Economic history in times of transition

This issue coincides with my retirement as one of the (co-)editors of the Scandinavian Economic History Review. It has been a great pleasure and a real privilege to work for this journal over the last six years, and I am grateful that Jari Ojala, editor-in-chief since 2015, invited me to reflect upon the development of the Journal since 2011. After a few acknowledgements, I present a brief survey of strategic ideas that guided the editors and of some achievements of the last six years. Then I take the opportunity to indicate how in my view academic journals in our fields may become even more interesting (the short answer is ‘red’ – relevance, engagement, debate). And finally, I introduce to the articles appearing in this number of the Journal.

A journal is teamwork. Many people, from the authors who submit their papers to the publisher’s copyeditors, contribute to the success of a journal. Most of all, I am grateful for the enjoyable collaboration with Jacob Weisdorf (we edited SEHR together for four years) and with Janette Rawlings who ran the secretariat and enabled us to focus mainly on content. Copenhagen Business School and the Department for Management, Politics, and Philosophy generously supported my term. Many thanks to Jari Ojala, who became the first editor-in-chief of this journal in 2015, and to the other co-editors with whom it was my pleasure to cooperate, Camilla Brautaset, Sverre Knutsen, Lars Magnusson, and Espen Storli. The engagement of the publishing team of Taylor & Francis was a pleasant experience: Victoria Babbit, ElisaBeth Alexis, and Calum Petrie were outstanding – it would be nice, though, if job turnover in the publishing industry were less frequent. Last but not least, without the support of our associate editors and the members of the advisory board, particularly Stephen Broadberry, Geoffrey Jones, Kevin O’Rourke, and Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, the journal would look different today; they helped in many ways.

Six years of SEHR – towards the Web of Science

In spring 2010, Kurt Jacobson, then chairman of the Danish Society for Social and Economic History, asked me if I might be interested in editing SEHR. SEHR, of course, this was one of the economic history journals I really appreciated. It had been on my reading list since I worked on my doctoral dissertation in the 1990s. Then it had become a truly European and really inspiring journal. Some articles found their way onto the reading lists of the courses I later taught at the University of Cologne. The journal was thus very familiar to me – yet, I was still a stranger in the Nordic academic environment. Only 18 months before, CBS had appointed me Associate Professor of Business History. Many things contribute to a good life in Denmark and in the other Nordic states (democracy, wealth, the welfare state, and income equality among others) including trust in newcomers to the job. Usually, they are appreciated rather than sceptically observed. Despite this ‘vote of confidence’, I still judged myself too much of a stranger to this new environment, and, certainly, there should be an economist as a co-editor. It turned out that Jacob Weisdorf had a similar perception of the journal and that we easily agreed on many things, although we discussed via Skype, as Jacob was staying somewhere abroad. We recognised to have rather different backgrounds and interests, and we got the impression we might possibly work well together. We offered our candidacy for editorship, and, in 2011, took over the office from our Swedish colleagues Lars Magnusson and Mats Morell.

We had specific aims for the journal and these found support from the editorial board and the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History, the owner of the journal. The aim of SEHR should be to publish articles on ‘economic, business and social history with a particular, but not exclusive interest in Scandinavia’ and ‘to reflect contemporary research, thinking and debate in these fields, within Scandinavia and throughout the world’.¹ We wanted to consolidate the journal as a valuable publishing outlet for scholars all over the world and for readers worldwide in times of a changing publication landscape. We thought it necessary to broaden the international scope. If the best scholars in the world were to publish in SEHR, the journal would be attractive for ambitious young scholars, including the Scandinavians. Still, in order to do so, we had to adapt to a changing environment. Our analysis was that in today’s increasingly competitive academic environment, a journal is more attractive to new generations of ambitious scholars if it is ranked on the respective journal lists. There might be different strategies for new journals that could experimentally with alternative reputation systems, but this would most probably not work for an almost 60-year old, well established journal. Therefore, it was our major aim to revise a decision taken in the early 2000s and ‘to make the journal ready’ for the Web of Science (WoS) (Reckendrees & Weisdorf, 2015, p. 102).

