Robert A. McGuire

African and European Bound Labor in the British New World: The Biological Consequences of Economic Choices

This article offers an explanation for the regional differences in the use of African and European bound labor in colonial America. The migrations of Africans and Europeans to the Americas set in motion an evolutionary process that caused regional changes in the disease ecology of the New World. Biological and epidemiological differences among populations explain the different regional labor supply choices. This article emphasizes the interactions between changing populations and disease environments. Diseases are intermediaries through which populations interact by causing illness and death. Not all populations are equally afflicted by specific diseases. Therein lies the story.

A Supply and Demand Exposition of a Constitutional Tax Loophole: The Case of Tariff Symmetry

The U.S. Constitution permits import tariffs but bans export duties. Yet import taxes are de facto export taxes, just as export taxes are de facto import taxes. Access to this symmetry proposition has been limited by its illustration being in daunting analytics largely restricted to international economics. This is unfortunate. Tariff symmetry exposes a tax loophole of constitutional proportions, a case where economics “trumps” the intentions of Americas Founding Fathers. Moreover, tariff revenue was the U.S. governments pivotal revenue source from 1789 until the 1913 constitutional sanctioning of the income tax. Because U.S. exports were heavily agricultural, tariff symmetry implies that federal taxation had an export dimension with disparate economic and regional consequences. By making tariff symmetry more accessible, this paper lowers the “cost” of examining important issues.

Constitutional Agreement during the Drafting of the Constitution: A New Interpretation

We provide a new interpretation of one of the “great” but in our view “failed” North‐South agreements during the U.S. Constitution’s drafting. In 1787, lower South delegates to the Constitutional Convention reputedly settled for a simple‐majority congressional vote for commercial regulations in exchange for northern delegates reputedly agreeing to limitations on national slave import restrictions and an export tariff prohibition. We document that the overall South gained little from the agreement because (1) import taxes are de facto export taxes, (2) the simple‐majority rule was costly to southern interests, and (3) the slave import provision was limited. The agreement represents serious economic and political miscalculation by southern framers. Because the agreement was at a constitutional level, it endowed the nation with decades of unforeseen and unintended constitutional and sectional conflict that played a critical role in American public finance and southern secession and has important implications for contemporary constitution making.

North-South Alliances During the Drafting of the Constitution: The Costs of Compromise

This chapter challenges the long-standing conclusion that North-South alignments helped bring the 1787 Constitutional Convention to a successful conclusion. The widely divergent economic interests between the regions regarding commercial and merchant activities, imports and exports, and slavery and the slave trade created such widely divergent sectional differences that the North-South agreements and compromises that were necessary to complete the Constitution created a governing institution that sowed the seeds of its own downfall. By 1861, the Constitution’s original design could no longer serve as the nation’s governing institution; its design created circumstances that led to southern secession and a civil war that killed and wounded more than a million Americans, cost several billion dollars, and required three major amendments to “save” the Constitution as the nation’s governing institution. This chapter draws on economic reasoning, political theory, and the historical record of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to challenge the long-standing conclusion that the North-South alignments helped bring the convention to a successful conclusion. The methodological approach involves juxtaposing economic principles and the issue positions of the framers and their states on the major North–South agreements and compromises among the delegates.

Demography, Disease, and Development: An Evolutionary Approach

Abstract Emphasising the impact of diseases on history, the essay integrates demography, economics, evolutionary theory, and microbiology to explain the historical development of humanity and the economy, with specific application to American economic development prior to the twentieth century. The cultural development of prehistoric humanity is explained with simple demography in which the blooming of Paleolithic culture about 50,000 years ago also induced diseases of permanent settlements. A model of historical long-run growth incorporates transportation developments with cycles; one “virtuous” (expanding markets and specialisation), the other “vicious” (spread of diseases with increased trade). The New World conquest is viewed as almost entirely due to microbiology, evolutionary selection, and environmental conditions (climates and soils) as was the eventual peopling of different New World regions. American economic development prior to the twentieth century is considered the result of primarily demographic changes, transportation developments, and large-scale plantation slavery that combined to spread infectious diseases. This has implications for American economic development, Malthusian Doctrine, and issues of environmental degradation and sustainability.