Jones, Geoffrey - Future of Economic, Business, and Social History

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Scandinavian Economic History Review

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The future of economic, business, and social history

Geoffrey Jones , Marco H.D. van Leeuwen & Stephen Broadberry
a c a b
Isidor Straus Professor of Business History , Harvard Business School , Boston , MA , USA
b
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences , Utrecht University , Utrecht , the Netherlands
c
Department of Economic History , London School of Economics and CAGE , London , UK Published online: 07 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Geoffrey Jones , Marco H.D. van Leeuwen & Stephen Broadberry (2012) The future of economic, business, and social history, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 60:3, 225-253, DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2012.727766 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2012.727766
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Scandinavian Economic History Review Vol. 60, No. 3, November 2012, 225 253
The future of economic, business, and social history

Geoffrey Jonesa, Marco H.D. van Leeuwenb and Stephen Broadberryc
a b
Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA; Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands; c Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and CAGE, London, UK
Introduction (by the editors of SEHR, Alfred Reckendrees and Jacob Weisdorf) On 25 May 2012, the Scandinavian Society of Economic and Social History celebrated the 60th anniversary of its international journal, Scandinavian Economic History Review, at Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen with a conference on The Future of Economic, Social and Business History. The editors of this journal invited three distinguished scholars in the fields of economic, business and social history, Stephen Broadberry, Geoffrey Jones and Marco van Leeuwen, to present their personal views and ideas about the future of their respective disciplines. Their talks led to inspiring and engaged discussions and we asked the three speakers to jointly publish their talks in SEHR. The future, however, is not a research field for any kind of historian and not a topic for an academic journal in the field of economic history; and thus, they hesitated. Yet, we are all curious about the future and we discuss also economic and social perspectives when we discuss our own historical research. This makes our subjects interesting and relevant, even though we may not be able to predict anything that others could not predict as well. We appreciate and respect that Geoffrey Jones, Marco van Leeuwen and Stephen Broadberry have agreed to present their personal views, opinions and reflections about their research fields to the broader audience of this journal. We hope that the three viewpoints encourage more of us to engage in a deeper discussion about the present challenges and future potential of economic, business and social history.
1. The future of business history (by Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School) This short essay offers a personal view by the author on three broad, but related, topics. First, it offers an assessment of the current situation of the subject. Second, it outlines some problems faced by the subject. Finally, it discusses alternative futures for the subject to resolve these problems.
1.1. The current situation Business history was born as a discipline at the Harvard Business School. In 1927, the schools dean established the first chair in business history. The first Isidor
*Corresponding address. Email: SEHR@cbs.dk
ISSN 0358-5522 print/ISSN 1750-2837 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2012.727766 http://www.tandfonline.com
226 G. Jones et al. Straus Professor was N. S. B. Gras, who also founded a business history society. Over the following decades the new subject made important intellectual contributions, which in all but one case are now largely forgotten by those outside the field. The first major contribution of the new discipline was its insistence on firm heterogeneity, and its explanation that this heterogeneity arose in an evolutionary fashion. Gras advocated for the production of massively detailed monographs on individual firms, and the generation of such company history was, and remained, a strong feature of the discipline. This emphasis on firms was pursued at a time when most economists believed that the firm, as such, was not interesting to study, as neoclassical economic theory taught that it was merely a profitmaximising entity that responded to the forces of demand and supply. Business historians began maintaining that firms differed, and those differences mattered, six decades before the prominent article by Richard Nelson asserted this argument.1 Second, business historians were prominent as pioneers in the study of entrepreneurship. Also at Harvard, the new field benefited enormously from the formation of Research Center in Entrepreneurial History (1948 1958), which was led by Arthur Cole at the Harvard Business School, and was supported by a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of their drive to encourage the study of economic history. The Centre brought together a multidisciplinary group that included sociologists, economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, and other business historians including Thomas Cochran, David Landes and the young Alfred D. Chandler. The Centre was distinguished by its willingness to address big issues related to explaining apparent spatial variations in the entrepreneurship. Third, business historians were early movers in the study of the multinational firm. The very word multinational was only coined in 1960, and the first theories to explain the multinational were launched during that decade by economists such as Ray Vernon. As early as 1964 Mira Wilkins and Frank Hill published a monumental study of the multinational growth of Ford. Wilkins subsequent two magisterial books on the history of American business abroad, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise and The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, demolished the prevailing wisdom that the multinational enterprise was primarily a post World War II phenomenon.2 Wilkins did not employ formal economic analysis in her books, but instead used archival research to support her insights on the determinants of the growth of multinational firms. Finally, there was Chandlers work on the growth of big business. Chandler generated tremendous interest in the history of firms with three major works, Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope.3 These books were marked by detailed historical research, the use of comparative analysis, and by conceptual contributions most importantly, Chandlers influential argument that a companys strategy must shape its organisational structure, not the other way around. Chandler presented a compelling analysis of the rise of large firms and
1 2
Nelson, Why Do Firms Differ (1991). Wilkins/Hill, American Business Abroad (1964). Wilkins, Emergence (1970), Maturing (1974). 3 Chandler, Strategy (1962), Visible hand (1977), Scale (1990).
