Lance E. Davis is Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He is author or editor of many books, including Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (1971, with Douglass North), Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism (1986, with Robert Huttenback, revised and abridged edition, 1988), International Capital Markets and American Economic Growth, 1820-1914 (1994, with Robert Cull), and Evolving Financial Markets and International Capital Flows: Britain, the Americas, and Australia, 1870-1914 (200,