Essays in Economic & Business History
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs
<p>Currently in its 41st year of publication, <em>Essays in Economic & Business History</em> (EEBH) now operates as an on-line open access journal. Articles for the journal are selected by double-blind review process. EEBH provides immediate open access to accepted articles as soon as the editorial process is completed on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.</p>The Economic and Business History Societyen-USEssays in Economic & Business History0896-226XContents and Guest Editors' Introduction
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/547
Gary A. HooverMatthew D. MitchellDaniel C. Giedeman
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412iivReassessing the Contributions of Black Inventors to the Golden Age of Innovation
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/548
<p>During the Second Industrial Revolution and subsequently, it is widely believed that Black Americans contributed disproportionately little to the economic development of the United States, especially in comparison to European Americans and immigrants from Europe. Yet, Black Americans tended to live in entirely different institutional environments than other Americans, particularly in the South under Jim Crow laws. Using a new database that matches inventors to census records, we find that patenting rates for Black Americans living in the North were very similar to patenting rates for White Americans from 1870 to 1940; in some decades and states, Northern Black patenting rates exceeded the patenting rate for White Americans. In the South, patenting rates were low for both Black and White Americans, while patenting rates for Northern Black residents were far higher than those for Southern White residents. We additionally find that Black Americans from all regions were responsible for more patents than immigrants from all but two countries (Germany and England). In total, we estimate that African Americans invented more than 50,000 patents over the period. Thus, when freed of extreme political oppression, Black Americans demonstrated a level of inventiveness that matched the most inventive groups in US history.</p>Michael J. AndrewsJonathan T. Rothwell
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412139Contributions of Black Entrepreneurs to the US Whaling Industry, Abolition, and Other Civil Rights
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/549
<p>The history of Black entrepreneurs from colonial times through most of the nineteenth century in the US whaling industry provides an excellent opportunity for insights into how free Blacks and those who freed themselves became entrepreneurs and how they influenced the abolition movement and other civil rights. These industrious people became whaling captains, ship designers and builders, investors, suppliers, outfitters, and producers of whale-based items. This research used Skip Finley’s <em>Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy</em> (2020a) as a dataset of over 50 men who became whaling captains. According to Tom Nicholas in <em>VC: An American History</em> (2020), these men should be considered entrepreneurs. By examining the history of whaling as a commercial industry and these entrepreneurs within it, the results showed that place of birth and date of first captaincy in relationship to the 13th Constitutional Amendment ending slavery (1865) made a difference as to the type of additional entrepreneurial endeavors pursued and whether they were involved in abolition and civic responsibilities. To provide a more complete picture of Black entrepreneurs born in North America who began their business prior to 1865, three significant whaling captains and seven contemporary Black entrepreneurs were chosen and brief biographies are provided.</p>Valerie Ellen Mock
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-274124062Mobility and Opportunity: Black Business Owners and Inventors Cross the US-Canada Borders
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/550
<p>In the decades after the Civil War and before the Great Migration, a set of remarkable Black business leaders and inventors emerged, including Elijah McCoy, noted inventor and innovator in engine lubrication; John Sullivan Deas, the first person canning salmon near Vancouver; Rev. Charles Spencer Smith, founder of the Sunday School Union of the AME Church; Georgina Mingo Whetsel, who employed a hundred men in her ice harvesting business; May B. Mason, who made the first Black fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush; William Harvey McCurdy, founder of the Hercules Buggy Company; and Jesse Binga, who founded the first privately owned African American bank in Chicago. Each of these remarkable Black business leaders has received some biographical attention, but they have not been considered together, nor by what linked them: each of these men and women (or, in a few cases, their parents) spent time in both the United States and Canada. Cross-border family mobility affected their business choices, opening opportunities not available to those not on the move. While we do not have enough evidence for a strong causal claim, it is clear this mobility correlates to opportunities which led to unusually successful business careers.</p>Adam Arenson
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-274126383A Comparative Portrait of Long-Run Racial Disparity in the United States and Brazil
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/551
<p>The relative incomes and education-levels of Black and white populations in the United States and Brazil are considered after Abolition, and framed by earlier disparities in their natural rates of increase. For the post-World War Two period, the effects of demography, education, and regional migration on the Black-white income gap are disentangled using census microdata and a single-equation form Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. These variables explain progressively less of income inequality over time, meaning that discrimination or other unobserved factors have become more-substantial determinants of relative earnings. Education, measured by literacy or years of schooling, was the major reason behind reductions in income gaps during this period, followed by demography and migration. While both countries have made gains towards racial equality, their timing is entirely divergent (and sometimes counter to popular understandings): the best decade in these terms for the US was the 1960s, and the worst, the 2000s or 2010s; and, vice-versa for Brazil.</p>Justin R. Bucciferro