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offered an explanation about why these firms arose only in a handful of industries and in specific national economies. In the process, he pioneered the concept of strategy, and its relationship to organisational culture, and exercised an enormous influence on the emergence of strategy among other management disciplines. The importance of Chandlers work was widely hailed. He finally brought the work of business history to the attention of far wider academic audiences. It made a huge impact on the social and management sciences, if less on the discipline of history itself. Chandler, who died in 2007, remains the most widely cited business historian, which is due acknowledgement to the importance of his insights. However, Chandlers pre-eminence also highlights some of the problems in the field, as it provides a striking contrast to lack of citations and recognition of the extensive research in business history by many other scholars other than Chandler in the last two decades. Indeed, business history has been transformed in the recent past. It is characterised by ever-widening boundaries, an impressively open architecture, and new geographies. Exclusive focus on growth of big business in capital-intensive manufacturing has gone. So has the use of American business as the sole benchmark of excellence, which was an implicit feature of Chandlers work. A quick survey of business history journals and conferences identifies a whole range of new issues being investigated, including family business, networks, business groups and governance. There are new domains far from manufacturing, including finance, consulting, advertising, tourism, fashion and beauty. There are wider themes than the growth of big firms, including knowledge, identity, culture, gender, crime, ethnicity and war. Not surprisingly, the theme of the 2010 meeting of the Business History Conference annual conference of the discipline in the USA was the business history of everything. This surge of research was been characterised by an impressively open architecture to scholarship in the field. There has been, on the one hand, a remarkable institutionalisation of the subject. Beyond the USA, where an academic society emerged in 1954, and Japan, where a society was founded in 1966, business historians were typically incorporated into wider groups of historians and economic historians. In Britain, for example, there were many business historians from the 1950s onwards, and a separate journal from 1958, but there was no professional association until 1990, when the Association of Business Historians was formed. This event, however, proved somewhat of a catalyst. Four years later a European Business Historian Association was formed. This has become a flourishing international society holding annual conferences with 300 or more participants. Specialist journals also proliferated, including the French journal Entreprises et Histoire in 1992, and a new US journal, Enterprise & Society, in 1999. Encouragingly, however, institutionalisation has not been followed by the curse of an inward-looking orthodoxy. There has been a remarkable persistence of interdisciplinary openness, which has long characterised the subject. As the editors of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Business History asserted after surveying the field, self-identified business historians co-exist with a wider circle of sociologists, political scientists, economic and social historians, to name just a few.4 We have seen also new geographies appearing in a literature which was long
4
Jones/Zeitlin, Introduction (2008), 4.
228 G. Jones et al. associated with the USA, northern Europe and, from the 1960s, Japan. New archives have opened up, notably in China and Russia. Research took off in the subject in Italy after 1988, in Spain after 1993, and in Switzerland as the Bergier Commission (1996 2002) involved practically every historian in that once-secretive country searching in corporate archives for the involvement of Swiss companies with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Beyond the West, the subject has grown especially strongly in Latin America, including Mexico, Argentina, and especially, Colombia. 1.2. Some challenges and problems of the subject There is, therefore, much reason to be optimistic about the current state of the discipline of business history. However, there is also reason for concern, for it is unclear if anyone is listening to the prolific and exciting research now being undertaken. This is not because no one cares about history. In fact, the opposite is the case, as other social sciences have discovered that history matters. The law and finance literature associated with Andrei Shleifer, Rafael la Porta et al. has had an enormous impact with its argument that the legal tradition countries inherited or adopted in the distant past has a long-term effect on financial development. Countries that had a common law legal system, these authors suggested, had on average better investor protections that most civil law countries, and that French civil law countries were worse than German or Scandinavian civil law traditions. They suggested that this had a major effect on financial development, which in turn impacted the nature and speed of economic development. This is classic territory of business history, yet the authors cite no research in business history. The same could be said broadly about the many legal scholars writing on the evolution of corporate governance, the political scientists writing on the varieties of capitalism, and the evolutionary economists researching corporate innovation. Meanwhile, as some historians in the USA pull back from the excessive emphasis on culture and gender which characterised the field for several decades, a new field studying the history of capitalism has proliferated. However its practitioners regularly assert, at least verbally, that it has to be distinguished from the narrow subject of business history, not least because individual firms are not mentioned. These scholars from beyond business history have launched exciting debates. The attention that they have secured for history is entirely positive. Yet, they have opted out of using business history research, seldom citing any business historians except Chandler, and sometimes they have even done research themselves. Business historians have been left demonstrating that these economists and others have limited historical knowledge. Aldo Musacchios Experiments in Financial Democracy,5 for example, has employed a history of corporate governance in Brazil between 1882 and 1950 to eviscerate the law and finance literature by showing that the level of stock and bond market capitalisation before 1920 in Brazil, a civil law country, might be higher (by some measures) than until recently. In a pattern which broadly conforms to most research on the history of globalisation, but which utterly challenges the legal origins literature, Musacchios research identifies corporate governance convergence in the era of the first global economy before 1914, regardless
5
Musacchio, Experiments (2009).
