W(h)ither Economic History, or Economic History is what Economic Historians Do?

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Notes

I would thank Patrick O'Brien for assistance at an important point; Richard Smith for helpful discussions on this encyclopedia in relation to the New Palgrave; and my colleagues Paolo di Martino, Christine MacLeod and Phillip Richardson, who read sample entries in their expert areas and thereby allowed me to form a much fuller judgement. Chris also kindly provided references and read and improved a first draft.

J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds.), The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 4 vols. (London, 1987). The outstanding critical review was M. Blaug, Economics Through the Looking Glass: The Distorted Perspective of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (London, 1988), but see also for a model of how to evaluate such a reference work, J.K. Whitaker, ‘Palgrave Resurrected: A Review Article’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.97 No.2 (1989), pp.480–96.

Patrick O'Brien has long been campaigning for historians to devote more resources, transparency and status to book reviewing; see his ‘Historical Reviews’, History Today, Vol.53 No.2 (Feb. 2003), pp.18–19.

Whitaker, ‘Palgrave Resurrected’.

Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxi.

Ibid.

A. Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume (London, 1890), p.1.

Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxii.

For 1, 3 and 4 I have used my colleagues detailed above to compensate for my ignorance of many specialist literatures and sub-fields.

Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxiii.

See, however, Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.II, pp.400–401 for the post-1850 chemical industries as a model of good practice.

George Unwin in 1910; see N.B. Harte (ed.), The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures, 1893–1970 (London, 1971), p.xxvi.

D.J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography: A Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980, 5 vols. (London, 1984–86).

Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxii.

See for example, G.N. von Tunzelmann, ‘Technology Generation, Technology Use and Economic Growth’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.4 No.2 (2000), pp.121–46.

Most recently and fully in J. Mokyr, The Gift of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2002) and here in this encyclopedia for the ‘industrial revolution’, the sole entry he contributes.

The Society for the History of Technology has conducted a number of debates on this problem, most recently in Technology and Culture, Vol.41 No.4 (2000), pp.752–82.

J.S. Chapman, ‘International Trade’, in Eatwell et al. (eds.), New Palgrave, Vol.II, pp.922–55.

R.C. Floud and P.A. Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2003). The ‘United States’ entry, comprising four sub-entries (pre-colonial, colonial, antebellum and modern period), makes only one mention of the equivalent publication (S.L. Engerman and R.E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1996–2000)), making one wonder whether these and the British entries are a little dated.

For example, C.H. Lee, Scotland and the United Kingdom: The Economy and the Union in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1995).

V. Tanzi and L. Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000).

P.H. Lindert, ‘The Rise of Social Spending, 1880–1930’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol.31 No.1 (1994), pp.1–37; and idem, ‘Poor Relief versus the Welfare State: Britain versus the Continent, 1780–1880’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.2 No.2 (1998), pp.101–40.

We thus have a reference to R.J. Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State, c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999) which concludes a decade and more of collaborative research into Europe's fiscal systems, but not to recent long-term studies of Britain's tax system, as in M.J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), and idem, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002). Recent methodological advances are also absent, such as generational accounting, upon which see R.P. Esteves, ‘Looking Ahead from the Past: The Inter-Temporal Sustainability of Portuguese Finances, 1854–1910’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.7 No.2 (2003), pp.239–66.

D.N. McCloskey, ‘Does the Past have Useful Economics?’, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.14 No.2 (1976), pp.434–61.

R. Floud, ‘Cliometrics’; D.N. McCloskey, ‘Counterfactuals’; and N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Economic History’, in Eatwell et al. (eds.), New Palgrave, Vol.I, pp. 452–4, 701–3, and Vol.II, pp.37–41.

Models of good practice in the handbook market include R.E. Goodin and H.-D. Klingemann (eds.), A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford, 1996), which devotes over 30 pages to an exploration of political science in relation to the other social sciences; and in the companion mode, D. Greenaway, M.F. Bleaney and I.M.T. Stewart (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Economic Thought (London, 1991), which concludes with an interface section amounting to 100 pages, including Crafts, ‘Economics and Economic History’, pp.812–29.

