ABSTRACT
The conclusions of this thesis are not particularly surprising, at least to economists, but they are of considerable importance to much of the current historical research and cast doubt upon the conclusions of earlier works. The conclusions regarding the large firms were supported by the results from the survivor technique. The external economies permitted large firms in those regions to have lower unit production costs than smaller firms even where those smaller firms were operating under conditions of constant returns to scale. In its overall conclusions regarding the extent of scale economies in the mid-nineteenth century, the results are very similar to those obtained for the twentieth century and reported by Walters, Besen, Ferguson, Moroney and others that the hypothesis of constant returns to scale cannot be rejected.