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of common or civil law, followed by divergence as the first global economy disintegrated during the era of the Great Depression and the two world wars. However, although this and other business history performs an important role in demonstrating that others need to get their historical facts right before offering bold generalisations, the development of the disciplines own bold generalisations should surely be a more ambitious goal. The apparent neglect of business history by other scholars is not new. Indeed, business historians have been complaining about the issue for well over half a century. In 1947 Henrietta Larson, who built business history at the Harvard Business School alongside Gras, and was the Schools first faculty member, observed that another matter which needs attention is making available to students, business men, and the general public the results of research in business history. 6 In 1958 Herman Krooss, the prominent economic and banking historian, noted, Business history is the most vexatious, exasperating, and aggregating of all the historical disciplines, but it has never been as important as it should be,7 In 1987 Donald Coleman, the leading British business sand economic historian of his generation, observed that company histories are largely unread by anyone except other business historians.8 Meanwhile the present author observed in 1999 that Many business schools continue to neglect or marginalize business history.9 These comments might be dismissed as the angst of scholars disappointed that they did not receive the attention they believed their work merited, yet the image of unread work is confirmed in a more aggregate way by the impact factor measurements whose importance has grown in recent years. In 2011, the 5-Year Impact Factor of Business History, the leading British journal, was 0.248, while the 5Year impact factor of Business History Review, the leading US journal, was 0.684. In contrast, the Quarterly Journal of Economics was 8.716, the Academy Management Review was 8.211, and Strategic Management Journal was 6.708. These numbers reflect the fact that business history is a small discipline, but they also provide evidence that the research as presented in specialist journals is not being widely read outside that discipline. There are a number of potential reasons why business history research is not more widely read. Certainly, until the late 1990s, there was a real problem that so much business history took the form of lengthy corporate histories. Although company history had a deservedly bad name as so many of the genre were public relations exercises by firms, the minority of studies written by more academic historians (and some archivists and business journalists) were often deeply researched from corporate archives, objective in their judgements, and contained wonderful insights on corporate decision-making and organisation. However, corporate histories were, and are, also frequently lengthy, and as a result pose a significant barrier to entry to scholars from other disciplines with short attention spans. Moreover the fact that each corporate history is a unique product, with no standard format, makes inter-firm comparisons challenging, at best.
6 7
Larson, Business History (1947). Krooss, Economic History (1958). 8 Coleman, Uses (1987). 9 Jones, Company (1999).
