: How much of the rapid growth in labor productivity in nineteenth century cotton weaving arose from capital-labor substitution and how much from technical change? Using an engineering production function and detailed information on inventions, I find that factor substitution accounts for little growth. However, much of the growth and most of the apparent labor-saving bias arose not from inventions, but from improved labor quality—better workers spent less time monitoring the looms. The inventions themselves were almost technically neutral because innovations in general purpose technologies were capital-saving. Labor quality played a critical role in the persistent association between economic growth and capital deepening in this important sector.

The essay considers the claim that slavery played a leading role in the acceleration of US economic growth in the nineteenth century. Although popular among pro-slavery apologists, the proposition fails under rigorous historical scrutiny. The slave South discouraged immigration, underinvested in transportation infrastructure, and failed to educate the majority of its population. It is not even clear that the region produced more cotton than it would have under a counterfactual alternative settlement by free family farmers, on the free-state pattern. The grain of truth in recently popular narratives is that many northerners and business interests were complicit in the crime of slavery: routinely engaging in transactions with slaveholders, even promoting activities that facilitated slavery and the domestic slave trade. Complicity complicates simple historical moralism, but it is quite different from the notion that the prosperity of the nation as a whole derived from slavery in any fundamental way.

In Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina, Ryan A. Quintana describes the role of slaves and slave labor in building the state of South Carolina, from the eighteenth century colonial era to the internal-improvements boom following the War of 1812. In the beginnings, the primary focus of infrastructure construction was security: against the Spanish, against the Indians, and even (the irony duly noted) against the slaves themselves. In the Revolutionary War and postwar periods, attention turned to economic development, primarily roads and canals, but later included one of the nation’s first long-distance railroads. Quintana’s central point is that most of the labor for these projects was provided by slaves, and this dependence was virtually taken for granted in political discussions. A second theme is that the South Carolina economy required a mobile slave labor force, yet this necessity undermined the goals of discipline and control. Not only were slaves continually reassigned from one location to another on giant rice plantations, but they also were called upon to deliver produce and obtain supplies away from the plantation, often across considerable distance. This mobility led in turn to an elaborate system of passes and codes, enforced by patrols and state militias, with only partial effectiveness. In the course of their travels, according to Quintana, slaves developed deep familiarity with the surrounding countryside, generating a “dense socioeconomic world” in which “black Carolinians . . . made their own claims to South Carolina’s territory” (116, 118). This independent knowledge facilitated running away and at least the possibility of organized violence. Slaves thus used the infrastructure they themselves had constructed to “[disrupt] the presumed racial exclusivity of state space” (116).

British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the ‘Williams thesis’: that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth‐century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti‐slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 revolutionized politics in the American South. These changes also had economic consequences, generating gains for white as well as Black southerners. Contrary to the widespread belief that the region turned Republican in direct response to the Civil Rights Revolution, expanded voting rights led to twenty-five years of competitive two-party politics, featuring strong biracial coalitions in the Democratic Party. These coalitions remained competitive in most states until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. This abrupt rightward shift had many causes, but critical for southern voters were the trade liberalization measures of 1994, specifically NAFTA and the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement which had protected the textiles and apparel industries for decades. The consequences of Republican state regimes have been severe, including intensified racial polarization, loss of support for public schools and higher education, and harsh policies toward low-income populations.

Prepared for 2017 Conference on “World War II and the West It Wrought” The Bill Lane Center for the American West Stanford University [Revised January 2018] World War II had enduring effects on the economies of the Pacific Coast, but not necessarily in the ways most commonly adduced. In his classic World War II and the West, historian Gerald D. Nash suggests that the war transformed the region from a colonial “Third World” economy based on agriculture and mining into a modern, technology-driven manufacturing dynamo. The war did indeed generate a flood of new workers into the West, propelled by an unprecedented infusion of federal spending for military production. But wartime spending did not particularly favor the West over other regions. And most of these jobs were transitory; employment in such industries as aircraft and shipbuilding fell rapidly between 1945 and 1948. Thus, as some analysts have observed, it was if anything postwar federal spending policy that sustained high income levels in the Pacific states, “preventing a decline that might otherwise have mirrored the Midwest.”1

Larson’s Laid Waste! is a freewheeling account of what he calls America’s “culture of exploitation,” the sense of entitlement to unregulated access to new territories and their natural resources. He frames the book as an exploration of the roots of contemporary resistance to government policies designed to reverse environmental degradation and mitigate climate change.Some features of the book will be vexatious to interdisciplinary readers. Larson deploys the term exploitation broadly to include not just environmental destruction but harsh treatment of slaves (the “culture of exploitation in its most visceral and brutal form”) and free industrial labor (142, 171–173). Thus, the text often reads like those narratives for which “progress” is merely a euphemism for expropriation, though Larson’s historical understanding is more nuanced.More seriously, given its objectives, the book does not provide a systematic analysis of the role of natural resources in U.S. economic growth. Chapters 5 through 8 offer relatively conventional accounts of geographical expansion, internal improvement, technological innovation, and the rise of big business. Deforestation emerges as a matter of concern at the end of the nineteenth century, but neither the nation’s early leadership in woodworking technologies nor its transition across the century from organic to fossil-fuel energy sources finds any coverage. The epilogue’s opening quotation from President Donald Trump announcing the end of the “war on beautiful clean coal” would be more powerful if mining and the use of coal had received attention in the preceding 200 pages (231). Despite its importance for U.S. economic preeminence, the minerals sector is entirely missing from the book.A more distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the perspectives of leading thinkers at various historical junctures. Larson reviews the thoughts of not only familiar figures like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Matthew and Henry Carey but also lesser-known colonial writers like John Oldmixon, William Byrd II, and William Wollaston, and the early national geographer Jedediah Morse. Particularly relevant is the work of nineteenth-century diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh, often considered the country’s first environmentalist. Marsh’s Man and Nature (New York, 1864) deplored the deforestation of his native Vermont, anticipating the complex systems approach of modern ecology and sounding an urgent alarm for the nation as a whole. Appearing in wartime, Man and Nature attracted little immediate attention. But Marsh influenced John Muir and other conservationists, launching another philosophical and cultural tradition, fully as American as the laissez-faire faith lamented in Laid Waste!.That the United States suffers from its history of unregulated environmental exploitation can hardly be denied. Laid Waste! succeeds in lending “historical aid and comfort” to efforts to overcome this legacy (241). But whereas resource-based development was central to nineteenth-century economic life, it seems evident that the health and economic well-being of most Americans in the present century would be improved by moving to a more sustainable approach. The challenge is to make this new economic reality apparent to American voters.

