Agriculture dominated the economy of eighteenth-century British America, and the pace of agricultural productivity advance was the primary determinant of the rate of economic growth. In this paper we offer new measures of agricultural productivity advance in the Lower South between 1720 and...

Using data from samples of probate inventories we construct a series of slave prices for Low Country South Carolina and Georgia covering the period 1722-1815. Using these data we examine variations in slave prices by age and sex, as well as geographic variations between and within the two...

This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the...

Based on data from several samples of probate inventories we construct and analyze a time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. These estimates reveal that prices fluctuated without trend prior to the 1760s and then began to rise rapidly, more than doubling by the early...

Combining theoretical work with careful historical description and analysis of new data sources, History Matters makes a strong case for a more historical approach to economics, both by argument and by example. Seventeen original essays, written by distinguished economists and economic...

We employ the conjectural approach to estimate the growth of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the mid-Atlantic region (Del., NJ, NY and Penn). In contrast to previous studies of the region's growth that relied heavily on the performance of the export sector, the conjectural method...

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes...

We construct decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the Mid-Atlantic region between 1720 and 1800. They show that the region likely achieved modest improvements in per capita GDP over this period despite a number of demographic factors that tended to slow the pace of...