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Quantification and the Economic History of Imperial Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2017

Steven Nafziger
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Extract

Historians work with sources that are products of specific social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Thus, understanding how and why sources were produced and why they survived is an essential component of historical scholarship. At the same time, many historians often employ some sort of conceptual framework—implicit or explicit, descriptive or normative—in order to translate the sources into a coherent narrative. Modern economic historians are no different. The sources tend to be quantitative and focused on economic phenomena (with many exceptions), but doing economic history well means interrogating the origins, trustworthiness, and usefulness of the data in question. In doing this, modern economic historians are largely unapologetic about employing the tools—especially statistical—and intellectual apparatus of economics to interrogate their sources, much as social, political, or environmental historians draw on ideas and methods from related disciplines in their own inquiries. This is precisely how we make sense of the historical process of economic development.

Type
Critical Forum on Statistics
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , Spring 2017 , pp. 30 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017 

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References

1. For thoughtful discussions of scholarly practices in modern economic history, see the following papers in the Journal of Economic History 75, no. 4 (December 2015)Google Scholar: William Collins, “Looking Forward: Positive and Normative Views of Economic History’s Future”: 1228–33; Kris Mitchener, “The 4D Future of Economic History: Digitally-Driven Data Design”: 1234–39; Naomi Lamoreaux, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary”: 1251–57; and Ran Abramitsky, “Economics and the Modern Economic Historian”: 1240–51.

2. These studies include Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, “Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire,” (February 1, 2016), at www.ssrn.com/abstract=2514964 (last accessed January 24, 2017); Nafziger, Steven, “Peasant Communes and Factor Markets in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Explorations in Economic History 47, no. 4 (October 2010): 381–402 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anfimov, A.M., Krest΄ianskoe khoziaistvo Evropeiskoi Rossii, 1881–1904 (Moscow, 1980)Google Scholar; and Koval΄chenko, I. D., Russkoe krepostnoe krest΄ianstvo v pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar. Several of the Soviet works Stanziani mentions do not draw upon the late-19th century sources, especially zemstvo materials, that he is primarily concerned with. I address several additional difficulties with how Stanziani interprets specific scholarly works below.

3. He notes that his “aim here is not so much to criticize this [sic] data, per se.”

4. Stanziani notes how late Imperial policy makers and local officials were especially intent on developing a deeper knowledge of the rural and peasant economies. The advances in statistical methodologies and the shear amount of resulting quantitative evidence subsequently generated—certainly greater than other comparable economies of the time—suggests that this was the case.

5. Porter, Theodore, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar; Darrow, David, “Statistics and Sufficiency: Toward an Intellectual History of Russia’s Rural Crisis,” Continuity and Change 17, no. 1 (May 2002): 63–96 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Stanziani, Alessandro, L’economie en revolution: Le cas russe, 1870–1930 (Paris, 1998)Google Scholar, along with a number of his other works. Stanziani also references numerous specialized studies (in various languages) of the intellectual backdrop to the zemstvo statistical research efforts.

6. In the “Measuring Time” section of his paper, Stanziani emphasizes an analytical difference between Marxist/Chaianovian and “market” interpretations of the peasant household economy (in connection to how information on seasonal labor decisions was collected), emphasizing the difference in conclusions that could be drawn under the two models. However, work by modern development economists has shown how these two frameworks can be formally linked. See Strauss, John, Singh, Inderjit, and Squire, Lyn, eds., Agricultural Household Models: Extensions, Applications, and Policy (Baltimore, 1986)Google Scholar.

7. On the use of the models and methods of institutional and development economics for understanding historical economies (and vice versa), see Greif, Avner, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; North, Douglass, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nunn, Nathan, “Historical Development,” in Aghion, Philippe and Durlauf, Steven, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2A (Amsterdam, 2014)Google Scholar; and the articles mentioned in Footnote 1.

8. Where Stanziani does criticize a specific study, he tends to be incorrect in his diagnoses, as I note below.

9. I suspect that Stanziani would disagree with this statement, but a quick skim through recent years of the flagship Journal of Economic History or similar outlets lends support to my claim.

10. For example, in my 2010 paper “Peasant Communes” (see note 2) on the interaction between property rights and rural factor market activity in late Imperial Russia, I draw on models of collective action and peasant household decision-making to formulate simple hypotheses regarding how households might react to exogenous demographic changes under the specific communal constraints postulated by Alexander Gerschenkron and others. I evaluated these hypotheses using zemstvo household data from Moscow province and found evidence inconsistent with this standard argument that the communal strongly inhibited peasant labor and land market participation.

11. Indeed, a paper I wrote with Dennison, Tracy, “Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 397–441 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, had the explicit aim of exploring what the available data could tell us about 19th century living standards in two districts, using internal consistency across various indicators as an implicit check on the quality of the sources. While he seems bothered by our use of particular sources, Stanziani never questions our tentative conclusions about the trajectory of rural living standards. Moreover, the work was intentionally exploratory, an emphasis that Stanziani seems to have missed.

12. Stanziani’s major example of the possible biases introduced by non-standard and subjective survey methods is from the well-known Tenishev ethnographic research program, rather than the more explicitly quantitative and likely more objective data collection done by zemstvo researchers. Moreover, the different responses he notes for similar questions across these (ethnographic) researchers can be interpreted simply as measurement error and addressed in an appropriate statistical framework.

13. For example, see Nafziger, “Peasant Communes,” which restricts its analysis and conclusions to Moscow province. Stanziani (note 46) asserts that modern economic researchers—myself included—who have employed zemstvo data have been “a-critical” in their use of the data. Some of this complaint seems to assume that we rely on the zemstvo researcher conclusions, however, when in fact my work and the research of others have exclusively relied on the raw data (and have grappled with issues of how representative and possibly biased such data are). See my “Peasant Communes;” see also: Nafziger, “Serfdom, Emancipation, and Off-Farm Labour Mobility in Tsarist Russia,” Economic History of Developing Regions 27, no.1 (March 2012): 1–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. For example, see Nafziger, “Did Ivan’s Vote Matter? The Political Economy of Local Democracy in Tsarist Russia,” European Review of Economic History 15, no. 3 (December 2011): 393–441 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Stanziani cites the work of Steven Hoch as representative of “accurate” data usage—for example, see “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trend, and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 53, no.1 (Spring 1994): 41–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While I admire Hoch’s pioneering scholarship, there is little to distinguish its “accuracy” from other works of quantitative history other than that it tends not to employ the methods of economics. Moreover, Hoch’s geographic coverage—and, hence, the larger applicability of his micro-level findings—is generally quite limited.

16. On other occasions—as in his apparent rejection of Paul Gregory’s optimistic interpretation of late Imperial rural economic growth—Stanziani misunderstands what the author has done. In that case, Stanziani confuses the level of rural incomes with Gregory’s emphasis on the growth rate.