liquidity premium. It was primarily a real barter asset and not a fiat currency. The liquidity premium was positively related to the amount of paper money per capita in circulation. This paper money traded below face value due to time-discounting, rather than depreciation. Past scholars have simply confused depreciation with time-discounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I reconstitute the spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 from primary sources using forensic accounting techniques. I identify and analyze the methods for raising revenue to meet normal peacetime and emergency wartime expenses. I calculate the provincial tax burdens imposed on New Jersey's citizens. I identify how Britain interfered with New Jersey's fiscal structure. I estimate what the revenues and tax burdens would have been without this interference. New Jersey paid for war expenses by issuing bills of credit, spreading the tax burden of redeeming these bills into the future. New Jersey paid its yearly administrative costs with current property taxes and with current interest earnings from loaning paper money. In the absence of British interference and wars, New Jersey could have driven tax burdens to zero by using interest earnings to pay for all its provincial administrative costs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Forensic accounting is used to reconstruct the data on emissions, redemptions, and bills outstanding for colonial New Jersey paper money. These components are further separated into the amounts initially legislated and the amounts actually executed. These data are substantial improvements over what currently exists in the literature. They also provide a more complete and nuanced accounting of colonial New Jersey's paper money regime than what has been done previously for any British North American colony. Enough detail of the forensic accounting exercise is given for scholars to reproduce the data series from the original sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the continental dollar, the currency issued by U.S. Congress to fund the American Revolutionary War, focusing on redemption by U.S. states in the period 1779 to 1790. It examines the question of state compliance with the remittance schedule set by Congress. The author comments on depreciation, the anti-paper money attitudes of Federalists, and the question of governmental monetary powers. Other topics include reports by Continental treasurer Michael Hillegas, registrar of the U.S. treasury Joseph Nourse, and U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Recently in Labor History, scholar Sharon Salinger reviewed the literature on colonial servitude with regard to contracting methods and servant welfare. Her review contains serious errors of fact, interpretation, omission, and attribution. Space limitations imposed by Labor History allow only an abbreviated discussion. The author's purpose, therefore, is to alert readers to key errors and provide enough information so that readers can investigate the veracity of Salinger's historiography for themselves. Historians have identified two methods of acquiring trans-Atlantic passage through servitude, and have named them "indenture" and "redemption." Contemporaries used these names only rarely. The two methods are distinguished by whether the immigrant entered the servant contract at embarkation, for indenture, or at debarkation, for redemption. Once a servant contract was signed, redemptioners were thereafter also called "servants." Making distinctions between the two methods is important because the method affected the incidence of contracting risk between shipper and servant and the flexibility of contracting between servant and American master.