This dissertation analyzes the relationship between law and the rise of capitalism in the U.S. First, I analyze the changing relationship between labor productivity and pay at the Lawrence #2 textile mill in Massachusetts between 1834 and 1855. I estimate a model of productivity under a piece rate contract. Results show that the relationship between changes in the wage and changes in productivity was negative in the 1830s, slightly positive in the 1840s, and strongly positive in the late-1840s to 1850s. I argue that changes in relative worker bargaining power, the intensification of work flow, and the importance of liquidity constraints due to the decline of agriculture in the Northeast are the main factors underlying this shift. Second, I study the impact of contract law on state-level economic performance. Using the contrasting cases of Connecticut and Vermont I find that the development of legal thought on contracts was not composed of a single path toward ``modernity'', as the legal historiography suggests. The Vermont legal system developed outside of the mainstream framework. Using census statistics and histories of labor and manufacturing in the two states, I then argue that this difference had an impact on the nature of state-level economic growth. Finally, I provide the first economic history of the antebellum ten hour movement. I study the historical background as well as the quantitative effects of the movement via the ten hour statutes that were passed in select states between 1847 and 1855. Using historical accounts, I first give an overview of each state's ten hour movement. Using the historical analysis as a light to shed on each state, I then use a difference-in-differences identification strategy to consider whether states that passed more stringent laws (which did not allow workers and employers to ``contract out'' of the ten hour law) saw a greater reduction in hours worked. I do find that the ten hour laws had an impact, but I suggest that the movement's effects were either amplified or tempered according to the strength and tactics of a state's labor movement.

<p> In this dissertation I present the first county-level estimates of deaths in the Confederate Army for eight of the former Confederate States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia). As described in Chapter 2, I estimate the number of deaths by Confederate company (a unit of roughly 100 men) and map these back to the company's county of origin. Counties' death rates were driven by the battles in which their men fought, determined by generals for strategic reasons. This produces a wide distribution in county-level death rates, and it allows for causal inference in assessing the impacts of these losses on counties' later development.</p><p> In Chapter 3, I estimate the long-run effects of population loss on the economic geography of the South. Populations in counties with higher death rates caught up to neighboring areas within 15 years after the war, but then they kept growing. These increases were caused by migration, especially by African Americans: counties with ten percentage-point higher death rates had 14% larger black populations in 1900 and 27% larger in 1960. Migrants also increasingly went to counties that were less advantaged in Southern economy before the Civil War. The economic geography of the American South was thus changed significantly after the institutional shock from the Civil War. </p><p> In Chapter 4, I estimate the effects of relative labor scarcity on racial violence and political participation in the American South from 1865 to 1900. I find counties with 10 percentage-point higher death rates in the Civil War had 24-33% fewer lynchings of African Americans from 1866 to 1900. They also had 3.6-5.6% higher voter turnout despite a larger fraction of their population being black. These effects persisted for at least two decades after the counties' relative labor scarcity disappeared. However, in the very long run (100 years), counties with greater Civil War deaths saw a reversal, with much worse discrimination by the Civil Rights Era, likely due to their larger black populations and absence of economic incentives to prevent discrimination. This suggests relative levels of discrimination were not culturally determined and can change fairly quickly.</p>

This thesis is a history of the gas industry down to 1914 with special reference to London. Part One deals with the industry's origins and its technical and business history and traces the development from the discovery of coal gas manufacture at the end of the seventeenth century to its first commercial exploitation in the early nineteenth century. It then sets out the subsequent technological progress made in the industry from the manufacturing process to the applications of coal gas. The commercial history of the gas companies in London is related from the early period of competition between an increasing number of speculative and often fraudulent concerns to the agreement of monopoly districts in the 1850s and amalgamation in the 1870s. The increasing government and legislative regulation is dealt with in detail and biographies of the leading industrialists are given. Part One concludes with an analysis which sets out to explain the nature and progress of the industry, its initial innovation, the pace of subsequent technological change and its commercial history, particularly relating to growth, competition, the actual role of government regulation and municipalisation, the relationship with the electricity industry and other linkages with the rest of the economy. Part Two deals with the fortunes of the workers employed in the London gasworks and deals with working conditions, wages, hours, welfare benefits and the attempts of the companies to discipline their men. It relates the early strikes in London particularly those of 1834, 1859 and 1872 and looks at the rise of the permanent union in 1889, the winning of the eight hour day and the prolonged strike at the South Metropolitan company in 1889-90. The history of the profit sharing schemes which became a feature in gas companies is given as is a brief history of some aspects of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers down to 1914. Part Two concludes with some analysis to explain the major variables in the labour relations of the gasworks, especially wages, strikes and the level of union membership.

