The future of economic, business, and social history

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Acknowledgements

Van Leeuwen is grateful to Jan Kok and members of the audience present at the celebration of 60 years Scandinavian Economic History Review for their comments, and to Chris Gordon for polishing this text.

Notes

¹Nelson, ‘Why Do Firms Differ’ (1991).

²Wilkins/Hill, American Business Abroad (1964). Wilkins, Emergence (1970), Maturing (1974).

³Chandler, Strategy (1962), Visible hand (1977), Scale (1990).

⁴Jones/Zeitlin, ‘Introduction’ (2008), 4.

⁵Musacchio, Experiments (2009).

⁶Larson, ‘Business History’ (1947).

⁷Krooss, ‘Economic History’ (1958).

⁸Coleman, ‘Uses’ (1987).

⁹Jones, ‘Company’ (1999).

¹⁰Wilson, Business History (1995). McCraw, Creating Modern Capitalism (1997).

¹¹Fellmann et al., Creating Nordic Capitalism (2008).

¹²Hidy, ‘Business History’ (1970).

¹³Fridenson, ‘Business History’ (2008), 10.

¹⁴Gras, ‘Business History’ (1934), 388.

¹⁵See http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory.

¹⁶Jones/Khanna ‘Bringing History (back)’ (2006).

¹⁷Following Ultee et al., Sociologie (2003). An alternative way of proceeding would have been to consider how interdisciplinary endeavours between the social sciences and history have evolved up until now. For surveys, see Abbot, ‘History’ (1991). Skocpol, Vision (1984). Skocpol, ‘Social History’ (1987). Steckel, ‘Social Science History’ (2007). or Kok/Wouters, ‘Virtual knowledge (2013, forthcoming). See also van der Linden/Lucassen, Prolegomena (1999).

¹⁸Treiman, ‘Industrialization’ (1970), and Blau/Duncan, American Occupational Structure (1976).

¹⁹Treiman, ‘Industrialization’ (1970). Treiman et al., ‘Educational Expansion’ (2003). van Leeuwen, ‘Social Inequality’ (2009). van Leeuwen/Maas, ‘Historical Studies’ (2010).

²⁰Collins, Credential Society (1979). Bourdieu/Passeron, Reproduction in Education (1977).

²¹Other confounding factors are professional organizations and trade unions. In a meritocratic view of the world, such institutions certify that a person has what skills are needed for a certain job, but they may function as institutional hindrances to newcomers. Political regimes might also matter in loosening or tightening the occupational bonds between parents and children, as do family systems and inheritance laws and practices.

²²Erikson/Goldthorpe, Constant Flux (1992).

²³Ganzeboom et al., ‘Intergenerational Class Mobility’ (1989); there is no consensus, Breen, Social Mobility (2004).

²⁴Tierney, ‘Critical Sociology’ (1999), 217–9. Beck, Risk Society (1992). Golding, ‘Social and Programmatic History’ (1992).

²⁵‘In risk perception, humans act less as individuals and more as social beings who have internalized social pressures and delegated their decision-making processes to institutions. They manage as well as they do, without knowing the risks they face, by following social rules on what to ignore: institutions are their problem-simplifying devices’, Douglas/Wildavsky, Risk (1982), 80. Boudon, ‘Subjective Rationality’ (1989). Tversky/Kahneman, ‘Framing of Decisions’ (1981), and the essays in Kahneman et al., Judgment (1982).

²⁶E.g. Schelling, Strategy (1960), 57 and 70.

²⁷‘Institutions reduce uncertainty by providing a structure to everyday life’, North, Institutions (1990), 3 et passim.

²⁸Douglas/Wildavsky, Risk (1982).

²⁹While this approach might ring a bell with many historians, it is not one which has yet engendered a great many studies on risks in past societies. Perhaps historical studies on the decline of magic or on the interpretation of nature and natural disasters could be interpreted in this fashion. See, for example, Thomas, Religion (1971), and Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983). Praying, for that matter, can be considered a way of risk management. For early studies suggesting this, see Febvre, ‘Pour l'histoire d'un sentiment’ (1956), and Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger (1989).

³⁰See Jones, European Miracle (1981). Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Diamond/Robinson, ‘Using Comparative Methods’ (2010).

³¹At place 16; it was, incidentally, the only question from the social sciences and humanities apart from ‘Will Malthus continue to be wrong?’, at 25. For the list in Science of July 2005, see http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/misc/webfeat/125th

³²Mandeville, Fable of The Bees (1714/1723).

³³The list of classic studies is, of course, longer. See, for example, Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990). See also recent studies on cooperative breeding, the notion that forms of human behaviour - such as family systems and mutual aid – have evolved out of a relatively strong innate human drive to cooperate, Sear/Coall, ‘How much does family matter?’ (2011).

³⁴Olson, Logic (1977).

³⁵Axelrod, Evolution (1984).

³⁶See, for example, Alber, Vom armenhaus (1982). Lindert, Growing Public (2004); For my own research on charity, philanthropy, and mutual aid see van Leeuwen, ‘Trade Unions’ (1997). ‘Guilds’ (2012). ‘Giving in Early Modern History’ (2012). van Leeuwen/Wiepking, ‘National Campaigns’ (forthcoming). For a recent summary of the findings of philanthropic studies, see Bekkers/Wiepking, ‘Literature Review’ (2011).

