Mixed Economy in the Entrepreneurial Sphere? Ethnic Enterprise in the Wholesale and Retail Trades in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 510-525
Author(s):  
Robert L. Boyd
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Pérez

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.


Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen

This chapter analyses the messy impact of historical forces such as ableism, patriarchy, and institutionalization on Ott’s life. The justifying logic imbedded in her diagnosis and prescriptive institutionalization (re)wrote her life story—her past, her future, and how she would be remembered. The ableism undergirding Ott’s insanity diagnosis permeated legal, familial, and activist contexts both outside and inside the walls of medicine in the late nineteenth-century United States. The chapter then argues for biography as a powerful methodology to forefront lived experiences while simultaneously embedding those lived experiences in large-scale social and historical structures.


2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shih-tse Lo ◽  
Dhanoos Sutthiphisal

Scholars have long noted the significant impact of general purpose technologies (GPTs) on the economy. However, limited attention has been paid to exploring how they are employed to generate inventions in downstream sectors (crossover inventions), and what factors may facilitate such diffusion. In a study of the introduction of electrical technology in the late-nineteenth-century United States, we find that knowledge spillovers between industries had little influence on the geography of crossover inventions as well as the speed and productivity of crossover inventors. Instead, human capital and an environment promoting inventions in general were more important.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document