230 G. Jones et al. Over the last decade and a half the proliferation of textbooks has greatly extended access to the business history literature. Landmarks included John Wilsons British Business History and Tom McCraws Creating Modern Capitalism.10 Over the following decade, outstanding textbooks were published on the business history of Australia, China, France, the Netherlands and Spain, while the collaborative Creating Nordic Capitalism set a new standard for textbooks designed for teaching use, through its comparison of the business histories of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.11 However, it remains evident also that the impact of much recent business history remains somewhat subdued by self-imposed boundaries. There is still too much knowledge trapped within the boundaries of company histories. There is also too much literature trapped within the boundaries of the nation state. It is evident, in that context, that the explanations of many key issues related to economic growth, innovation and entrepreneurship are to be found in regions rather than nation states. Explanations are to be found through examining regional institutions, geographical endowments and cultures rather than in nation states. This is as true of small- and medium-sized European countries such as Britain, Denmark and Germany as it is of the more obvious cases of big countries like Brazil, China and the USA. In Europe, integrated economic regions often crossed national borders. Far more research is needed on such regions, as well as their counterparts elsewhere. An underlying issue in business history, which has circumscribed its impact, has been a disregard for methodology. This is an old complaint. In 1970 Ralph Hidy, the prominent US business historian and co-author of a pioneering history of Standard Oil, reflected in a survey article on business history that we need to improve our tools and borrow much more extensively the applicable concepts and analytical techniques from the social sciences.12 Some care is needed in making an argument that business history is methodology-light. After all, among other methodological innovations, business historians pioneered the innovative use of oral history in scholarly history.13 Business history has also been quite influenced by theory. Sociologists like Weber and Parsons, and transactions costs and institutional economists like Williamson and North, have helped shape research in discipline. Yet, and again with significant individual exceptions, business historians have not made a habit of explicit hypothesis testing or the use of standardised social science methodology. Nor have business historians been at the forefront of the application of constructionist and post-modern methodologies seen in History, although again with conspicuous exceptions. The under-investment in methodology has increasingly meant that other scholars accustomed to more formal approaches have been unable to identify business history research as being of high scholarly quality. This issue is not unrelated to a perennial identity crisis in the subject. Born in a business school, the subject has never fitted comfortably in the discipline of History. As management studies embraced social science methodology during the post-war decades, business history was also orphaned in its original home. In successive generations, leading figures have disagreed whether the subject was a separate
10 11
Wilson, Business History (1995). McCraw, Creating Modern Capitalism (1997). Fellmann et al., Creating Nordic Capitalism (2008). 12 Hidy, Business History (1970). 13 Fridenson, Business History (2008), 10.
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discipline, a sub-discipline of economic history, or part of business administration. At interwar Harvard, the birthplace of both economic history and business history, the uncomfortable relationship between business history and economic history was already evident in the disagreements between N.S. B Gras and Edwin Gay, the economic historian who became the first Dean of the Harvard Business School. Economic and business history, Gras asserted in 1934, are different in content and objective. Any yet let us hasten to add that they are clearly twins, though not identical twins.14 During the 1960s business and economic history split irrevocably in the USA as the cliometric revolution took economic history towards economics, while most business historians remained committed to archivally based qualitative methodologies. In Japan, business and economic historians split on ideologically grounds, the former pro-capitalist and the latter Marxist. Elsewhere, there was no uniform pattern, and in Scandinavia for example business and economic historians remained more or less the same communities. This international diversity added to the uncertain identity of the discipline, which in led it towards becoming the business history of everything. The lack of wider impact has practical consequences for business history as a discipline. The institutionalisation of the disciple in new societies and journals has coincided with the de-institutionalisation in many universities of the world. It has been swept out of economics departments, and most history departments, although many individual business history researchers hold positions which are not formally designated for the field. It has shrunk remarkably in some European countries such as Germany and Spain. It has shrunk in once-promising new growth areas such as South Korea. In some countries, although not the US business schools are a growth area. Copenhagen Business School, Harvard Business School, Henley Business School and the Norwegian School of Business and Economics host flourishing business history research and teaching groups. Indeed, in December 2011, Harvard Business Schools Dean made Business History one of the Schools top priority research areas, known idiosyncratically as Initiatives.15 It must be said, however, that such large clusters of faculty are not typical. They also owe their existence to the efforts of individual entrepreneurial faculty, past and present, as well as strong commitment to teaching excellence.
1.3. Alternatives for the future The third part of this essay turns to the issue of the future of the subject. There appear to be three alternative futures. Each one would be a plausible choice, although each one contains significant downsides. A first option for the field would be to continue to develop as the business history of everything. This path would continue to see the embrace of multiple perspectives, and it would encourage diversity in approach. It would celebrate business history as an open, nondoctrinaire, interdisciplinary subject. The upside of this future would that, in an increasingly unpleasant and vicious academic environment, it would keep business history as an open-minded and pleasant subject, open and welcoming. The primary downside would be an accelerating loss of identity and potential for impact as a
14 15
Gras, Business History (1934), 388. See http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory.
