In his Economic History Association Presidential Address, Fogel wrote that "Scientific creations, however, are usually protracted over long periods, approach perfection quite gradually, and involve the efforts of a large number of investigators. The social savings controversy has demonstrated the great complexity of the analysis of the developmental impact of railroads, the wide range of issues that need to be pursued, the large amounts of data that must be retrieved and the many pitfalls that may be encountered in the analysis of these data. Such problems are resolved through collective effort" ("Notes," p. 51). Where this article alters the existing literature it does so in that spirit of collective effort. I thank

Using a new source of evidence we explore the geographical mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born -characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men with more choices in life -were more likely to migrate to London. Contrary to what might be inferred from contemporary descriptions of urban disamenities or from persistent differentials in mortality, London appears as a desirable destination for those who could choose. The conclusion must be that London was not so bad, and we should adjust our perception of the problems of urbanisation accordingly, with implications for the wider debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution. The paper's methodological innovation is the use of height as an explanatory variable in the analysis of migration. Although correlated with other variables that are routinely used in anthropometric studies to indicate life chances, such as literacy and the ability to recall date of birth, height has many advantages over these alternatives in that it exhibits higher levels of significance, and is more flexible. Moreover while literacy and heaping are in essence binary variables, height is a (near) continuous one, and one that allows us to test for linear and non-linear responses, as we do with interesting results in this paper. Perhaps the most fruitful use of height in historical analyses may turn out to be as an explanatory variable; at the very least such a research strategy provides anthropometric historians with fresh opportunities.

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This paper uses new product-specific, micro-level US data to show that New England had lower levels of productivity in cotton spinning than Lancashire, c. 1900, contradicting results derived by Broadberry from the Censuses of Production. The discrepancy stems from the Censuses' poor methods of aggregating heterogeneous yarn output. The finding that Britain -the labour-abundant country -has higher labour productivity contradicts the Rothbarth-Habakkuk model. We suggest Britain's industrial success stems from more intensive competition, manifested through external economies of scale and longer production runs. We finish with some speculative implications for British performance in the first and second industrial As befits the leading industry of its day, the Lancashire cotton industry has been studied extensively, both by contemporaries and by economic and social historians.The resulting literature is prodigious, with a recent select bibliography running to 3000 items 2 . All periods are well studied, with different questions dominant for economic and social historians of different periods. For the period c. 1900, the key questions revolve around the causes and consequences of Lancashire's differences.Lancashire was the industry most attached to the spinning mule and the power loom, and least enthusiastic about the ring and automatic loom. It was the industry that grew by adding more and more firms, with little or no growth in firm size. The Lancashire cotton industry also remained vertically specialised almost beyond imagination. It is most often compared with its opposite number in New England, where firms were more likely to adopt the new (American-invented) technologies of the ring and automatic loom, to be large, and to be vertically integrated. Good summaries of the general literature can be found in Marrison, Mass and Lazonick, and Rose. 3 Much work has been done both to explain Lancashire's technological choices, and to document the possible advantages of moving over to a system more similar to that prevalent in New England. Yet despite this volume of work, there is little that explicitly investigates which country had higher productivity in producing cotton goods. This is surprising, since detailed and reliable productivity estimates can be used to assess more accurately the effects of a number of aspects of cotton spinning that differed in the two countries. For example, following Marshall it is frequently claimed that the Lancashire cotton industry benefited from external economies of scale. 4 In addition, Lancashire workers, especially mule spinners, were renowned for high levels of skill and experience, which might reasonably be expected to lead to higher productivity. 5 Finally, the industry was highly competitive, in that it was characterised by many firms and extreme vertical specialisation. Modern empirical work increasingly finds that competition is an effective incentive mechanism for managers. 6 In contrast, others have claimed that larger US firms gained from internal economies of s...