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Recent Developments in American Economic History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Stanley L. Engerman
Stanley L. Engerman*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Extract

Economic history, as a combination of two disciplines, has had a rather curious evolution. This is indicated both by looking at its checkered academic development in the United States, and by contrasting its evolution in the United States with that in England and elsewhere. Whereas in England and most European countries economic history is regarded as a separate discipline, with its own departments and professors, such an academic separation does not exist in the United States. Here, reflecting the dual nature of the subject, economic historians can be found in either history departments or in economics departments, and the nature of academic specialization often means they teach two distinct student bodies, with infrequent communication across disciplinary lines. Separatist tendencies have seemed more pronounced in the past two decades, when there was a marked change in the study of economic history in the United States, a change that has also affected other sub disciplines of history: quantification and model-building have spread into many areas of historical study. But in some measure this movement in economics reflects the recent tendency for economic historians to come from economics, rather than from history departments. Since the causes of the change seem, in part, peculiar to the United States, what I say about recent tendencies in the field may not fully reflect developments in other countries, although there seem to be similar trends emerging, albeit with some lags, in England and elsewhere in Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Fall 1977 , pp. 72 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1977 

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the Symposium: Blueprint for Interdisciplinary Regional History sponsored by the Landon Project, University of Western Ontario. I benefited from the discussion and comments at the Symposium, particularly those of José Igartua. Robert Gallman made very helpful stylistic and substantive criticisms of the first draft, and I was also aided by the comments of Thomas Cochran, Gary Hawke, Donald McCloskey, and Harold Woodman. This broad survey is meant to describe some basic tendencies, and there is no intent to provide a working bibliography of work in economic history.

References

Notes

1 See McClelland, Peter D., Causal Explanation and Model Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History (Ithaca, 1975)Google Scholar for a recent survey and analysis of methodological debate in economic history, economics, and history. This book contains a useful bibliography of recent works in economic history as well as of past and present debates related to the study of economic history.

2 For discussion of this, see Schumpeter, Joseph A., Economic Doctrine and Method: An Historical Sketch (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. An excellent guide to the debates about the usefulness of economic theory in the late-nineteenth century is Keynes, John Neville, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London, 1891).Google Scholar

3 For a recent discussion of the changes in British economic history, see Hartwell, R.M., “Good Old Economic History,” Journal of Economic History, 33, (March 1973), 28-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while for the presentation of the attitudes of Marshall and Cunningham, see Maloney, John, “Marshall, Cunningham, and the Emerging Economics Profession,” Economic History Review, 29 (August 1976), 440-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Empty Economic Boxes” were debated by Clapham, Pigou, and Robertson in the Economic Journal, 1922 and 1924, and these articles are conveniently reprinted in Stigler, George J. and Boulding, Kenneth E., eds., Readings in Price Theory (London, 1953), 119-59.Google Scholar

4 See Heckscher, Eli F., “A Plea for Theory in Economic History,” Economic History, 1 (January 1929), 525-34.Google Scholar

5 See Clapham, J.H., “Economic History as a Discipline,” in Seligman, Edwin R.A., ed., The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5 (New York, 1931), 327-30.Google Scholar

6 For discussions of this earlier work in American economic history, see, in particular, Cole, Arthur H., “Economic History in the United States: Formative Years of a Discipline,” Journal of Economic History, 28 (December 1968), 556-89CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Birth of a New Social Science Discipline: Achievements of the First Generation of American Economic and Business Historians, 1893-1974 (New York, 1974), and the references cited in Fogel, Robert William and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross, 2 vols. (Boston, 1974), II: 187-88.Google Scholar

7 Davis, Lance E., et al., American Economic Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. For a useful discussion of changes in the nature of economic history, see Cochran, Thomas C., “Economic History, Old and New,” American Historical Review, 74 (June 1969), 1561-72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other recent evaluations of the “new economic history,” include McCloskey, Donald N., “Does the Past Have Useful Economics?” Journal of Economic Literature, 14 (June 1976), 434-61Google Scholar, and his “The Achievements of the Cliometric School,” Journal of Economic History, 38 (March 1978), (with comments by Douglass C. North), and North’s “The New Economic History After Twenty Years,” American Behavioral Scientist (forthcoming).

8 For a discussion of these shifts, see, in particular, Parker, William N., “American Economic Growth: Its Historiography in the Twentieth Century,” Ventures: The Magazine of the Yale Graduate School, 8 (Fall 1968), 71-82Google Scholar and “Through Growth and Beyond: Three Decades in Economic and Business History,” in Cain, Louis P. and Uselding, Paul J., eds., Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson (Kent, 1973), 15-47Google Scholar. Anthologies of this new work include Fogel, Robert William and Engerman, Stanley L., eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971)Google Scholar and Temin, Peter, ed., New Economic History: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, 1973).Google Scholar

9 For a discussion of the Committee and a complete bibliography of work done under its auspices, see Cole, Arthur H., “The Committee on Research in Economic History: An Historical Sketch,” Journal of Economic History, 30 (December 1970), 723-41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 It should be noted that Kuznets’s great contribution was not only to operationalize the measurement of national income, but to make clear its conceptual basis. In describing a measure with clear theoretical meaning and purpose, he anticipated many of the discussions of welfare economists on criteria for economic betterment, as well as much of the recent work on net economic welfare based on more inclusive treatment of leisure and of externalities.

