Contents:
Possibilities for coping with population pressures by extensions to margins of cultivation and cropping, through tenurial reform, investments in the infra-structure for intra-regional trade and specialization, by reallocating pasture to arable, improving the control of water, supplies implementing efficient food stabilization policies, etc. Although precise calculations are difficult to make and several figures including revised estimates from Pomeranz jostle for recognition the tradition of energy accountancy as a way of explaining increasing and decreasing returns go back to the 19th century.
Furthermore, all forms of heat intensive industry and transportation metallurgy, glass, pottery, beer, sugar and salt, refining soap, starch, railways and ships benefited from the substitution of coal for other more costly and less efficient organic forms of energy. Feedbacks and spin-offs from the mining, transportation and utilization of coal, including the construction of canals, precision engineering and, above all, the impetus provided by coal for the development, improvement and diffusion of engines for the provision of energy from steam, remain impossible to calculate.
Yet that age — remained imminent rather than dominant during the first stages of the industrial revolution, which occurred decades before that particular golden age of liberal capitalism. Chinese coal may or may not have been more combustible and less well located than European deposits, but it stayed below ground as an abundant and presumably as a potentially more efficient source of energy, compared to the manpower, wind and water that the Chinese, Japanese and other Asian economies continued to utilize throughout the 19th century.
References to geology, geography and transportation problems do not seem to be sufficient to explain why China remained virtually an outsider throughout the age of steam? Finally, to return to Adam Smith and overseas expansion europeans not Chinese, Arabs or Indians discovered conquered, infected, plundered, colonized and eventually established mutually beneficial, commercial relationships with the Americas.
Material benefits from the rediscovery of the Americas did not come on stream for a long time after , and accrued disproportionately to two latecomers and free riders — the Netherlands and England. No doubt quantitative exercises in national accountancy designed to measure the macro-economic significance of transatlantic commerce for either the development of Europe as a whole, or even for particular countries such as the Netherlands or Britain, most persistently and profitably involved with expansion overseas are fraught with conceptual and statistical difficulties.
No economic historian could deny that the establishment of colonies regulated along mercantilist lines together with slave plantations in the New World, turned the terms and conditions for trans-Atlantic trade in favour of Europe; compared, that is, to commerce with Asia; and even more clearly to a counterfactual scenario, whereby the settlement and the build-up of viable and independent economies in the Americas depended upon unregulated, but unprotected private investment and the immigration of free labour from Europe rather than the enslavement of millions of Africans.
Furthermore, recent research into world trade in bullion has clarified the importance of the complex and multifaceted role played by Chinese, Indian and South East Asian demand for New World silver in maintaining the profitability and momentum of European investment in the Americas for some two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. That investment also promoted an entirely gradual movement towards the integration and growth of an embryonic global economy, within which the separated maritime towns and regions of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas interacted — usually with more positive effects for European than for Asian development.
Nevertheless, a national accounts framework continues to be the only viable perspective available to historians who wish to specify and quantify the overall significance of variables, such as intercontinental exports and imports for national and European wide rates of capital formation and structural change and innovation from to Revisionists, who take their perceptions from Adam Smith, will prefer to shift the focus for concentration to Britain, which over time became more involved than any other European economy including the Netherlands with intercontinental commerce and colonization.
Britain cannot represent the West and its transition to an industrial market economy and was never a paradigm for its rivals on the mainland to follow. Another route that can be followed in order to make the case in a less parsimonious way, but which comes closer to the details of micro dynamism favoured by economic historians, like Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Ken Pomeranz is to construct narratives built around the array of imports that Europeans transhipped from the New World and Asia back into their famous maritime ports Lisbon, Seville, Cadiz, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Bordeaux and London.