232 G. Jones et al. discipline. It is impossible to see a rosy future for a subject that lacks basic agreement even a central core of issues, let alone the language it uses, and the methodologies it employs. This is the path to insignificance. A second future path is to re-integrate with a renewed economic history. As the companion essay by Stephen Broadberry notes, economic history has become far more vibrant recently, after a dreary era between the 1970s and 1990s. It has been invigorated by mega-debates, such as the nature and causes of the Great Divergence between the West and the rest. Much of this research still pays insufficient attention to firms and entrepreneurs, primarily perhaps because the scholars who are interested in such institutions have isolated themselves in the separate domain of business history. One particularly negative outcome of this isolation is that, for unclear reasons, self-identified business historians rarely feel comfortable dealing with periods before the nineteenth century. This chronological oddity has more or less excluded them from contributing to debates about the origins of modern economic growth. The de-institutionalisation of business history and re-engagement with economic history would be of mutual benefit. It could contribute towards reversing the fragmentation of History as a discipline and the rebuilding of common discourses between fields such as economic, social, business, financial, transport, environmental and legal history, which overlap, and deserve to overlap much more. The potential downside for business history, within this much larger domain, is that the voices declaring that firms matter might be drowned out. Business history grew as a subject because its supporters believed that firms and entrepreneurs did matter indeed, that they mattered more than most other actors. If anything, as governments and the world political system hovers on irrelevance, the time seems opportune for more, rather than less research, on firms as institutions and wealth creation. A third path, therefore, beckons, at least to this author. This is to renew business history as a discrete field, and take it to the next level. This bold strategy would be the opposite path to the business history of everything. Although it would seek to retain a separate identity from economic history, it would not it should be emphasised seek a turf war with that or other historical specialisations. Indeed, as firms grew within and impact the global political, economic, social and cultural system, business historians must and should seek to interact and share knowledge with all types of historians. The third proposed path would have two essential components. The first is to undertake a collective endeavour to raise the methodological standards in business history in an effort to convince other scholars that the subject is scholarly, and that its evidence can be used. This would require journal and book series editors to insist, consistently, that contributors raised their standards. Much of this is not, as Hidy suggested, rocket science, but simply involves willingness to learn from what other social scientists and historians do routinely. Business historians need to test hypotheses, count, construct databases, and use archival sources much more critically. They also need to experiment with new methodologies for analyzing small sample and qualitative data. There is no need at all for a one best way methodology. Indeed, fields such as International Business are struggling precisely because of slavish commitments to orthodox social science methodology, which limits the range of issues that can be addressed.16
16
Jones/Khanna Bringing History (back) (2006).
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The second component of renewal is for business history to get, in the inelegant language of business schools, an elevator speech. In other words, for the collective community of scholars to agree what the subject is about, and what the key debates are. Too many journal submissions still begin with words to the effect that Chandler was wrong to suggest . . .. Chandler was probably wrong about many things, but framing research in such a negative fashion simply highlights the lack of big issues in the subject. Chandler was, in fact, right about one very big thing: the way for a discipline, and its scholars, to get attention is to address big issues to which many people want answers, to provide them with answers using the highest quality scholarship, and to debate those answers honestly and rigorously in the quest for knowledge. Going forward, business history needs to focus on a limited number of broad issues, formulate hypotheses about them, and contest them rigorously. It borders on the absurd for senior scholars to tell others what they should do with their time. So the suggestion of four broad issues which follows is simply meant to be illustrative of what needs to, or could be, done. They have been chosen not because they are novel, but because they are not. There is also much research, by many scholars in many countries, being conducted about them. What needs to be done is that this research is more carefully framed within wider debates, which might be code-names as the business history equivalent of the Great Divergence. The first broad issue is entrepreneurship, or rather explaining why and how it differs between countries and time periods, and why and how this matters. This is a terrain in which business historians made huge investments before the organizational synthesis focused collective attention on the growth of big firms and their organisational structure from the 1960s. There are huge opportunities to fill a missing gap between institutional and human capital explanations of global wealth and poverty and the actual creators of wealth and innovation. Have institutions, culture or human capital factors driven the variations seen in entrepreneurial performance around the world in different time periods? The study of entrepreneurship plays to some of the fields strengths for example, individual entrepreneurial biographies are likely to reveal much about entrepreneurial cognition, and much also concerning how resources were assembled. Entrepreneurship remains a weak area of management which has struggled to incorporate context in its explanations, and focused attention obsessively on high-technology start-ups at the expense of the broader field of entrepreneurship. It is also a subject which every MBA student and government minister wants to know more about. A new surge of research on entrepreneurship, properly conducted and presented, would take the world by storm. Second, business historians have a huge opportunity to contribute to the literature on globalisation. The study of the history of multinationals has been an enormously successful and productive area of business history research since the original work of Wilkins in the 1960s. Yet as economists, historians and others discovered globalisation, they have largely ignored firms and the business historians who wrote about their role in integrating economies. Here is a golden opportunity for business historians to reconnect with a vibrant literature with a wider audience and make an impact. Business historians can add their voices to the debate that is on many minds: is globalisation a positive or a negative force? Arguably, existing business history research suggests a less than positive picture as firms emerge as weak transferors of knowledge and contribute to income divergence. However, many topics from the relations between affiliates and parents in multinational firms, to the