During an Industrial and Corporate Change conference at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2016, a roundtable discussion on The Legacy of Nathan Rosenberg and the Importance of Economic History was held on December 12th, 2016. The discussion was chaired by Professor David J. Teece and included Professors David C. Mowery whose introductory comments form the basis of the present Introduction to this Nathan Rosenberg Memorial Issue. It also included roundtable interventions by Professors Kenneth Arrow, Giovanni Dosi, Uve Granstrand, Richard R. Nelson, and Gavin Wright. The following text constitutes a revised version of the contributions by each participant.

Every year around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we hear that the revered civil-rights leader came to understand late in his life that sweeping economic reform was essential for racial progress, but that this "radical" King has been obscured by the antiseptic apostle of brotherhood favored by the media. Since we hear this theme every year, we may ask just how deeply suppressed it can be. King as economic thinker and activist is nonetheless an undeniably neglected topic. Laurent addresses it in this new book, focusing particularly on the Poor People's Campaign of 1967/8, King's ambitious last political initiative.Laurent first shows, following the lead of Jackson and Birt, that King had a deep background in social-democratic thought, having stressed inequality and economic justice for decades.1 She thus firmly rejects the "radicalization" thesis, arguing instead that the Poor People's Campaign was "the culmination of King's lifelong thinking on the nature of justice" (13). Laurent portrays the campaign as a link in a "long chain" of black progressive intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and King contemporaries A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.The next major section tells the story of the Campaign, though Laurent acknowledges that she "does not describe in depth the fine details," instead using the history to illustrate King's "understanding that racial inequality was embedded in class" (98). An important turning point was King's traumatic experience with the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965–1967. Exposure to entrenched segregation and powerlessness in a northern city "left an indelible impression on King" (123). Worse yet, he found that his message of nonviolence and interracialism was no match for Stokely Carmichael's "black power" slogan in its appeal to urban black youth. King may not have been "radicalized" by his Chicago experience, but his interest in sweeping economic reform also responded to political competition on his left flank. Support for the sanitation workers of Memphis in 1968 reflected King's plans for a new phase of the movement, more oriented toward progressive economic goals.The account of the rise and fall of Resurrection City, the six-week poor people's live-in on the National Mall in 1968, is one of the most interesting parts of the book, but it conveys the sinking feeling that failure was preordained. Amid intense planning for the event, King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4. The organizers carried on, but the project was beset with media skepticism, fbi hostility, political fragmentation, and the absence of well-defined achievable goals. Bayard Rustin, who was recruited as national coordinator on May 24, counseled pragmatism. He published an updated version of the Economic Bill of Rights on June 5, advancing a specific legislative agenda. His reward was dismissal for insubordination by Ralph Abernathy on June 7. Robert Kennedy, by then a presidential candidate and a strong supporter of the Campaign, was himself assassinated on June 6. Resurrection City was razed by district police on June 24.In the last section, Laurent attempts to salvage a legacy from this fiasco by maintaining that King and the Campaign "echoed and anticipated many academic works on urban poverty and structural inequalities" (219), highlighting the work of Wilson (who contributes a brief foreword) and other scholars.2 This attempt is a stretch. King tried to make sense of the turbulent world in which he lived, while remaining true to his own deepest values, including a willingness to advance radical economic proposals. In doing so, he drew from, and worked with, many of the leading thinkers of the times. But neither King nor the experts could have foreseen the economic world in which we now find ourselves, and none of them truly cracked the code of race–class interaction in American society. Laurent deserves credit for elucidating the "real" Martin Luther King over the sanitized icon, but we should look to the man for inspiration and values, not particularly for an economic policy agenda.

This chapter surveys the role of natural resources in American economic history, from colonial times to the present. The central theme is that natural resources do indeed have a history: to a very considerable degree, American resource abundance has been “socially constructed” through responses to economic incentives, investments in transportation, and development of technologies of exploration and extraction using advanced forms of knowledge. During the nineteenth century, Americans adapted their technologies and consumption patterns toward wood to an extent unmatched in the world at that time. The country’s rise to world leadership in minerals was not based primarily on geological endowment, but on an accommodating legal environment, expansion of the infrastructure of public knowledge, and investment in higher mining education. Recent American developments in shale oil and shale gas confirm the historical generalization that natural resources are not given by nature but by policy choices and human behavior.