American and Asian imports included: bullion, foodstuffs, manufactured goods, industrial inputs and raw materials. Imports, obtained in very large part through the exercise of coercion designed to secure favourable terms of trade, increased in volume with the incorporation of maritime Atlantic economies into global commerce, slowly at first, but more rapidly as the infra-structure and organizations required for long distance trade were built up over the 16th and 17th centuries. Histories of spin-offs and externalities have been woven around most of the major imports from other continents carried into European ports.
Their connexions to the maintenance and extension of benefits from long established patterns of intra-European trade, to the foundation of new food processing industries, to geopolitical rivalry and state formation, to the growth in the wealth and powers of merchant oligarchies, to the rise of maritime cities, to changes in science, technology and the arts; indeed to almost all aspects of European economic, political and urban life have been elaborated in numerous histories of sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, maize, rice, tobacco, tropical fruit.
That bibliography is long. Volumes imported fluctuated but increased on trend. Points of entry and distribution for Asian and American imports changed through time from city to city and from country to country. The problem is how to connect imports from other continents to narratives or models of early modern European development in which national economies are carried forward to plateaux of possibilities from where transitions to industrial market economies became probable?
Fernand Braudel, Giovanni Arrighi and Charles Kindleberger find the key mechanisms they wish to underline in a geopolitical matrix of dynamic circuits between maritime cities, big merchants and nation states. Pomeranz devotes his research and analysis to two possible macro-economic connexions. In brief, the rise of material culture in Europe has been linked, in carefully specified ways, to intercontinental trade and colonization to changes in consumption and investment and to the patterns of work by European households.
Nothing comparable occurred in Asia because the consumption of tropical groceries, porcelain, silks and cotton textiles and other indigenous products had already diffused down the social scale. In the Orient, imperial states had virtually no fiscal or other interest in the promotion of commerce and colonization that might in the fullness of time pay for itself in the form of imported and taxable luxuries. At the same time, Chinese and Indian demands for foodstuffs and manufactures produced in Europe remained limited in volume and scope.
Although the new world silver that European merchants exchanged for Asian foodstuffs, manufactures and raw materials presumably promoted monetary transactions and internal trade in China and India in the same way that American bullion did within Europe? Revisionists make the most of a not unconvincing case for symbiotic linkages between the luxurious, exotic, addictive and desirable characteristics embodied in imports from Asia and the Americas to: the industrious revolution; the maintenance of European commitments to intercontinental trade; the enslavement of Africans; and flows of investment into colonization and plantations in the New World.
They cite literature which locates the impetus to development from urban processing industries sugar refining, coffee roasting, tea and tobacco blending, etc. They are familiar with histories that explain how the manufacture of cotton textiles in Britain developed over the 18th century within a matrix of trade with India, the import of cotton fibres from slave plantations in the Americas, state involvement with its East India company and the promotion of a functional process of import substitution by English Parliaments from — Nevertheless, it will be heuristic to confront this new and stimulating narrative which foregrounds the role of Asian and Americas imports in bringing about divergent economic developments between Western Europe and East Asia.
First the share of the calorific intake supplied by sugar, tea and other tropical groceries could only have been small.
Growing proportions of British merchant ships were indeed built in North American colonies and in Asia even before the French blockades cut off supplies of Baltic timer and other naval stores pitch, tar and hemp during the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, established patterns of East-West and intra-European trade in timber reverted to normal after that war, and iron rather than American forests alleviated European shortages of wood for construction and for shipbuilding in the 19th century.
Although a statistically more compelling case for the substitution of cotton fibres grown on slave plantations in the Americas, for supplies of flax, hemp, silk and wool grown in Europe can be made. Once again, the scale of imports in relation to total consumption of indigenous fibres becomes important later rather than earlier in the 19th century.
New economic history consigned axioms of indispensability to the realms of improbability four decades ago. Yet there is certainly a more nuanced but less dramatic argument to be made for the importance of supplies of slave produced cotton fibres, namely that cheap raw materials promoted the growth of one major manufacturing industry in Europe and that the engineering problems involved in the mechanization of spinning and weaving cloth were more easily solved with fibres with the tensile properties of cotton, than thrown silk not so clear!