234 G. Jones et al. tensions between local and global ambitions, to, finally, the impact of the globalisation of firms on female career employment opportunities, remain hardly explored. The discipline of International Business, which has long been receptive to historical approaches, and faces its own methodological roadblocks in addressing big issues, would be a natural audience and partner in this terrain. A third terrain is business and the natural environment. Business historians have primarily yielded the history of the environment to environmental historians, who until recently have at best treated business simply as one of the big exogenous problems faced by the world. This represents a huge missed opportunity for business historians, who have a long history on mining and other resource companies, as well as consumer packaging and advertising, which have all had major environmental impacts over the past two centuries. There are important debates to be conducted on the role of business in environmental degradation, as well as the role of business in seeking solutions to such degradation. Business historians need to re-use much of what they already know to write on, and debate, the role of business in the natural environment. There is a wide audience for strong empirical evidence on this terrain, for it deals with perhaps the most important issue facing humanity. Finally, business historians have undertaken much research on the social and political role of business which could, and should, be reframed as major contributions to wide and vocal debates on the responsibility of business. The relationship between business and democracy is particularly contentious. Although many scholars have linked the growth of capitalist systems to their controls over executive power and their respect for individual property rights, the historical evidence raises doubts regarding a correlation between democracy and capitalism, as is too evident in the part played by business in colonial systems, and in authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany, apartheid era South Africa, many Latin American dictatorships, a variety of Asian military dictatorships, and in Communist China since the 1980s. Conversely, however, some business leaders have sought to use their wealth and power to foster democracy and counter economic and social injustice. There is a huge demand in business schools, and more widely, for empirical evidence on the broad issue of the responsibility of business. By proving empirical evidence on what has happened in the past, and debating its meaning for the present and the future, business historians have an opportunity not only to be heard as scholars, but to feed to the vocal and politicised debates of today. As with the other two paths, this path has downsides. It may not succeed. The past legacy of marginalisation is a powerful one, and not easy to overcome. Such a path could only succeed if there is a collective decision by many individuals to leave their comfort zones, and pursue and present before their colleagues bold generalisations, based on innovative methodologies. It is difficult for junior scholars seeking to navigate often difficult career paths to take such risks, and it is even more difficult for senior scholars to shift gears, and venture down unknown paths. Should this bold path be followed, journal editors, as gatekeepers of the discipline, would need to be bold in their decisions, and supportive to those who take risks. Business history, then, has a remarkable heritage. It is a repository of unique and rich data on firms and business systems. Yet, as Krooss observed, it has never been as important as it should be. After Krooss had penned these words, Chandler made the subject hot, and it flourished. In recent decades, the hotness has seriously chilled, but this has not, and is not, preventing a vibrant research culture. However, the
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current academic environment is not promising for this research being heard in a crowded world. If the subject is to gain voice, and the faculty jobs and doctoral students that follow, there is surely no future in being the business history of everything. Instead, business historians need to build on their proud tradition of deep engagement with the empirical evidence by raising the bar in methodology, and debating big issues for which many people want answers.
2. A future for social history as global social science history (by Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, Utrecht University) Suddenly and unforeseen, wars break out, empires collapse, genocides take place, banks go bust, states fail which serves to say that modesty befits me. Historians, like sociologists and economists, are not always very good at predicting the future. Having accepted your kind invitation, however, I will try to do so, and to sketch a future for social history as global social science history. For this to be true, social history has to be both global, and part of the social sciences with regard to research domains and designs. So let me begin by discussing the topic of research domains (and questions) before proceeding to research designs (including the nature of the data and collaboration needed for a global social science history). I apologise if examples I am most familiar with are emphasised, but the thrust of my argument namely that there is a bright future for social history as global social science history does not depend on the examples.
2.1. Research domains It is impossible to review all the relevant social science theories here, but it is possible to mention the three main sociological research domains: social inequality, rationalisation, and cooperation.17 I will discuss each briefly and give an example.
