Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century

Acknowledgements Introduction: technology, history and growth Part I. Concepts and Preconceptions: 1. Labor scarcity and the problem of technological practice and progress in nineteenth-century America Part II. Generation: 2. Learning by doing and tariff protection: a reconsideration of the case of the ante-bellum United States cotton textile industry Addendum: estimated rates of labor equality change 3. The 'Horndal effect' in Lowell, 1834-56: a short-run learning curve for integrated cotton textile mills Part III. Diffusion: 4. The mechanization of reaping in the ante-bellum Midwest Addendum: threshold farm size 5. The landscape and the machine: technical interrelatedness, land tenure and the mechanization of the corn harvest in Victorian Britain Appendix A: technical notes Appendix B: source of the parameters and variables Part IV. Ramifications: 6. Transport innovations and economic growth: Professor Fogel on and off the rails References Index.