11 See Kuznets, Simon, National Product Since 1869 (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

12 For the United States, see Gallman, Robert E., “Commodity Output, 1839-1899” in Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 24 (Princeton, 1960), 13-71Google Scholar and “Gross National Product in the United States. 1834-1909,” in Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 30 (New York, 1966), 3-76. For England see Deane, Phyllis and Cole, W.A., British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (Cambridge, 1962).Google Scholar

13 For the discussion of the social savings of railroads, see Fishlow, Albert, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Cambridge, 1965)Google Scholar and Fogel, Robert William, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, 1964)Google Scholar. For the rate of return upon investment in slaves, see Conrad, Alfred H. and Meyer, John R., “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy, 66 (April 1958), 95-130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 On this point, see Gould, J.D., “Hypothetical History,” Economic History Review, 22 (August 1969), 195-207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 There are, of course, some limits to the extent to which tastes are free to operate once the question to be pursued is agreed upon. Yet, since the appropriate counterfactual is dependent upon the specific question asked, failure to agree on what is the “interesting” and/or important question also means a failure to agree on the relevant counterfactual in particular cases.

16 It is these assumptions relating to alternative use of resources which underlie the revisionist work on, e.g., the importance of the railroad to United States economic development, the role of foreign investment in the late-nineteenth-century British economy, and the contribution of the slave trade to British industrialization. The choice of which model is relevant is not solely one of tastes, and examination of the patterns of wage and price change, unemployment rates, etc., can suggest the extent to which opportunity costs must be considered.

17 For a useful evaluation of the substantive contributions, see Fishlow, Albert and Fogel, Robert W., “Quantitative Economic History: An Interim Evaluation: Past Trends and Present Tendencies,” Journal of Economic History, 31 (March 1971), 15-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a less sanguine view, see Woodman, Harold D., “Economic History and Economic Theory: The New Economic History in America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (Autumn 1972), 323-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 See Gallman’s essays cited in note 12. These implications are also discussed in Kuznets, Simon, “Notes on the Pattern of U.S. Economic Growth,” in Edwards, Edgar O., ed., The Nation’s Economic Objectives (Chicago, 1964), 15-35.Google Scholar

19 See Stanley Lebergott, “Labor Force and Employment, 1800-1960,” in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800, 117-204, for the new labor force estimates. For a discussion of United States economic growth from 1790 to 1860, based on the data prepared by Gallman, Lebergott, and Marvin W. Towne and Wayne D. Rasmussen (“Farm Gross Product and Gross Investment in the Nineteenth Century,” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, 255-312) see David, Paul A., “The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840: New Evidence, Controlled Conjectures,” Journal of Economic History, 27 (June 1967), 151-97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the discussions by Gallman in the works cited in note 12.

20 See Easterlin, Richard A., “Regional Income Trends: 1840-1950,” in Harris, Seymour, ed., American Economic History (New York, 1961), 525-47Google Scholar and the works of Easterlin which it draws upon.

21 Compare, for example, David, Paul A. et al., Reckoning with Slavery (New York, 1976)Google Scholar and Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross.

22 It is, at times, unclear whether the Marxist critique refers mainly to the questions being asked by neoclassical economists or to the use of certain techniques to answer these questions, and the same can be said about the critique of economic history. Since much Marxist economic history seems to utilize the same economic tools as those used by neoclassical economic historians in explaining specific events and patterns of behavior, presumably the major objections are to the questions asked and the way their answers are placed into the broader historical context.

23 For a recent survey of the literature on this topic, see Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” in Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History, vol. 1 (Greenwich, 1976), 69-123.Google Scholar

24 See Davis, Lance E. and North, Douglass C., Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as the book by the Nobel Prize economist, Hicks, John R., A Theory of Economic History (Oxford, 1969).Google Scholar

25 For interesting discussions of two of these issues, see Rosenberg, Nathan, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Domar, Evsey D., “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History, 30 (March 1970), 18-32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 See Kelley, Allen C. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Lessons from Japanese Development: An Analytical Economic History (Chicago, 1974)Google Scholar; Kelley, Allen C., Williamson, Jeffrey G. and Cheetham, Russell J., Dualistic Economic Development: Theory and History (Chicago, 1972)Google Scholar, and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Late Nineteenth-Century American Development: A General Equilibrium History (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar

27 See, for example, Easterlin, Richard A., “Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States,” Journal of Economic History, 36 (March 1976), 45-75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the works described there.

28 For a preliminary discussion of the issues in regard to the study of comparative slave demography, see Engerman, Stanley L., “Some Economic and Demographic Comparisons of Slavery in the United States and the British West Indies,” Economic History Review, 29 (May 1976), 258-75.Google Scholar

29 This clearly understates the amount of primary data used in the earlier work of “new economic historians,” as noted in Albert Fishlow and Robert W. Fogel, “Quantitative Economic History,” 19, and it may be only that this aspect has recently become more publicly conspicuous.

30 For descriptions of this project, see Foust, James D., The Yeoman Farmer and Westward Expansion of U.S. Cotton Production (New York, 1975)Google Scholar and Parker, William N., ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington, 1970).Google Scholar

31 This work is presented in Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977).Google Scholar

32 This sample is described in Bateman, Fred and Foust, James D., “A Sample of Rural Households Selected from the 1860 Manuscript Censuses,” Agricultural History, 48 (January 1974), 75-93.Google Scholar