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

by Claudia Goldin (Editor), Hugh Rockoff (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226301358
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Series:	National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	502
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the Development of the American Economy Program and research associate at the NBER. In 2023 she was a awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes. She the editor or coeditor of numerous NBER volumes
 

Table of Contents

Introduction, Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff
Two Appreciations, Stanley L. Engerman, Donald N. McCloskey
I. Labor Markets in Manufacturing and Agriculture
1. The Market for Manufacturing Workers during Early Industrialization: The American Northeast, 1820 to 1860, Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor
2. Wages, Prices, and Labor Markets before the Civil War, Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo
3. Structural Change in the Farm Labor Force: Contract Labor in Massachusetts Agriculture, 1750-1865, Winifred B. Rothenberg
4. Farm Tenancy in the Antebellum North, Donghyu Yang
II. Markets in Capital and Credit
5. Regional Interest Rates in Antebellum America, Howard Bodenhorn and Hugh Rockoff
6. Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914, Michael D. Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna J. Schwartz
7. Precedence and Wealth: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Utah, David W. Galenson nad Clayne L. Pope
8. The Wealth of Women, 1774, Alice Hanson Jones
III. The Demography of Free and Slave Populations
9. Adult Mortality in America before 1900: A View from Family Histories, Clayne L. Pope
10. Toward an Anthropometric History of African-Americans: The Case of the Free Blacks in Antebellum Maryland, John Komlos
11. The Slave Family: A View from the Slave Narratives, Stephen Crawford
12. The Fertility Transition in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses, Richard H. Steckel
13. Trading Quantity for Quality: Explaining the Decline in American Fertility in the Nineteenth Century, Jenny Bourne Wahl
IV. Political Economy
14. The Profitability of Early Canadian Railroads: Evidence from the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railway Companies, Ann M. Carlos and Frank Lewis
15. The Rise and Fall of Urban Political Patronage Machines, Joseph D. Reid, Jr., and Michael M. Kurth
16. Dividing Labor: Urban Politics and Big-City Construction in Late-Nineteenth-Century America, Gerald Friedman