³⁷Akerlof, ‘Market’ (1970). Arrow, ‘Uncertainty’ (1971). Stiglitz, Economics (1988); for a discussion of social mechanisms to combat moral hazards, see Hechter, Principles (1987); for examples of the historical development of mutual aid societies globally, see van der Linden, Social Security (1996).

³⁸North, Institutions (1990), 60. Weisbrod, Nonprofit Economy (1988), 101, 156–7.

³⁹Ultee et al., Sociologie (2003).

⁴⁰Acemoglu et al., ‘Ancien Régime’ (2010); Diamond/Robinson, ‘Comparative Methods’ (2010).

⁴¹Not that these data are not used today, but they are the preserve of intelligence agencies, states, banks, and other corporations, such as Facebook, and subject to privacy rules. Such rules do not usually apply for those long dead.

⁴²Kok, ‘Principles’ (2007).

⁴³See note 53, see also the survey of historical databases with longitudinal microdata by K. Mandemakers and G. Alter, accessible at http://historicaldemography.net/documents/questionaire_longitudinal_databases_balsac_version2.pdf

⁴⁴See notes 53 and 54. An interesting anthropological database is formed by the Murdoch Atlas, http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/worldcul/atlas.htm, and the current reworking by Bolt, ‘Long-Run Economic Development’ (2010).

⁴⁵E.g. the househould classification systems by Laslett and Hamel. The priest, the vicar and the civil servant may note events duly but not always in a ‘neutral’ way or uniform e.g. in the case of illegitimate children, see e.g. Szreter et al., Categories (2004).

⁴⁶See Snijders/Bosker, Multilevel Analysis (1999).

⁴⁷E.g. Zijdeman, ‘Like My Father Before Me’ (2009).

⁴⁸Braudel, La Méditerranée (1949); Braudel, Civilisation matérielle (1967–1979).

⁴⁹See, for example, de Moor/van Zanden, ‘Do ut des’ (2008), and Dormans/Kok, ‘Alternative Approach’ (2010). An example of a collaboratory in the domain of cooperation is http://www.collective-action.info, which is used in de Moor's ‘Common Rules’ project, http://www.collective-action.info/projects_ERCGrant

⁵⁰Which is difficult, as Buchmann/Hannum, ‘Education’ (2001) concluded.

⁵¹It is one of the collaboratories hosted by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

⁵² http://historyofwork.iisg.nl; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hisco with files on https://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documents

⁵³See, for example, for Russia http://occupations.asu.ru. HISCO codes are used in various collaborative projects to harmonize data. See, for example, the European Historical Population Samples Network (EHPS-Net), http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.html; the Mosaic project on Recovering Surviving Census Records to Reconstruct Population, Economic, and Cultural History, http://www.censusmosaic.org; the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP), http://www.nappdata.org/napp; the CLIO-INFRA project, http://www.clio-infra.eu; a project at the Centre for Global Economic History at Utrecht University to reconstruct economic inequalities over the past two centuries globally, http://www.cgeh.nl

⁵⁴ https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelations; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hsn; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflicts

⁵⁵Conzen, ‘Quantification’ (1983), quotes from pages 664, 672, 655 and 676.

⁵⁶Samuelson, Economics (1967).

⁵⁷Eichengreen, ‘Economic History’ (2012), 289.

⁵⁸Humphries/Hindle, ‘Editor's Introduction’ (2009), 1.

⁵⁹Pomeranz, Great Divergence (2000).

⁶⁰Broadberry/Hindle, ‘Editor's Introduction’ (2011).

⁶¹North et al., Violence (2009). Greif, Institutions (2006). Acemoglu/Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012).

⁶²Steckel, ‘Heights’ (2009). Floud et al., Changing Body (2011).

⁶³Broadberry et al., ‘British Economic Growth’ (2011). Malanima, ‘Long Decline’ (2011). Álvarez-Nogal/Prados de la Escosura, ‘Rise and Fall’, 2012. Broadberry/Gupta, ‘India’ (2012). Bassino et al., ‘Japan’ (2012). Guan/Li, ‘Chinese Economic Growth’ (2012). Broadberry, S./Klein, A., ‘Aggregate and per capita GDP in Europe’ (2012).

⁶⁴Campbell, ‘Nature’ (2010). Kander/Lindmark, Energy Consumption’ (2004).

⁶⁵Schumpeter, History (1954), 815.

⁶⁶Darling, Back from the Brink (2011).

⁶⁷Suny, ‘Back and Beyond’ (2002).

⁶⁸ http://www.wehc2012.org/programme.php

⁶⁹Broadberry, ‘Economic History’ (2001).

⁷⁰Broadberry/O'Rourke, Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (2011).

⁷¹ http://eh.net/book_reviews/dynamic-society-exploring-sources-global-change

⁷²Acemoglu/Robinson, Why Nations Fail? (2012). Galor, From Stagnation to Growth (2005).