I am pleased that, after those six years, SEHR passed the first bar and that the WoS accepted the journal for the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in fall 2016. Is not it encouraging for a journal turning 65 to be still perceived as ‘emerging’? Today the standard procedure of the WoS is first to accept a journal for the ESCI and possibly later for the Social Sciences Citation Index. It is astonishing how often the WoS has changed its rules and acceptance procedures within only a few years. A few years ago, it stipulated an editor-in-chief and thus disregarded the collective ‘Scandinavian’ model. Our editorship rotated every fourth year to two new editors from another Nordic country; since 2015, there are four editors from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, one of whom is the editor-in-chief. Only the latter position is now subject to rotation every fourth year. We not only wanted to accommodate the WoS rule (on which they do no longer insist); the new board structure was also intended to create more continuity, and with an enlarged team, more collective responsibility for the Nordic economic history communities the journal belongs to.

In 2010, our analysis was that in order to be listed on the relevant journal rankings SEHR would need to raise its already high level of international reputation. We thus focused on improving the journal’s visibility, on online-access to and an increased use of the articles, and we furthermore wanted to attract more contributions from outside Scandinavia. A new review process (adopted in 2011) and the introduction of an electronic submission system (in 2012) helped reduce manuscript turnover time and substantially accelerate the speed of getting published (Reckendrees & Weisdorf, 2015). All articles dating back to the first issue of the journal in 1952 are now available online with full open access to all articles prior to 1995.² The number of downloads has increased sixfold since 2011. Two articles published in 2014 had more than 2000 reads in less than 18 months (Kunnas et al., 2014; Stenkula, Johansson, & Du Rietz, 2014), which compares well to the larger journals in the field. This development is based on the research of hundreds of scholars around the world who submitted their manuscripts, and on even more dedicated reviewers who provide instructive reports on these manuscripts to the authors and the editors. Between 2011 and 2016, we received manuscripts from about 25 countries; one-third from West and South Europe and the UK, about 10% from North America, 5% from Eastern Europe and Russia, and 5% from Asia, Australia and South America; close to 50% came from Nordic countries. Readers are equally distributed over the world (as measured by downloads) and readership has grown substantially.

SEHR accepts relatively long papers of up to 14,000 words; we publish additional data and other material on the journal’s webpage. After initially mixed experiences with special issues, we decided that special issues at SEHR should address broad topics and must have open calls for papers. All papers are subject to the ordinary review process with usually two or three reviewers and several rounds of reviews. The average manuscript is accepted after the second revision. The rejection rate changes a little from year to year. Still, despite an increasing inflow of manuscripts, a style change in 2016 that enabled us to publish 15–20% more articles helped to keep the overall rate between 50 and 60%. Thus authors get a fair chance to publish and the editors are able to decide according to quality.

RED – relevance, engagement, debate

Economic historians love their work. Our research is interesting and the quality of our publications is high. Yet our journals have a limited outreach and the majority of us possibly do not wait desperately for the new issue of a particular journal – unless it contains an own contribution. Pre-publishing and working papers may be one reason. Editors may ask, however, whether such observations might relate to form, content, and publication practices. I guess they do.

Economic history – however, strict boundaries are drawn – is a relatively small discipline. We have a number of international and national journals, we have our conferences including a World Congress every three years, and after some time people know each other to a certain extent. We have fantastic discussions at conferences and workshops, where we engage deeply with each other, and every so often a controversial debate. One such might be the discussions about the Acemoglu, Cantoni, Johnson, and Robinson’s article (2011) on the economic impact of the French Revolution that has been widely debated and much criticised. The discussion, however, shows up in economics journals (Kopsidis & Bromley, 2016) rather than in economic history journals.

I have no explanation for why this is the case. Looking back, it seems there was more debate a few decades ago. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the discipline reassessed the British Industrial Revolution; there was the standard-of-living debate and the so-called Borchardt debate about the economic reasons of the failure of the Weimar Republic. The discussion about the Great Depression, of course. Many countries had their own ‘controversies’. The debates also concerned data, but to me it seems that it was rather the interpretation of ambiguous observations and different preferences, values, and ideology that made them interesting and relevant. People used neoclassical, Keynesian, Post-Keynesian, or Marxist approaches to study phenomena. Not even the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Contraction that followed reinstated similar debates. Could it be that we tend to ask questions that reflect available data rather than existing problems? Please do not misunderstand me: this is not a rhetorical question. We love our work and to most of us research is a means to understand the economy and the world rather than ‘l’art pour l’art’. Journal articles, however, look rather different.