2.1.1. Social inequality Social inequality has interested sociologists from the days of de Tocqueville, Marx, Weber and Sorokin. The key questions are: How are societies stratified from high to low? How much social inequality is there, and how easy is to move from one social layer to another? What explains inequality and mobility? As opinions on how fair inequality is are influenced by the prospects of mobility (allowing the truly gifted and hard working to reap the fruits of their efforts and talents), and current articles in the USA and European newspapers breath a sense of blocked mobility, this is a topical issue that will continue to receive attention in the near future. This broad research domain covers inequality and mobility between the generations, at marriage, and over the life course. It also relates to the consequences for inequality in life chances,
Following Ultee et al., Sociologie (2003). An alternative way of proceeding would have been to consider how interdisciplinary endeavours between the social sciences and history have evolved up until now. For surveys, see Abbot, History (1991). Skocpol, Vision (1984). Skocpol, Social History (1987). Steckel, Social Science History (2007). or Kok/Wouters, Virtual knowledge (2013, forthcoming). See also van der Linden/Lucassen, Prolegomena (1999).
17
236 G. Jones et al. such as health, and for lifestyles such as tastes in music. Let me give an example relating to intergenerational social mobility. The immediate intellectual origins of this research domain are rooted in modernisation theory.18 It predicts that as societies modernized, industrial employers increasingly recruited their personnel by reference to their individual merits or achievements rather than to those of their parents (ascription). That leads to a loosening of direct bonds between class of origin and destination, a process from ascription to achievement. In addition to industrialisation, educational expansion is often mentioned as a cause.19 The more a person, his or her parents, or the state invest in education, the more mobility there is. But there is a competing view, social reproduction theory, stressing that privileged groups use certain schools and other resources at their disposal to circumvent meritocracy.20 Because it has become increasingly difficult to place a child directly into a privileged position, an indirect compensation strategy of social reproduction is used.21 Total mobility rates after 1950 have been shown to vary both among and within countries, but not according to the level of industrialisation. Thus the debates shifted to variations in relative mobility not due to changes in occupational structure (notably the decline of the rather immobile group of farmers). Some researchers conclude that meaningful variations in relative mobility between countries are absent in the survey material, as are trends.22 Others, however, conclude that relative mobility grows by 1% per year.23 A long time horizon combined with measured variations of determinants in historical societies will better capture slow changes, and allow us to test better for changes that are non-linear and that do not appear in all regions at the same time. What actually drives mobility patterns is still unclear, certainly for the pre-survey era. Failure to take historical contexts into account might be a key explanation for the often contradictory results that have been found. Here, there is a task for long-term global social science history: to modify modernisation theory to accommodate the historical records in different parts of the world. 2.1.2. Rationalisation Rationalisation increasing efficiency in all parts of life the second research domain I will discuss, is a process which Weber saw as one of the main characteristics of Western societies since the Middle Ages. But surely it is now a global process. Weber considered rationalisation across a wide range of human activity, such as the arts, economy, scientific and technical progress, state formation, and bureaucracy.
18 Treiman, Industrialization (1970), and Blau/Duncan, American Occupational Structure (1976). 19 Treiman, Industrialization (1970). Treiman et al., Educational Expansion (2003). van Leeuwen, Social Inequality (2009). van Leeuwen/Maas, Historical Studies (2010). 20 Collins, Credential Society (1979). Bourdieu/Passeron, Reproduction in Education (1977). 21 Other confounding factors are professional organizations and trade unions. In a meritocratic view of the world, such institutions certify that a person has what skills are needed for a certain job, but they may function as institutional hindrances to newcomers. Political regimes might also matter in loosening or tightening the occupational bonds between parents and children, as do family systems and inheritance laws and practices. 22 Erikson/Goldthorpe, Constant Flux (1992). 23 Ganzeboom et al., Intergenerational Class Mobility (1989); there is no consensus, Breen, Social Mobility (2004).
