"Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint - critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded...

"The Great Depression of the 1930s often recalls images of the drought-stricken Great Plains. Prolonged drought exacerbated the economic effects of the Great Depression to such a degree that the prairies became the epicentre of the disaster in Canada. Between 1929 and 1932, per capita incomes...

Hours at work and total factor productivity growth in nineteenth-century U.S. agriculture / Lee A. Craig, Thomas Weiss -- Factor endowments and contract choice / Alan Dye -- Moral hazard and asset specificity in the Renaissance : the economics of sharecropping in 1427 Florence / Francesco L....