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Comparative Study in the Barnyard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Sylvia L. Thrupp
Sylvia L. Thrupp
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

For anyone on the green side of fifty who didn't start historical browsing in the playpen it may be quite hard to see the present appeal of statistical theory and method in perspective. To one lucky enough to have been a student abroad in the 1920's, it is merely one of the consequences of a fundamental shift, which was firming in that decade, in conceptions of the economic historian's job. Essentially the shift consisted in making the economy and the social institutions in which it is embedded analytically distinct. Voices from the Polanyite school still claim that this step was as wrong as Adam's eating of the apple. Milder critics complain only that some of us let economic analysis run away with the ball to the neglect of social analysis and of the interplay between the two. For workers on the recent past this is defensible, because the heavy fall-out of purely economic data clamors to be dealt with in its own terms. The preindustrialist, who has to dig harder for data, and seldom turns up such pure economic ore, is more inclined to think in terms of interplay.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1975

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References

1 Debate on the matter continues in economic anthropology. See Cook, Scott, “Structural Substantivism: a Critical Review of Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age Economics,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVI (June 1974), 355–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 “On Medieval History as a Social Study,” Economica, New Series, No. 1 (February 1934), 13–27.Google Scholar

3 “L'histoire immobile,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (May-June 1974), 673–92.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 Postan, M. M. and Titow, J., “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review, 2nd Series, XI (1959), 392–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Titow, J. Z., Winchester Yields. A Study in Medieval Agricultural Productivity (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1–4Google Scholar, 12–33, and Appendices. The question of soil exhaustion was first raised by W. Denton, who rejected Thorold Rogers’ favorable views of the medieval economy, using Rogers’ wage data to point to a secular decline in population from 1315 and questioning Rogers’ assumption that wage-earners had enough employment to get an adequate yearround living. See , Denton'sEngland in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1888)Google Scholar. William Cunningham in the later editions of his The Growth of English Industry and Commerce During the Early and Middle Ages (first published in 1882) picked up both points but did not allow them to cloud his more optimistic view.

7 My information on the general state of plague research is from Ronald Lee of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center.

8 Shrewsbury, J. F. D., A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 133, 146Google Scholar.

9 From computerized research by Robert Gottfried of the University of Michigan.

10 Translated by Postan, Cynthia, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

11 Gras, N. S. B. was the first to follow up this problem, in his The Evolution of the English Corn Market (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His technique in the medieval research has been criticized but not his theory.

12 Hallam, H. E., Settlement and Society. A Study of the Early Agrarian History of South Lincolnshire (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

13 Raftis, J. Ambrose, Tenure and Mobility. Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1964)Google Scholar, represents interests which Raftis is expanding.

14 Hatcher, John, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300–1500 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

15 On her differences with Postan on the extent of this see Carus-Wilson, E. M., Medieval Merchant Venturers (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 261Google Scholar, n. 3.

16 Several develoment model do of course deal with options and their statistical outcome, notably the Hymer and Resnick model of which Jan de Vries makes use in his The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.