Comments

Jan de Vries
Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and Economics
University of California at Berkeley

My heart sank, for a moment, when I saw the title assigned to us economic historians. Such a question has lurking behind it the default answer: nothing. And it is an invitation to supply a sermon on the value of economic history in a genre theologians call “apologetics.”

These sermons are familiar to me, for I give them every year in the first meeting of Berkeley’s required graduate course in economic history. There, every fall is the whole entering class and there I stand before them, as I now stand before you, trying to explain why what I have to tell them is somehow good for them, even essential to their training as economists.

I long wished that I could just begin with the second lecture, and let the field’s pleasures and benefits speak for themselves. In that spirit, I would now launch into a brief but spirited account of my current research, focused on historical household economic behavior, in which I am exploring the interaction of market-oriented household productive efforts and the patterns of consumer demand. There were times in the past (and I focus on periods stretching back to the mid-seventeenth century)when this interaction led to strategies I have termed an industrious revolution.[1] The concept shifts the focus of historical research from the behavior of the individual and the role of technology, to the family and consumption in the broadest sense, including intra-household allocations and transfers.

But, to return to the burden we economic historians must bear.

The answer to the question “What does economic history have to teach us?” has, itself, an interesting history. There was a time – as Marshall’s influence was waxing early in this century, and even more intensely in the 1940s and 50s under Samuelson’s synthesis of marginalism and Keynesianism – when a division of labor existed between neoclassical economics, focused on short-run phenomena, and economic historians, who were free to indulge in heterodox concepts as they ranged widely in their efforts to understand the long-term processes beyond the reach and ken of neoclassical theory.[2]

They ranged widely, this eclectic band, but they appeared increasingly to most economists as a tribe wandering in the wilderness. By 1960, when the eminent epistemologist Karl Popper declared that “Economics is the first of the social sciences to have had its Newtonian Revolution,” the scientific economists, like newly minted amphibians proudly learning to use their stubby little fins to clamber about on the beach, looked back at the still fishy historians with disdain.

It was at this point, as Bill Parker came to Yale in 1962 and, shortly after, I arrived here as a graduate student, that the New Economic History emerged, declaring, in effect, that the wandering was over, that economic historians, too, could hit the beaches as aspirant amphibians, and that economic history should be, and would be, the application of modern economics – neoclassical theory – to the service of history.[3] This is how Donald McCloskey put it in 1976 in a kind of victory declaration of the New Economic History.

But it was in the service of a limited kind of history. For the ahistorical theory coming to the rescue of “maiden history” could not really comprehend time in its explanations. This limitation is obvious enough in static equilibrium analysis. But it is not less true in dynamic equilibrium, where time is treated not in an historical way, recognizing the irreversibility of change, but as a kind of locomotion, where the model can be run backward as readily as forward.

As all of this was playing itself out among American economists, the French historian Fernand Braudel (some of my less pleasant memories of my graduate student days here involve my struggle to learn French well enough to read his baroque prose) was complaining in the pages of Annales that the social sciences had put aside historical explanation – dismissing it as too messy and unformalizable – and had developed instead concepts based exclusively on the study of the immediate event – an act of exceedingly short duration – and had deployed methods that simply bypassed time altogether.[4]

He complained of the “tyranny of the event” which blinds us (according to Braudel) to the reality of processes of longer duration.

“Traditional history, given its attention to the short term, the individual, the event, accustomed us long ago to its sudden, dramatic, breathless narrative.” This fixation of the historian obviously repelled the social scientist, seeking regularities and patterns. Yet, Braudel went on to insist that these social scientists needed a new kind of history that could demonstrate the truth of his claim that:

Nothing comes closer to the heart of social reality than the lively, intimate, constantly recurring opposition between the instant and the long term (between event and structure).”

Or, as he put it elsewhere:

Whether we are dealing with the past or present, a clear awareness of the plurality of social time is indispensable to a common methodology of the social sciences.[5]

Braudel and the Annales School historians who he led set out to reform history as a discipline to make it suitable to function as the “queen of the social sciences” by shifting its attention from event-based narratives to focus on this “plurality of social time.”