Nevertheless, in rather short compass the problems of mechanizing all major processes in the production of cloth made from the entire range of natural fibres were solved. We can agree that the early shift from organic to inorganic forms of energy provided Europe particularly Britain with an early start. Nevertheless, and for several reasons, the other leg of the revisionist explanation which follows the line taken by Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the World Systems School that the discovery, conquest and exploitation of the Americas also generated comparably large windfall gains and allowed Western Europe to circumvent the problems of diminishing returns afflicting oriental empires carries less conviction.
First of all, classical diminishing returns to land seem less applicable to India and South East Asia than to China. Furthermore, the convergence of Japan despite a poor endowment of natural resources , undermines histories based on classical growth models. Secondly, and on any recasting and reconfiguration of the data, now available to measure the significance of intercontinental commerce, standard exercises in national income accountancy are unlikely to provide persuasively large ratios.
Meanwhile the now fashionable post-modern retort that large outcomes could flow from small changes to exogeneous variables, simple destroys any claims that economic history might have to precision.
We might rhetorically enquire if small outcomes could flow from large changes to endogenous variables? Thirdly, it is not at all clear that the arable land, pastures, forests and seas of Western Europe, together and through trade with its periphery to the East and South could not have sustained the rates of population growth, industrialization and urbanization experienced say, down to the midth century without massive imports of primary produce from the Americas.
Compared to Western Europe, just how far were China and other regions of Asia away from their technologically constrained production possibility boundaries before ? Classical economists Smith and Malthus both perceived that China had proceeded further and had continued to move faster down the path of diminishing returns. Leaving coal aside, the intercontinental trade data suggests that Europe possessed the foodstuffs and agricultural raw materials required to persist with Smithian growth and the urbanization and industrialization of the workforce without recourse to massive imports of primary produce from the Americas until well into the 19th century.
Meanwhile, the accumulation, testing and application of a body of reliable knowledge required to carry the mechanization and transformation of industry and transport, the deployment of steam power, urbanization and reorganization of finance and commerce had proceeded a long way and perhaps beyond a point of no return — or what historians of China refer to as involution. That remains clear, if we look again at the volume and array of imports entering European ports before The cargoes carried by ships into European ports were dominated for centuries by tropical groceries and manufactured luxuries.
Agreed the Great Divergence and the Industrial Revolution form part of an interconnected narrative and the degree of divergence in labour productivities and real incomes between Europe in China, that had so clearly appeared by , looks inconceivable without the massive supplies of basic foodstuffs and raw materials imported from the Americas and other primary producers. But since those supplies came on stream over the second half of the century, questions of what started and what sustained the Industrial Revolution should not be conflated.
Despite a plan by NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson to make blanket provisions for a thirty-five hour workweek in all industry codes, by late August , the momentum toward the thirty-hour week had dissipated. About half of employees covered by NRA codes had their hours set at forty per week and nearly 40 percent had workweeks longer than forty hours.
Hunnicutt argues that the entire New Deal can be seen as an attempt to keep shorter-hours advocates at bay. After the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, Roosevelt responded to continued demands for thirty hours with the Works Progress Administration, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and, finally, the Fair Labor Standards Acts, which set a federal minimum wage and decreed that overtime beyond forty hours per week would be paid at one-and-a-half times the base rate in covered industries.
Even the reformist American Labor Legislation Review greeted the call for a five-day workweek with lukewarm interest. Cited in F. The average person is impoverished paying for these special interests, whether they are government contractors or military costs or favored manufacturers or farmers who receive protection or Sam Donaldson and his millions in farm subsidies. Trade was roughly balanced with the Netherlands, but France continually ran a large trade deficit with Italy due to the latter's silks and exotic goods. S economic history in the colonial era though be aware of the rigor This economic misery caused by out-of-control government spending eventually generated schemes by reformers to use the state, which created the problem by its aggressive foreign policy, to eradicate poverty. Buy Now from Mises Store.