From the early nineteenth century through World War II Springfield, Massachusetts was one of the world's preeminent metalworking centers. On the eve of the Second World War hundreds of firms and thousands of skilled machinists produced machine tools, fixtures, castings, forgings, and precision components for the nation's automobile, electrical appliance, steel, and aircraft industries. However, by the mid-1950s Springfield industry commenced an inexorable decline, interrupted briefly by Vietnam War defense spending. Firms were purchased by outside investors and work moved, while foreign firms gained market share from local companies. Springfield's fall from manufacturing prominence mirrors events elsewhere in the industrial Northeast and is important to understand. The decline is examined mainly through a history of the American Bosch Company, its workers, and their union. Established in 1911, unionized in 1936, Bosch specialized in the design and manufacture of precision diesel fuel injections components. During World War II it employed thousands of skilled machinists. After the war it was purchased by Wall Street investors and in the early 1950s became part of a small corporation headquartered in New York City. By the early 1960s it had become the most profitable firm in the diesel products division of a Fortune 500 corporation. By the time it closed in 1986 Bosch was an aging plant with a few hundred workers owned by a Fortune 100 corporation. From 1950 forward management attempted to implement numerous strategies to reduce costs and maintain market share, including the construction of a low-wage plant in Mississippi, the acquisition of overseas factories, and in-plant schemes to streamline production. The union resisted in-plant restructuring efforts, but offered token opposition to the company's world-wide maneuvers. Throughout, unionists believed their machining skills coupled with their knowledge of the products being produced were assets the company needed to succeed. The company never shared this perspective, and unresolved, this disjuncture contributed to the closing of the plant. It is argued here that management's efforts failed because workers were treated as appendages of their machines.

Between 1790 and 1865, the Jamaican political economy experienced a series of structural crises which precipitated changes in the relations of production on the island. Faced with changes within the global circulation of capital, groups of Jamaican elites, using their positions of privilege within the socio-economic hierarchy of the island, attempted to manipulate the socio-economic upheavals of the nineteenth century to maintain and reinforce their wealth, power, and status within Jamaican society. Within this context, large-scale coffee production, first using slave- and then later wage-based labor systems, was introduced to Jamaica for the first time. The introduction and development of this industry in one coffee producing region, the Yallahs drainage of the Blue Mountains in the southeastern quadrant of the island, are considered as manifestations of the global change that was affecting Jamaica at the time. A crucial component of the socio-economic manipulations of the nineteenth century was the introduction and negotiation of new social spaces. Two sequential phases of negotiation were experienced and have been interpreted: the introduction of coffee production under slavery, and the reorganization of labor/capital relations following emancipation. The intentions behind, and the often contested results of, the elites' attempts at restructuring the logic of accumulation during these phases of manipulation are interpreted by examining the historical, cartographic, and archaeological records. These various data sets are considered to be manifestations of three interrelated dimensions of space: the cognitive, the social and the material. By examining plantation space in this theoretical context, this dissertation interprets the way new spaces were designed and intended by elites to reinforce new social relations, and how such manipulations were resisted by the African-Jamaican majority in the Yallahs region.

This dissertation examines the impact of capitalist class transformation on African American households and community institutions during the Great Migration. The study reviews theories of rural to urban migration according to their applicability to African American migrant households. The transformation of African American households and laboring processes interacted with changes in gender and racial ideology. A historical case study of the Urban League of Pittsburgh discusses the League's racial uplift program and its implications for African American migrant households and Pittsburgh industries. The League unsuccessfully attempted to encourage black female domesticity and economic dependency on black men by encouraging wives to quit jobs and increase surplus labor within the household.

In this dissertation, I try to understand processes of dispossession and exclusion within a class-focused Marxian framework grounded in the epistemological position of overdetermination. The Marxian concept of primitive accumulation has become increasingly prominent in contemporary discussions on these issues. The dominant reading of “primitive accumulation” in the Marxian tradition is historicist, and consequently the notion itself remains outside the field of Marxian political economy. The contemporary literature has de-historicized the concept, but at the same time missed Marx’s unique class-perspective. Based on a non-historicist reading of Marx, I argue that primitive accumulation—i.e. separation of direct producers from means of production in non-capitalist class processes—is constitutive of capitalism and not a historical process confined to the period of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism. I understand primitive accumulation as one aspect of a more complex (contradictory) relation between capitalist and non-capitalist class structure which is subject to uneven development and which admit no teleological universalization of any one class structure. Thus, this dissertation claims to present a notion of primitive accumulation theoretically grounded in the Marxian political economy. In particular, the dissertation problematizes the dominance of capital over a heterogeneous social formation and understands primitive accumulation as a process which simultaneously supports and undermines such dominance. At a more concrete level, I apply this new understanding of primitive accumulation to a social formation—consisting of “ancient” and capitalist enterprises—and consider a particular conjuncture where capitalist accumulation is accompanied by emergence and even expansion of a “surplus population” primarily located in the “ancient” economy. Using these theoretical arguments, I offer an account of postcolonial capitalism in India, distinguishing between two different regimes—(1) the dirigiste planning regime and (2) the laissez-faire regime. I argue that both regimes had to grapple with the problem of surplus population, as the capitalist expansion under both regimes involved primitive accumulation. I show how small peasant agriculture, traditional non-capitalist industry and informal “ancient” enterprises (both rural and urban) have acted as “sinks” for surplus population throughout the period of postcolonial capitalist development in India. Keywords: primitive accumulation, surplus population, postcolonial capitalism