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-2741284110The Black Dollar in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/555
<p>When did Black communities begin having access to significant amounts of money? Were the Black economic enclaves or Black Wall Streets which developed in the first decades of the twentieth century in places like Richmond, Chicago and Durham, the first communities where the Black dollar demonstrated Black economic success? This paper argues that although Blacks in nineteenth-century Baltimore did not demonstrate wealth through widespread property ownership there was a significant amount of money flowing through the Black community. This suggests, apart from its need to solve community problems created by overpopulation and racial discrimination, Baltimore may have been the first noteworthy Black economic enclave in the nineteenth century.</p>Marcus Anthony Allen
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412111131License to Exclude: Black Barbers in Arkansas
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/552
<p>In the early twentieth century, predominantly white union barbers in Arkansas implemented voluntary regulations that dictated business practices to create a voluntary cartel. Black and other minority barbers who often had more success than white barbers prior to unionization tended to ignore these regulations, destabilizing the union’s cartel. Lacking a strong enforcement mechanism, white union members turned to the state to eliminate what they saw as unfair competition. By implementing a licensure law and creating the Board of Barber Examiners in 1937, established barbers were able to give themselves a stark advantage over future entrants into the profession. The law was detrimental to minority barbers. Black barbers failed to pass barber licensure exams at an equivalent rate as their white counterparts, and the number of Black barbers in Arkansas decreased significantly over the decade that the regulations were implemented. In making our assertions, we examine primary sources regarding the Journeymen Barber’s International Union of America, while also keeping in mind the data on pass rates, the composition of regulations, and exams that the Board of Barber Examiners implemented. Though scholars often assume that licensure laws harm minorities, we provide a detailed case study to support those claims.</p>Tanner CorleyWendy LucasMarcus Witcher
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412132148Bad Men, Good Roads, Jim Crow, and the Economics of Southern Chain Gangs
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/553
<p>Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers’ costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation reinforced the social order defined by Jim Crow. Drawing on insights from the economics of crime literature, this paper analyzes whether chain gangs reduced road maintenance costs. Using a fixed-effects design, the analysis finds that the costs of using gangs in road maintenance were marginally lower on average than using wage labor. The results are consistent with county officials choosing between convict and free labor in manner consistent with minimizing taxpayers’ costs.</p>Howard Bodenhorn
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412149170“The Race was on Trial”—Migrant Adjustment in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh During the Great Migration
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/554
<p>This essay provides the first comparison of the political economic thought of Sadie T.M. Alexander and Abram Harris Jr., the first Black American economists, through an analysis of Alexander’s dissertation and Harris’ master’s thesis. Alexander and Harris studied the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to northward destinations while the early migration was unfolding. Reflecting the anxieties of northern Black residents, Alexander and Harris’ research explored the racial implications of migration on Black communities in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, respectively, through an analysis of migrants’ ability to adjust to their new urban environments. I examine Alexander and Harris’ understanding of migrant adjustment, their methods for analyzing adjustment, and their recommendations for facilitating migrants’ adjustment to northern industrial economies. Alexander and Harris’ analyses of the Great Migration differed from later generations of mostly White economists in ways that can inform directions for future research on the migration.</p>Nina Banks
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412171185“So why can’t they finance Black Power?” Howard Lamar Fuller’s Fight for Black Control of Black Housing in North Carolina, 1965-1969
https://www.ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/ebhs/article/view/546
<p>By 1965, as the traditional civil rights movement waned in North Carolina, Howard Lamar Fuller emerged as a key figure in the “War on Poverty”. Through his leadership of Operation Breakthrough from 1965 to 1967, Fuller helped bring about a shift in political control of Black Durham from white and Black elites to poor Black residents by taking on the challenges of Black housing. In 1965, when Fuller was hired as a community organizer, Operation Breakthrough was passive, small, and white. Within two years, Fuller had made it “tough, massive, and black” (James V. Cunningham 1967, 157). Among its achievements, Fuller was responsible for events that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in <em>Thorpe v. Housing Authority of the City of Durham (1967)</em>. This that ruled tenants in public housing could not be evicted without due process, and caused the federal agency of Housing and Urban Development to issue a circular, directing federally assisted housing projects to “inform their tenants of the reasons for a lease termination prior to the termination and to provide a method by which a tenant might reply and offer an explanation”. While white media at the time created binaries between “conservative” and “militant” Black leaders, Fuller’s activism exposes the inadequacies of this conceptual framework. Scholars have yet to recognize how Fuller was a forerunner of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s antipoverty campaign, an activist who blended King’s vision of fighting poverty with the militant overtones associated with Black power and Malcolm X.</p>Anthony M. Donaldson Jr.
Copyright (c) 2023 Essays in Economic & Business History
2023-11-272023-11-27412186207