As the Great Depression ended, average weekly work hours slowly climbed from their low reached in With the postwar return of weekly work hours to the forty-hour level the shorter hours movement effectively ended. Offsetting isolated examples of hours reductions after World War II, there were noteworthy cases of backsliding.
giuliettasprint.konfer.eu: The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era (Volume 1) (): Stanley L. Engerman, Robert E. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era ( Volume 1) () [unknown] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE* shipping on.
Over the course of the next decade, however, the tide turned. By most departments had opted to switch to 8-hour shifts, so that only about one-quarter of the work force, mostly women, retained a six-hour shift. Finally, in , the last department voted to adopt an 8-hour workday.
Workers, especially male workers, began to favor additional money more than the extra two hours per day of free time. In interviews they explained that they needed the extra money to buy a wide range of consumer items and to keep up with the neighbors. In addition, the rise of quasi-fixed employment costs such as health insurance induced management to push workers toward a longer workday.
Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time. The length of the workweek, like other labor market outcomes, is determined by the interaction of the supply and demand for labor. Employers are torn by conflicting pressures.
Holding everything else constant, they would like employees to work long hours because this means that they can utilize their equipment more fully and offset any fixed costs from hiring each worker such as the cost of health insurance — common today, but not a consideration a century ago. On the other hand, longer hours can bring reduced productivity due to worker fatigue and can bring worker demands for higher hourly wages to compensate for putting in long hours.
If they set the workweek too high, workers may quit and few workers will be willing to work for them at a competitive wage rate. Thus, workers implicitly choose among a variety of jobs — some offering shorter hours and lower earnings, others offering longer hours and higher earnings. The long-term decline in the length of the workweek, in this view, has primarily been due to increased economic productivity, which has yielded higher wages for workers. In a recent survey, a sizeable majority of economic historians agreed with this view.
Other broad forces probably played only a secondary role. For example, roughly two-thirds of economic historians surveyed rejected the proposition that the efforts of labor unions were the primary cause of the drop in work hours before the Great Depression. The swift reduction of the workweek in the period around World War I has been extensively analyzed by Whaples b. His findings support the consensus that economic growth was the key to reduced work hours.
Whaples links factors such as wages, labor legislation, union power, ethnicity, city size, leisure opportunities, age structure, wealth and homeownership, health, education, alternative employment opportunities, industrial concentration, seasonality of employment, and technological considerations to changes in the average workweek in cities and industries.
He finds that the rapid economic expansion of the World War I period, which pushed up real wages by more than 18 percent between and , explains about half of the drop in the length of the workweek. The reduction of immigration during the war was important, as it deprived employers of a group of workers who were willing to put in long hours, explaining about one-fifth of the hours decline.
The rapid electrification of manufacturing seems also to have played an important role in reducing the workweek. Increased unionization explains about one-seventh of the reduction, and federal and state legislation and policies that mandated reduced workweeks also had a noticeable role. In the average workweek varied tremendously, emphasizing the point that not all workers desired the same workweek. In a few Midwestern steel mill towns average workweeks exceeded 60 hours.
In a wide range of low-wage Southern cities they reached the high 50s, but in high-wage Western ports, like Seattle, the workweek fell below 45 hours. Whaples a finds that among the most important city-level determinants of the workweek during this period were the availability of a pool of agricultural workers, the capital-labor ratio, horsepower per worker, and the amount of employment in large establishments.
Hours rose as each of these increased. Eastern European immigrants worked significantly longer than others, as did people in industries whose output varied considerably from season to season. High unionization and strike levels reduced hours to a small degree.
The average female employee worked about six and a half fewer hours per week in than did the average male employee. In city-level comparisons, state maximum hours laws appear to have had little affect on average work hours, once the influences of other factors have been taken into account. One possibility is that these laws were passed only after economic forces lowered the length of the workweek.