Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel

edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff

University of Chicago Press, 1992
Cloth: 978-0-226-30112-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-30135-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226301358.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Offering new research on strategic factors in the development of the nineteenth century American economy—labor, capital, and political structure—the contributors to this volume employ a methodology innovated by Robert W. Fogel, one of the leading pioneers of the "new economic history." Fogel's work is distinguished by the application of economic theory and large-scale quantitative evidence to long-standing historical questions.

These sixteen essays reveal, by example, the continuing vitality of Fogel's approach. The authors use an astonishing variety of data, including genealogies, the U.S. federal population census manuscripts, manumission and probate records, firm accounts, farmers' account books, and slave narratives, to address collectively market integration and its impact on the lives of Americans. The evolution of markets in agricultural and manufacturing labor is considered first; that concerning capital and credit follows. The demography of free and slave populations is the subject of the third section, and the final group of papers examines the extra-market institutions of governments and unions.

Introduction

Two Appreciations

I. Labor Markets in Manufacturing and Agriculture

1. The Market for Manufacturing Workers during Early Industrialization: The American Northeast, 1820 to 1860

2. Wages, Prices, and Labor Markets before the Civil War

3. Structural Change in the Farm Labor Force: Contract Labor in Massachusetts Agriculture, 1750…1865

4. Farm Tenancy in the Antebellum North

II. Markets in Capital and Credit

5. Regional Interest Rates in Antebellum America

6. Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880…1914

7. Precedence and Wealth: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Utah

8. The Wealth of Women, 1774

III. The Demography of Free and Slave Populations

9. Adult Mortality in America before 1900: A View from Family Histories

10. Toward an Anthropometric History of African-Americans: The Case of the Free Blacks in Antebellum Maryland

11. The Slave Family: A View from the Slave Narratives

12. The Fertility Transition in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses

13. Trading Quantity for Quality: Explaining the Decline in American Fertility in the Nineteenth Century

IV. Political Economy

14. The Profitability of Early Canadian Railroads: Evidence from the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railway Companies

15. The Rise and Fall of Urban Political Patronage Machines

16. Dividing Labor: Urban Politics and Big-City Construction in Late-Nineteenth- Century America

Dissertations Supervised by Robert W. Fogel

The Writings of Robert W. Fogel

Biographies

Contributors

Author Index

Subject Index