Tag: economic history

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Why Was St. Louis an “Also-Ran”?

St. Louis Union Terminal now a Doubletree

Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.

In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east.  Indeed, as one historian noted,

“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]

In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.

But by 1880, when St. Louis had grown to 350,158 people, Chicago’s population had galloped ahead to 503,185.[2] Continue reading “Why Was St. Louis an “Also-Ran”?”

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The Problem with Political History

US. Capitol

As many readers know, my husband, Richard Stroup, died in November. For those who didn’t know him, here is a short obituary.  I very much appreciate the messages so many have shared with me about Rick.

Rick was somewhat skeptical of history as a discipline because he didn’t see any theory behind it (it seemed more like “one damned thing after another“). He preferred economic theory and its application to political behavior, which is called public choice economics. He and his coauthor James D. Gwartney were among the pioneers in this field.

Can history and economics be reconciled? Continue reading “The Problem with Political History”

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Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?

Cotton field

Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?

We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.

What could southerners do? Continue reading “Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?”

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Battle of the Keys: Why Do We Have QWERTY?

Typewriter

Did you ever wonder why the computer keyboard has the design it does? It is called QWERTY, named after the first six letters located under the numbers, where you might expect to see ABCDEF.

The reason for this oddity is that the keyboard was designed in the 1870s for primitive  mechanical  typewriters. Some typebars (bars with letters on the end) kept hitting one another, stopping the flow of writing. By separating the most-used letters, the QWERTY layout reduced clashes of this kind (and in the process probably slowed down the typist).

But why do we have the same keyboard today, long after typebars no longer run into one another—in fact, typebars having long ago disappeared? That is the subject of a debate that  reflects different views of how markets operate. Continue reading “Battle of the Keys: Why Do We Have QWERTY?”

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The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall

Chinese family

Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.

The End of the Chinese Extended Family

Nick Eberstadt  argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.

Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.

I am interested in the Chinese family partly because extended-family patterns may have inhibited a Chinese Industrial Revolution around 1800. In contrast, England, with its nuclear families and a willingness to let young men and women work outside the family, became the source of innovative growth. (For more about the contrast in family patterns, see my post on “Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth.”) Now, back to China. Continue reading “The Fraying of the Chinese Extended Family . . . Benefits from Rome’s Fall”