Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CHAPTER I The Historical Study of Economic Growth and Decline in Early Modern History
- CHAPTER II Agriculture in the Vital Revolution
- CHAPTER III The European Fisheries in Early Modern History
- CHAPTER IV The Changing Patterns of Trade
- CHAPTER V Monetary, Credit and Banking Systems
- CHAPTER VI The Nature of Enterprise
- CHAPTER VII The Organization of Industrial Production
- CHAPTER VIII Government and Society
- Bibliographies
- Fig. 7. Centres of metal production
- Fig. 8. Centres of textile production
- References
CHAPTER I - The Historical Study of Economic Growth and Decline in Early Modern History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CHAPTER I The Historical Study of Economic Growth and Decline in Early Modern History
- CHAPTER II Agriculture in the Vital Revolution
- CHAPTER III The European Fisheries in Early Modern History
- CHAPTER IV The Changing Patterns of Trade
- CHAPTER V Monetary, Credit and Banking Systems
- CHAPTER VI The Nature of Enterprise
- CHAPTER VII The Organization of Industrial Production
- CHAPTER VIII Government and Society
- Bibliographies
- Fig. 7. Centres of metal production
- Fig. 8. Centres of textile production
- References
Summary
The Ends and Means of Economic History: Some Changing Concepts
Recent Decades have seen important changes in the objectives, techniques and methodologies of economic history. As a confluence of two different streams of thought and practice – that of the economic theorists on the one hand and that of the general or political historians on the other – economic history often meandered uncertainly in its course, urged sometimes more by one tributary, sometimes more by the other. Each national ‘school’ reflected the characteristics of its diverse ancestry, but in all the traditional pull of ‘institutional’ history was strong. The habit of proceeding by the more or less disparate analysis of celebrated institutions already familiar through their political importance – gilds, companies, colonial trading organizations, public banks, etc. – went hand in hand with an adumbration of the macro-economy of this or that state, again vaguely familiar (if only in outline) from the earlier study of the political history of the different nations. To be sure, this latter varied in interest and influence with the actual history of the individual state. It assumed a lower profile in a country like the Netherlands with its obstinate traditions of local municipal autonomy and provincial federation than it did in the economic history of modern Germany, where late but swift and revolutionary industrialization was reflected in the strong political and strategic orientations of the school of Gustav Schmoller and the ‘historical economists’. At the same time the strength of the German tradition of idealist philosophy was also vividly reflected in the socio-economic analysis of German historians like Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Artur Spiethoff: hence the ‘ideal types’ of the first, the ‘systems’ of the second and the isolation by the third of Gestalt theory – ‘the closest possible approximation [of theory] to observable reality’.
Keywords
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- The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , pp. 1 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977
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