Assessing the impact of the Panic of 1819 in Virginia, and even more so across the nation, is complicated by the confluence of events in that critical year. In addition to the economic crisis engendered by the Panic, the debate regarding federalism and states’ rights that influenced all political discussions of the day, and particularly those in Virginia, was exacerbated by three other incidents. The first of these ‘grew out of John C. Calhoun's attempt to recover through his cabinet position some of the internal improvement ground lost in the Bonus Bill veto’. Facing strong opposition led by Henry Clay, Calhoun's proposal was sharply debated in Congress, and while a compromise gave both sides something, the question of the federal role for internal improvements remained unresolved.

A second event in March of the watershed year 1819 was the Supreme Court's ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland. In addition to sustaining the Bank of the United States, Chief Justice John Marshall's decision operated to ‘enlarge federal power and enhance its instruments of economic development’ by reserving ‘almost nothing to the states except what was local and self-contained’ and gathering ‘under the umbrella of federal supremacy all things not prohibited by the Constitution’.

Finally, the second session of the fifteenth Congress began debate on the issue of admitting the Missouri territory to the Union. The debate actually concerned the sectional balance in Congress, and both sides, slave South and antislavery North, took increasingly hard stands that ended in a deadlock in March 1819. Returning for the sixteenth Congress, northern antislavery forces who had taken their case to the public ‘in the first American antislavery political campaign of its kind’ evoked strong southern reactions that produced a crisis. With exquisite political skill, compromisers led by Henry Clay found a way through the impasse and achieved the ‘immediate goal of pushing aside the slavery issue under a deceptive national truce so Americans could concentrate on even more pressing matters of economic survival’.

In November 1989, Trump Taj Mahal Vice-President Donald Buzney had a problem. The Taj was set to open within six months and it still had 3,100 unfilled positions. Buzney's solution was outreach. In an unprecedented strategy for Atlantic City casinos, he prepared the Trump Organization to recruit employees from outside the region. To fill the jobs, Trump would end up recruiting workers from Gary, Indiana, Washington DC, Puerto Rico and Ireland. Trump's outreach to Gary also highlighted the reality of looming competition for the Atlantic City casinos, as Gary residents had just voted in favour of casino gaming in their fading rust-belt city on Lake Michigan. Perversely, the possibility of Gary casinos actually served as a selling point for creative Trump recruiters, led by Donald's brother Robert. He suggested that Gary residents could take jobs at the Taj to learn the casino business in preparation for a future move back home to work in a Gary casino.

The Taj's employment issues highlighted a broader crisis of uncertainty in the casino industry, at its lowest point since the era began in 1978. No one really know what impact the Taj Mahal's opening would have on the resort community and the broader casino industry, but it was hard to miss the potential danger and industry-wide anxiety as the 1990s began. Total casino revenue had essentially stagnated and actually declined when adjusted for inflation. The overall rate of revenue growth had slowed to 2.6 per cent, down from 9.5 per cent in both 1987 and 1988. Costs and expenses were rising at a faster rate then revenue growth in the same period. An Atlantic County report summed up the uncertainty and anxiety, especially with regard to the employment impact:

The development of life insurance is generally believed to be tightly connected to the increased income dispersion in conjunction with the rise of the wage-earning middle class in the nineteenth century. Life insurance became a necessary substitute for the safety net previously provided by the agricultural society, facilitating the existence of a middle class lacking real property. Scholars therefore view the use of life insurance as central to the improvement and diversification of the middle-class standard of living.

However, at least as important as the growth of the middle class in the nineteenth century was the rise of the working class. The great expansion of life insurance taking place in the late nineteenth century was thus not only accomplished through ordinary life insurance but also through industrial life insurance, which was especially designed for working-class conditions with premiums payable weekly, collected by agents at the house of the insured. The compensation of agents was done on a commission basis, sometimes both on the amount of new business written and upon the amount of premiums collected. The claim was also paid shortly after the death of the insured. All this implied considerable deviations and new elements in relation to the operation of ordinary life insurance.

Industrial life insurance, with its beginnings in England in the 1850s, came to be immensely popular and expanded in many Western countries.

The newly accumulated empirical data for this book come from a wide variety of sources. The sources and treatment for these variables merit detailed explanation.

Laws and Decrees

In commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary (1992), the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce commissioned a five-volume history of mining in Brazil. The Coletânea da Legislação, from this collection, offers identifying information and the ementa (brief abstract) of federal legislation affecting mining. This publication has served to identify national-level legislation from 1891 to 1946. When consulting the full text of legislation, I have relied on the official Brazilian government website. Accumulating the appropriate legislation from the pre-Republican era and for the state of Minas Gerais required other sources. The comprehensive guide to the legislation of imperial Brazil provided the finding aid to identify legislation by its subject. The official website provides identifying data, ementa and when necessary the text of the legislation. For the legislation from Minas Gerais (Chapter 4 and Appendix Table A.1B), I have relied on the indexation that the library of the state assembly is compiling (as of 2007, which they kindly shared with me). Laws passed but not enabled through subsequent legislation are not included. (However, Appendix Table A.1A, with the most important legislation that fundamentally shaped mining, identifies important laws that were passed, but did not take effect.) I have also excluded legislation that re-authorized, without change, existing provisions.