How often does it happen that someone writes, ‘I disagree with this interpretation, because’, and perhaps we are equally reluctant to agree? In our articles, we usually make statements about the past, rather than about the meaning of the past. We are hermetic in the sense that we show that we know the details, that we describe the ‘facts’ precisely, and that no one has better or more reliable data and sources. Are we trapped in the realist’s paradigm? Sometimes journal articles give this impression. The review process may play a role as reviewers focus on argumentation, methodology, and execution. The ‘genre’ of the journal article requires a particular type of argumentation. Still, I am afraid that we, most probably, just do not want to run the risk of rejection because of a particular judgment or ideology. We rather play it safe, because an article in this journal (rather than the content of the article) is relevant for our research assessment or promotion.

We may not be able to change the incentive structure of our universities; time and again we may challenge routinised practices. Most journal editors would perhaps say, we would like to publish more controversial papers, more articles that stimulate discussion and provoke disagreement as well as agreement, but journals are supply driven. But do we encourage people to take a stand? Journals would be more interesting if we were more concerned about the Relevance of a topic than about the elegance of the presentation and if we were more concerned about the questions asked (cf. Hansen, 2014; Jones, van Leeuwen, & Broadberry, 2012). Do they matter to us, to society? We need Engagement and perhaps we also need to talk politics in order to maintain freedom of research, the right to publish, non-discrimination, and equal access. There is much at stake when a democratically elected government argues with ‘alternative facts’ and when countries ‘come first’.³ One lesson from history is to take populists at power at face value. And we need Debate. Are international cooperation, trade, and openness of markets beneficial to society? Should we continue using GDP estimates, or for which questions should we cease to use it? How important are equality and non-discrimination? – The questions are possibly endless.

I hope that our discipline of economic history may engage more actively with society and that our journals support this process, and I indeed like to see SEHR as part of such a process. The journal is open to very different formats, such as longer and shorter contributions, debate articles; it publishes articles in economic, business, and social history. Authors, please challenge the editors; they will appreciate it.

The current issue

The five articles in this issue ironically deal with the Nordic countries; three authors are from Sweden, one from the USA, and one from Finland. Rather than contradicting the international scope of the journal, this distribution reflects that journals are supply driven. The topics are of fairly general interest: change in the welfare system, motives for currency reforms, impact of international trade agreements, and the role of the public sector in society and politics.

Lars Frederik Andersson and Liselotte Eriksson contribute to the growing body of literature using the concepts of moral hazard and adverse selection to study social insurance, and to the discussion on whether a health insurance scheme should include everybody or be more selective. The article assesses how organisational form impacted on sickness absence. It examines the Swedish health insurance system at the turn of the twentieth century, where, in contrast to many other countries, compulsory and voluntary health insurance systems co-existed.

Johannes Hagen engages with one of the major topics of welfare state history, pension systems, and policies. Increasing pension costs are one of the major challenges of ageing Western societies. Hagen provides an analysis of the development of the Swedish pension system from its inception in 1913 until the present day, also paying attention to the early development of the pension system instead of focusing only on the last decades. Hagen finds that the likelihood of change was strong when the pension system failed to incentivise labour and to achieve financial stability as well as redistribution.

Lawrence Stryker discusses the first years of the Swedish copper standard in the early seventeenth century. While earlier research stressed the crown’s intention to manipulate copper prices in Europe by restricting supply, Stryker proposes a re-interpretation of the King’s motives for introducing the copper currency. He connects its implementation to the liquidity needs of the Swedish crown in order to wage war on the European continent and by so doing provides an innovative approach to the ‘old’ theme.

Mats Hallenberg and Magnus Linnarsson discuss the political conflict in Sweden regarding the organisation of public services, particularly the communalisation of tramways and nationalisation of telecommunications. They show how decisions were affected by the politicians’ conception of political community, forms of organisation, and by values like equal access and modernity. Without arguing for presentism, it is a timely contribution to the broadly discussed concepts of a shared and community based economy.

Juha Sahi presents an interesting case study discussing the impact of the most-favoured-nation (MFN) treaty on the development of commercial activity and on international trade. While most publications analyse trade and trade policy only, the article includes the micro-perspective, thereby adding new insights to the existing literature. Sahi is particularly sceptical about the assumed causality between the MFN treaty and developments in international trade between Finland and Japan. In his view, corporate practices are crucial.

Notes

1 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sehr20.

2 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/sehr20/current.

3 At the time of writing, the title of The Economist (2017) was ‘An insurgent in the White House’.