Clearly, while the New Economic Historians were developing a social scientific history, Braudel and other historians sought an historical social science. They did not get far in this. Indeed, history as a discipline has moved in the opposite direction in the past twenty years.[6]

Yet, I think that is the goal we are moving toward now, and the impetus is coming from the seemingly unpromising cadre of the old New Economic Historians and other economists, who had been nurtured in the faith of neoclassical theory. This could give powerful answers to rather narrow questions, its strength being at once its weakness. But its rigor provided the context in which hard questions could be systematically pursued. Thus, while pomo bonfires burned brightly around the historians of our tribe and plastic-pocket-protector equipped positivists snapped at the heals of the economists among us, a sizeable number of economic historians have sought to move beyond the Newtonian Revolution celebrated by Popper.

Since when? Well, as good a date as any is December 1984, when Bill Parker organized a session of the ASSA meetings in Dallas. There, Robert Solow read an obituary for the aging New Economic History:

“Apart from anything else, it is no fun reading the stuff anymore… it gives back to the theorist the same routine gruel that the economic theorist gives to the historian. Why should I believe, when it is applied to thin eighteenth century data, something that carries no conviction when it is done with more ample twentieth century data?[7]

At the same session several economic historians read papers full of promise for the future, most widely known, surely, being Paul David’s “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”. The modern work has proceeded on several fronts at once. Much of it, to use the conventional shorthand, seeks to replace physical with biologically-inspired models in the study of technological change and technical interrelatedness and in the exploration of the consequences of positive returns and the existence of multiple equilibria.

These explorations have reintroduced into economists’ discourse both geography – spatial interaction – as well as history –durational interaction – in ways whereby time and space, instead of being rendered invisible (and irrelevant) in the long run, come to cast forward long shadows in what has come to be called “path dependence.” The historical dimension of these explorations in complexity and non-linearity often are short-term events: what Braudel despised as mere accidents of history. But this is definitely not the case with the new institutionalism – another path whereby history is being reintroduced to the disciple. This brings very much to the foreground the Braudelian notion of multiple durational tempos interacting with each other.

To return to my introductory lectures to first year economics graduate students: it is one or more dimensions of what I have just described in such desperate brevity that more and more of these students bring with them as they enter the graduate program. They don’t know quite why it matters, but increasingly our students have a sense that “history matters” and that a course in economic history really could make them better economists. It certainly has become easier to give these lectures; perhaps the time will come when I can dispense with them altogether.

As an historian I should add that economic history is not only valuable as a forum in which to explore some of the exciting new theoretical developments and, in some cases, as the site of their introduction to the discipline. It is also playing a prominent role in challenging the basic framework of historical periodization, a framework that has been with us for well over a century. This is no trivial matter. If the Industrial Revolution is demoted to the level of a phenomenon comparable to several other eras of technological and organizational renewal, the very questions we ask about economic change, the meaning of a modern economy, and the future to which it will lead us, will also change.

To indicate what I have in mind here, let me close by calling to mind the words of John Maynard Keynes. At the conclusion of The General Theory he makes the famous observation that

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.[8]

I suggest the following emendation: Practical economists, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any humanistic influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct historian.

[1] Jan de Vries, “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, Routledge, 1993), pp. 85-132; “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), 249-69.

[2] Naomi Lamoreaux, “Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 69.

[3] Donald McCloskey, “Does the Past have Useful Economics?” Journal of Economic Literature 14 (1976), 434-61.

[4] Certainly, this applies to the economist’s understanding of the concept “the long run” which has become, in Paul David’s words, “that imagined state which would be attained when economic agents had accomplished all adjustments in endogenous variables, and therefore both initial conditions, and intervening events in the past would have ceased to matter.” Paul David, “Historical Economics in the Longrun: some implications of path-dependence,” in Graeme Snooks, ed., Historical Analysis in Economics (London, Routledge, 1993), p.34.

[5] Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée,” Annales E.S.C. 13 (1958), 725-53.

[6] For more on this see: “Great Expectations: Early Modern History and the Social Sciences,” Review 14 (1999, forthcoming).

[7] Robert Solow, “Economic History and Economics,” American Economic Review 75 (1985), p. 330.

[8] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1964), p. 383.