Graduation date: 1974

Thèse--Poitiers. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse--Poitiers. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

No description available.

As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly important to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its location near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on the export of agricultural commodities from western states farther upriver. Handling this wide-ranging commerce was the city's business community: bankers, factors, and wholesalers, among others. This globally oriented community represented an older and qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation, merchant capitalism, which was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production to which it was closely allied, the New Orleans merchant community faced increasing pressure during the antebellum decades even while its fortunes seemed otherwise secure. The city lost most of its market share in western grain products to railroads and other routes linked directly to northeastern urban centers, and its merchants' failure to maintain port infrastructure or create a viable manufacturing sector reflected their complacency and left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrially-based economy of the North. These and other weaknesses were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of many changes to the regional and national political economy after northern victory in the war, the New Orleans merchant community was never able to recover its previous commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly became a site of notorious political corruption and endemic poverty. Much the same can be said of the postbellum southern economy in which it was embedded, where the practices of merchant capitalism nevertheless managed to persist by becoming dispersed throughout the agricultural interior in the form of "country stores." Under the sharecropping system that became prevalent in cotton production, rural merchants furnished seasonal credit to the small farming households that had replaced plantation slavery. Although these stores played different roles in Louisiana cotton and sugar parishes, the culture of merchant capitalism hampered economic development in the South for many decades to come.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation explores, both theoretically and empirically, the role of strange farmers in the Gambia's mono-cash crop economy and analyzes the structure of strange farmer contracts within the context of rural production relations; ie. the relations of economic agents to resources of production in terms of their use and ownership rights and the relations between economic agents as principals (ie. landlords) and agents (ie. workers; strange farmers). Strange farmers, the migrant laborers who come from the West African hinterland to farm in the coastal areas of the Senegambia region due to certain transaction cost advantages, constitute a dynamic population adjustment to West Africa's spatial, unequal spread of resources. It is argued in this study that the reason "strange farming" has continued to persist is because it is flexible and adaptable to the prevailing agroclimatic conditions and endowments of the West Africa region, and to the economic changes induced by the interplay of internal (the government; technology) and external (e.g., world primary commodity markets) institutional and market forces. Detailed analysis of the strange farmer contract (a contract of "input sharing"), as contrasted with wage, fixed-rent, and sharecropping, is presented; and emphasis is placed on the "strangeness" of the strange farmers (the fact that they are non-residents of their farming areas) as the distinguishing feature of the contract. Our analysis considers how environmental and idiosyncratic factors such as information, risk, and incentive constraints impinge on agents in this environment and how alternative models of the strange farmer system explain how such problems are circumvented. The study concludes by examining the efficiency and (briefly) the equity implications of strange farming, and argues that strange farming performs the vital economic role of providing otherwise labor deficient landlords with a steady and timely supply of labor throughout the farming season and indeed circumvents the contract enforcement and shirking problems posed by a second-best environment. / Ph. D. / incomplete_metadata