In 1870 a Massachusetts shoe manufacturer imported 75 Chinese workers to break a strike. This event ignited nationwide interest in Chinese immigration and ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law ever passed by the United States banning a group of people based solely on race or nationality. The origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act involve many factors, but the most important force behind the law was national politicians who, in an era of almost perfectly-balanced party strength, seized the issue in the quest for votes. Politicians appealed directly to voters' deep-seated racism. They manipulated the image of the Chinese immigrant--who often appeared positively and heroically in popular culture--and transformed it into something grotesque. The politics of racism brought success in the West where most Chinese immigrants had settled, but the campaign fell flat east of the Rocky Mountains. No groundswell of support for exclusion emerged in the East in the mid-1870s. In 1877, however, after the national railroad strike revealed the stark class divisions in American society, politicians shifted their tactics and presented Chinese exclusion as a way to help the workingman. They did this in spite of the fact that eastern workers had expressed virtually no interest in the issue. Workers had long opposed the importation of Chinese laborers but not their immigration. Workers carefully distinguished between the two--a distinction ignored by politicians and historians alike. To politicians, Chinese exclusion became a panacea for rising working-class discontent. By making the Chinese the scapegoat for the nation's industrial problems, politicians could avoid dealing with the genuine causes of the depression; they could also ignore more far-reaching solutions which would have required direct government intervention in the economy. Chinese exclusion served as class politics on the cheap. Such anti-Chinese politics served other functions as well. It helped wean Republicans away from the equal rights ideals of the Civil War and legitimized racism as national policy. A classic example of top-down politics, the Chinese Exclusion Act symbolically marked the end of Reconstruction and set a precedent for later anti-immigration legislation.

As the dust of the Second World War began to settle, that which began life in the U.S. as an experimental space in early twentieth century firms became a knowable object of intervention for economics and accountancy alike. Jumpstarted by the war, research and development, or RandD, was pulled into the experimental forays of a new generation of experts, including macroeconomic growth theorists. By explaining growth outputs in terms of RandD inputs, postwar macroeconomists failed to learn the lesson that was so hard won by accountants, namely: that it is the very uncertainty of outcomes which makes experimental inquiry so valuable to society and yet so untenable as capital. / Doctor of Philosophy / Over the course of the twentieth century, American "research and development" evolved from an experimental space within a handful of early twentieth century firms, into "RandD"—a knowable object of intervention for experts and regulators alike. Tracing this shift through the lens of accounting history, this dissertation draws out the debates involving RandD accounting which ultimately settled on the treatment of RandD as an ordinary and necessary business expense. Federal laws and regulations, however, continue to treat RandD as if it were a capital investment like any other. The implications of treating RandD as capital are discussed.

This thesis presents an intellectual history of the historiography of Australian Economic History between 1918 and 1965. More specifically, it is a contribution to a relatively novel area of research into 'disciplinary history’. It takes as its basic analytical material the four books widely used for significant lengths of time for undergraduate teaching during the period of the study. The thesis consists of five main chapters, plus an appendix which surveys the institutional development of Australian Economic History and provides the empirical basis for the selection of the works named above. After a brief introduction and overview, the next four chapters consist of a detailed study of one of these works, the historical context in which each was written, and an intellectual biography. The fifth chapter is largely theoretical and conceptual. It analyses the epistemological bases of History and Economics and explores the implications of different models of knowledge for the relationship between Economic History and its two antecedent disciplines, History and Economics. Current perceptions of the state of the discipline in Australia and overseas are also examined. There are three main propositions advanced and their implications explored in the fifth chapter. First, that changes which occurred in Australian Economic History during the period 1918-1965 shifted the discipline from the broad area of History to the broad area of Economics. Second, that the inherent tension and fundamental differences between the two disciplinary areas of History and Economics have profound and complex implications for Australian Economic History at a number of levels and in a number of areas. The third proposition posits that the paradigm shift of the 1950s/1960s in Australian Economic History, and the paradigm shift of the 1960s/1970s in Economic History respectively have resulted in crisis. The final part of the chapter summarises the contents of the preceding chapters, and draws some conclusions based on those detailed studies.