In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come...

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth...

Biographical note: McLeanIan W.: Ian W. McLean is currently a visiting research fellow in economics at the University of Adelaide, where he taught for many years. He is the coeditor of "The Australian Economy in the Long Run".

Power to the People examines the varied but interconnected relationships between energy consumption and economic development in Europe over the last five centuries. It describes how the traditional energy economy of medieval and early modern Europe was marked by stable or falling per capita...

In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This...

A major feat of research and synthesis, this book presents the first comprehensive history of the Dutch economy in the nineteenth century--an important but poorly understood piece of European economic history. Based on a detailed reconstruction of extensive economic data, the authors account for...

Although political and legal institutions are essential to any nation's economic development, the forces that have shaped these institutions are poorly understood. Drawing on rich evidence about the development of the American states from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, this...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- CHAPTER ONE Soviet Development in World-Historical Perspective -- PART ONE The Economy before Stalin -- CHAPTER TWO Economic Growth before 1917 -- CHAPTER THREE The Development Problem in the 1920s -- CHAPTER FOUR...