Given the extent to which so many of the world's economies have suffered from excessive issues of fiat paper money and consequent inflations, often drastic, since the First World War and the end of the traditional gold standard, the coinage debasements in the Roman world during the third century ad should appear to be quite relevant to modern society. Yet, the great debasement of imperial Roman silver coins, along with the accompanying price increases during this era, has attracted little attention among current scholars of Antiquity. Debased silver or billon coins, especially the antoniniani of 238–74 ad, and the silver-coated coins struck between 274 and 371 – for almost a century – produced serious inflations that ruined traditional classes, while enriching much of the Roman autocracy and its servants. A destructive expedient at best, these debasements led to a breakdown not only of the currency but of fiscal institutions and monetary policy. Hence this inflation was once seen as a step backwards: a destruction of a well-developed, monetized market economy and a consequent shift to a ‘natural’ or barter economy (Naturwirtschaft) that marked the transition from the traditional Classical world to that of Late Antiquity. More recently, however, scholars have devoted far less attention to such questions of debasement and inflation, and have instead directed their primary efforts to quantifying the Roman economy. But the results are far from conclusive. There are insufficient data for, and even less agreement on, estimates of the GDP of the Roman Empire or even the scale of annual production of silver currency in the late first and second centuries. The economy of the Rome under the Principate has also been compared, with varying degrees of success, to those of the traditional agrarian empires of Han China, Mughal India and the Ottoman Middle East. Furthermore, social historians, writing in the tradition of M. I. Finley, have regarded coins as fiscal instruments issued to meet imperial expenditures rather than to promote markets and trade in what has sometimes has been dubbed an underdeveloped economy.

One decade into the twenty-first century, and thirty years since the worst economic crisis in Latin America (the debt crisis of the 1980s – ‘the lost decade’), it is time to have another look at the economic history of Latin America and the Caribbean from a long-term perspective. We firmly believe that many of the ideas used to study Latin American backwardness, are twentieth-century rather than twenty-first-century ideas. In this sense, Latin American economic historiography has been marked by a period of pessimism about Latin America's chances of overcoming economic backwardness. The tendency to take a short term perspective or to focus only on a few national cases has meant that research has been heavily influenced by debates centring on the failure of industrialization, the political cost of the military dictatorships, the social and economic impact of the ‘lost decade’ and the limitations of the subsequent recovery. The poor performance of Latin American economies in recent times has also influenced those who study the earlier stages, which helps to understand the success of a book entitled ‘How Latin America Fell Behind’ published in 1997.

This backwardness is apparent in the widening gap between GDP per inhabitant in Latin America and the Caribbean and that of wealthy countries. The ideas most frequently used in an attempt to explain Latin American backwardness point to institutional reasons, on the one hand, and the theory of ‘the curse of natural resources’, on the other, or to both simultaneously.

Coinage debasements in pre-industrial Europe, despite their frequency and especially their severity during the late medieval guerres monétaires, and despite their often important economic consequences, remain a subject that is often mentioned but remains ill understood in the economic history literature. Indeed, one often-cited article, aptly titled ‘The Debasement Puzzle’ (1996), by three highly respected economists, sought to demonstrate that coinage debasements were both impractical and economically futile. Yet debasements continued to ‘plague’ Europe until the eighteenth century. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that they were both practical and often quite effective in their often very different goals, and were not always so deleterious in their effects as is traditionally portrayed.

Medieval Coinages and their Relation to Moneys of Account

The nature, techniques and economic consequences of European coinage debasements must be understood first in relation to the local money of account system for that coinage. In medieval and early-modern western Europe (except for the Iberian peninsula and parts of Germany), most local moneys of account were based upon the system that was established under Charlemagne, c.795. It was directly linked to the new Carolingian pound weight of fine silver (489.51 g) in that the pound money of account was given the precise value of this weight of fine silver. Obviously no silver coins weighing a pound were struck; and for centuries, the only silver coins struck were the various regional pennies (and their subdivisions). Solely for accounting purposes, in reckoning prices, wages, values, etc., the pound money of account (libra, livre, lira) was subdivided into 20 shillings (based on the Roman gold solidus), which in turn were subdivided into 12 pence (based on the Roman silver denarius), so that this pound of account always consisted of 240 currently circulating silver pennies. Not until the thirteenth century did some Italian city-states and then France introduce heavier weight silver coins, known as grossi or gros. The primary reason for issuing such larger, ‘full-bodied’ coins was the deterioration in the silver contents of the original penny through the ensuing centuries of almost universal, if periodic coin debasements, and the consequent rise in prices in each region's silver-based money of account.

Introduction

The issue of the (in)accuracy of foreign trade statistics remains in the economics, development and trade literature to the present day. This chapter proposes a non-parametric test in order to establish the level of accuracy of the Latin American foreign trade statistics when contrasted with the trade statistics of the main trading partners.

The study of Federico and Tena showed that, in historical terms, the accuracy of foreign trade statistics seems to be more robust than previously thought. The results of this chapter also point in such a direction. Nevertheless, this chapter departs from previous exercises regarding the (in)accuracy of foreign trade data in several aspects. First, the chapter focuses in the trade of a particular region in a single year. That is the chapter provides a test for the accuracy of the foreign trade statistics of seventeen Latin American countries for the year 1925. Second, rather than testing for the accuracy of the overall trade figures, the test is performed on data registered for a couple of quite homogeneous products, petroleum products and mineral coal. Third, the test applies to the accuracy of both the volumes and values registered on the official statistics of the exporting and importing countries. Most previous exercises did only test for the accuracy of the values registered, since the aggregate trade figures were used.