On the last of these, part of the gap can be filled by T.C. Mills, ‘Recent Developments in Modelling Trends and Cycles in Economic Time Series and their Relevance to Quantitative Economic History’, in C.J. Wrigley (ed.), The First World War and the International Economy (Cheltenham, 2000), pp.34–51.

A.H. Conrad and J.R. Meyer, ‘The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.66 No.2 (1958), pp.95–130. He also references his ‘A Quantitative History of the Journal of Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.51 No.2 (1991), pp.289–301, but not his update (‘The Supply and Demand of Economic History: Recent Trends in the Journal of Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.62 No.2 (2002), pp.524–32) nor his survey of disciplinary opinion on core topics, ‘Where is there Consensus among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey of Forty Propositions’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.55 No.1 (1995), pp.139–54.

Using the index, once can relatively easily locate the work of Robert Fogel, Jonathan Hughes and Albert Fishlow and – less easily for the index records Vol.IV, p.117 rather than the correct Vol.IV, p.107 – Douglass North.

See, for example, R.H. Dumke, ‘The Future of Cliometric History: A European View’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol.40 No.3 (1992), pp.3–28; G. Grantham, ‘The French Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French Economic History’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.1 No.3 (1997), pp.353–405; N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Quantitative Economic History’, LSE Working Papers in Economic History, 48/99 (1999); and R. Tilly, ‘German Economic History and Cliometrics: A Selective Survey of Recent Tendencies’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.5 No.2 (2001), pp.151–87.

D.C. North and J.V.C. Nye, Abstract for ‘Cliometrics, the New Institutional Economics and the Future of Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.63 No.2 (2003), p.559.

R.W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago, 2000).

It is encouraging that M.D. Bordo, A.M. Taylor and J.G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003) was included, but inexplicable that H. James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2001) was not, not even in the entry for ‘great depression’.

H.-J. Voth, Time and Work in England, 1750–1830 (Oxford, 2001); J. de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.54 No.2 (1994), pp.249–70.

In its latest iteration of August 2002. Douglas Farnie had collected brief biographical details of some 2,200 economic historians on five continents who have contributed to the economic history literature over the last 140 years; available via the Economic History Society's website: www.ehs.org.uk/AbouttheEHS/BioBibliographicalDRAFTBK010902.doc.

Vol.I, p.xxiii.

Harte, Study of Economic History, p.xi.

P. Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002); D. Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (London, 2002); cf. the earlier incarnation of this latter volume as J. Gardiner (ed.), What is History Today?(London, 1988), pp.31–41 which contained five short essays on the discipline, of which one was prescient in asking ‘what was economic history’ (p.37).

D.N. Winch and P.K. O'Brien (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), p.27; see also Winch's earlier paper, alas still unpublished, on the ‘disputatious pair’ of economics and economic history since Marshall and Cunningham became founding Fellows: www.kings.cam.ac.uk/histecon/docs/winch_disputatiouspair.pdf.

Subsequently, within the same series of centenary volumes – albeit originating as a conference to honour Charles Feinstein (another exemplary economic historian not included in this encyclopedia) – there has appeared P.A. David and M. Thomas (eds.), The Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003), which has done much to demonstrate the possibility of useful trade between the twin tribes.

P. Hudson (eds.), Living Economic and Social History (Glasgow, 2001).

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Notes on contributors

Roger Middleton

I would thank Patrick O'Brien for assistance at an important point; Richard Smith for helpful discussions on this encyclopedia in relation to the New Palgrave; and my colleagues Paolo di Martino, Christine MacLeod and Phillip Richardson, who read sample entries in their expert areas and thereby allowed me to form a much fuller judgement. Chris also kindly provided references and read and improved a first draft.