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A “New” Business History? A Commentary on the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2016

William N. Parker
William N. Parker
Affiliation:
William N. Parker is Phillip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economics and Economic History,emeritus, atYale University.
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Extract

The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.

Type
Surveys and Debates
Information
Business History Review , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 623 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1993

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References

1 Cliometrics Newsletter 8, no. 3 (Oct. 1993) (Special Insert): 7–8Google Scholar.

2 North, Douglass C., “Entrepreneurial Policy and Internal Organization in the Large life Insurance Companies at the Time of the Armstrong Investigation of Life Insurance,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 5 (March 1953): 139–61Google Scholar, and “Capital Accumulation and life Insurance between the Civil War and the Investigation of 1910,” in Men in Business, ed. Miller, William (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)Google Scholar.

3 North, Douglass C., Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966)Google Scholar.

4 Rostow, W. W., How It All Began (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Nathan and Birdzell, L. E. Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York, 1986)Google Scholar. See also the remarkable book of Jones, Eric L., The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geo-Politics (Cambridge, England, 1981)Google Scholar, a book that in both breadth and depth is, in my view, a supreme work in social science history, though not easily fitted within the confines of “economic science.”

5 David, Paul A. et al. , Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

6 Carlyle, Thomas, ed., Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (London, 1901), 2: 112Google Scholar.

7 Davis, Lance E., “And It Will Never Be Literature,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 6, no. 1 (Fall 1968): 75–92Google Scholar.

8 My impressions of the potential for a “new” business history are based in part on the last five dissertations that the Yale economic history “team”—David Weir, David Weiman, and I—supervised in the Department of Economics between 1988 and 1992. They were as follows: Shapiro, Helen, “State Intervention and Industrialization: The Origins of the Brazilian Automotive Industry” (1988). A part of this research appeared as “Determinants of Firm Entry into the Brazilian Automobile Manufacturing Industry, 1956-1968,” Business History Review 65 (Winter 1991): 876–947CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the thesis has recently been revised and published by Cambridge University Press as Engines of Growth: The State and Transnational Auto Companies in Brazil (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Smith, Bernard, “A Study of Uneven Industrial Development: The American Clothing Industry in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries” (1988); an article based on this research appeared as “Market Development, Industrial Development: The Case of the American Corset Trade, 1860–1920,” Business History Review 65 (Spring 1991): 91–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Insong Gill, “Furnishing Merchants and the Rural Credit Market of the American South: Alabama, 1870-1920” (1990); Laura Jane Owen, “The Decline in Turnover of Manufacturing Workers: Case Study Evidence from the 1920s” (1991); and Margaret Catherine Levenstein, “Information Systems and Internal Organization: A Study of the Dow Chemical Company, 1890-1914” (1991).

Each of these dissertations was concerned at bottom with the micro-problems of a firm or of a group of firms. They were all based on some combination of firms' records and firms' reports to government agencies or credit services, with a sophisticated awareness of modern management and organization theory and its issues. Levenstein's use of the Dow Chemical archives at Midland, Michigan, magnificently preserved and catalogued, has attracted particular attention even from hard-bitten economic theorists. Local records of Connecticut manufacturers as well as manuscript census materials supported Smith's research. Gill used reports to the Comptroller of the Currency and state bank examiners, as well as the R. G. Dun credit ratings and reports; Owen drew on that great storehouse in Baker Library and on the records of Sargent Hardware, a New Haven firm, which are housed in Hartford. Shapiro provided rich documentation from the archives of the international auto firms in Brazil, as well as from government reports and memoranda.

9 Heaton, Herbert, A Scholar in Action: Edwin F. Gay (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.