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Beyond the New Economic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Douglass C. North
Douglass C. North
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

The new economic history has been with us now for almost a score of years. Its practitioners have advanced from young revolutionaries to become a part of the middle-aged establishment; and by all the criteria of publication and training of graduate students, it has indeed transformed the discipline in the United States. From my quite subjective perspective, the new economic history has made a significant contribution to revitalizing the field and advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Yet I think it stops short—far short —of what we should be accomplishing in the field. Our objective surely remains that of shedding light on man's economic past, conceived in the broadest sense of those words; and I submit to you that the new economic history as it has developed has imposed strictures on enquiry that narrowly limit its horizons—and that some of my former revolutionary compatriots show distressing signs of complacency with the new orthodoxy.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 1974 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1974

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References

I am indebted to Elisabeth Case and Robert Willis for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation which provided me with a fellowship and resultant time to reflect about the issues discussed herein.

1 A convenient summary of the literature on property rights and transactions costs is contained in the December 1972 Journal of Economic Literature, “Property Rights and Economic Theory: A Survey of Recent Literature,” by Eirik G. Furubotn and Szetozar Pejovich.

2 “New Economic Approaches to Fertility,” Journal of Political Economy (March-April 1973), Part II. See particularly the essay by Theodore Schultz, “The Value of Children: an Economic Perspective.”

3 This issue is discussed more fully in North, Douglass and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), Ch. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar