Econometric History

It is the part of economics, history and economic history that uses economics to understand the past. As such things go the thing is new.

Historical economics does what it has done by means of economic theory. A quarter of a century before the first stirrings of historical economics the great Swedish economist and historian, Eli Heckscher, put it this way:

Now, if economic theory is at all what it ought to be, its reasonings should apply to economic life as such, and consequently to that of all ages. No doubt much remains to be done in the field of economic theory; but an attempt might at least be made to utilize economic theory for the work of economic history. [Heckscher, 1930]

An historian unable to make use of the intellectual apparatus constructed in the two centuries since Adam Smith may be a fine fellow, an excellent scholar, a skilled user of statistics, an important figure in historical studies, but if innocent of economic theory he will not be doing historical economics.

Economic history is of course a counting subject. Sir John Clapham, a British contemporary of Heckscher trained by Alfred Marshall in the economics of the day, remarked in his inaugural lecture for the first Cambridge chair of economic history, that ‘it is the obvious business of an economic historian to be a measurer above other historians’ [1929, 68]. Replete with prices and profits, acres and hands, economic life is the most measurable of human activities. Elsewhere Clapham wrote:

Every economic historian should … have acquired what might be called the statistical sense, the habit of asking in relation to any institution, policy, group or movement the questions: how large? how long? how often? how representative? [1930, 416]

The advice is good for any historian, economic or not. The attempt to produce a number is usually illuminating, even when no number is in the end producible. Counting is a master metaphor. A historian listing the factors causing the American revolution or the English enclosure movement will give more weight to one factor than to another. The very idea of ‘more weight’ is quantitative, and to settle on one factor or a few as ‘more important’ than others is to think quantitatively. Quantities are unavoidable.

The claim of the historical economists to have ‘reinterpreted’ American economic history — the word was used in the title of a collection edited by Fogel and Engerman — was only a little bold in 1971. By now it is fully justified. Another fat volume published about the same time, which also collected pieces from the major reinterpreters, declared itself to be American Economic Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States [Davis Easterlin, Parker et al., 1972]. The piling up of historical economics since 1957 certainly does justify a reinterpretation of American economic history in the economist’s way. By now numerous textbooks do so: Brownlee [1974], Gray and Peterson [1974], Niemi [1975], Temin [1975], Vedder [1976], Lee and Passell [1979], Ratner, Soltow and Sylla [1979], North, Anderson and Hill [1983], Hughes [1983] and Lebergott [1984]. Whatever their methodological approach the texts are dominated by the new findings. The Encyclopedia of American Economic History [1980], edited by Glenn Porter, contains a high proportion of cliometric articles. The Bibliography of Historical Economics, as noted earlier, contains over 4500 items. Only a few are selected here.

In this way historical economics won the West. While winning the United States, however, it was sending armies elsewhere, as Duke William’s cousins conquered Apulia and Sicily, too. A survey of many thousands of writings cannot be complete. But to conclude with a rapid tour of the outposts, a mere selective list of who has done or is doing what will perhaps make one point clear: that historical economics can reinterpret histories other than the American. To some degree it already has, which will be news to many in its home. Like most national histories, American economic history is provincial, and its practitioners are mostly unaware that historical economics thrives also in such climes as Canada, Britain, Japan, Italy and far Australia fair.