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Coping with risks can be seen as part of the domain of rationalisation, arguably from the dawn of human history. While there is every reason to feel festive on the occasion of the Scandinavian Economic History Reviews jubilee, the risks that face us seem tremendous. Banks are failing, governments are having to step in, creating even more massive public debt, the electorate is becoming increasingly polarised, and the end of the euro is now being discussed as if it were a distinct possibility. Political, social, and economic risks dominate the news, momentarily driving environmental risks from the news hour. Is it too bold a prediction to suggest that from now on many more historical studies will be devoted to risk and risk control? Several general social science approaches to the study of risk may be discerned.24 Familiar to historians, at least those working in the fields of economics, demography and morbidity, is an approach that statisticians and policy-makers favour for presentday risks. It involves the estimation of the probability distribution associated with a certain risk, and the magnitude of the adverse effects of those risks. Geographers have long been interested in the spatial distribution of risks, and in linking those to variations in resources. Historical geographers can increasingly follow suit, due to the rise of historical Geographical Information Systems (GISs). Social psychologists analyse how humans estimate risks and choose a course of action when it is not feasible to estimate, even roughly, hazard probabilities or the magnitude of losses.25 Institutions may, incidentally, serve to make life simpler by creating predictable courses of action, as stressed by rational choice sociologists,26 and neo-institutional economic historians.27 Another research tradition focuses on how risk assessment, risk attribution, and risk behaviour spring from how we look at the world in terms of norms, values and ideologies.28 A pivotal theme in this approach is that even if, by some stroke of magic, we could estimate exactly all the losses and gains of all courses of action in the face of risk, there would never be one single best solution, that costbenefit analysis, for example, could single out. The best solution, in this view, depends on the social and cultural premises we start from.29 Here, history matters too. Enlarging the time span may greatly increase the availability of data. Long-term data may facilitate explanations as societies change, and the long-term data thus cover many different situations with regard to potential
24 Tierney, Critical Sociology (1999), 217 9. Beck, Risk Society (1992). Golding, Social and Programmatic History (1992). 25 In risk perception, humans act less as individuals and more as social beings who have internalized social pressures and delegated their decision-making processes to institutions. They manage as well as they do, without knowing the risks they face, by following social rules on what to ignore: institutions are their problem-simplifying devices, Douglas/Wildavsky, Risk (1982), 80. Boudon, Subjective Rationality (1989). Tversky/Kahneman, Framing of Decisions (1981), and the essays in Kahneman et al., Judgment (1982). 26 E.g. Schelling, Strategy (1960), 57 and 70. 27 Institutions reduce uncertainty by providing a structure to everyday life, North, Institutions (1990), 3 et passim. 28 Douglas/Wildavsky, Risk (1982). 29 While this approach might ring a bell with many historians, it is not one which has yet engendered a great many studies on risks in past societies. Perhaps historical studies on the decline of magic or on the interpretation of nature and natural disasters could be interpreted in this fashion. See, for example, Thomas, Religion (1971), and Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983). Praying, for that matter, can be considered a way of risk management. For early studies suggesting this, see Febvre, Pour lhistoire dun sentiment (1956), and Delumeau, Rassurer et prote ger (1989).
238 G. Jones et al. causes. In this respect it does not matter whether one uses some form of multivariate analysis or case comparisons. There has certainly been an interest in spatial variation, for example, in historical studies trying to explain the past rise of the West. Such studies often discuss East West differences in the occurrence of natural risks, such as diseases, earthquakes and flooding, before turning to other explanations.30 Historical studies of risk are the second candidate on the shortlist of global social science history.
2.1.3. Cooperation Cooperation is the third central theme in sociology. The journal Science even places the question How did cooperative behavior evolve? among the top 25 unresolved key questions across all fields of science.31 Why indeed do and did humans cooperate? Why do we not live in a situation of permanent conflict, given that we often value our own interests most? Paraphrasing the eighteenth-century protosociologist Mandeville, how do private vices often lead to public virtue?32 A key question for social science history is to explain what allowed for different degrees and forms of human cooperation in past societies, and to document which forms were more successful than others in certain situations? Why have collective goods been produced more by some groups, and in some societies, in the past than in others? Peace is an extreme example, but safety in general, welfare, health care and schooling are others. How did such public provisions come about? Social scientists have developed insights of use for historians.33 Olson pointed out that self-interested group members may attempt to enjoy, without contributing, the benefits of a collective arrangement from which they cannot be excluded (because exclusion is impossible or not feasible because of high costs). The existence of this free-rider problem leads to fewer or less efficient collective goods than is preferable, even for a self-interested group member. Solutions include third-party enforcement, perhaps by the state, and selective incentives, such as praise in response to cooperation or shaming in the case of free-riding.34 Axelrod demonstrated that in a repeated prisoners dilemma (where one has the option of achieving a collective solution that is superior) the most rewarding strategy is to start by cooperating and then do what your partner does to you.35 Cooperation may come about despite its costs if there is information on the partners past behaviour, and due to the shadow of the future in other words the expected duration of the relationship. Institutional arrangements providing such information, or such a time horizon, thus matter, as
See Jones, European Miracle (1981). Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Diamond/ Robinson, Using Comparative Methods (2010). 31 At place 16; it was, incidentally, the only question from the social sciences and humanities apart from Will Malthus continue to be wrong?, at 25. For the list in Science of July 2005, see http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/misc/webfeat/125th 32 Mandeville, Fable of The Bees (1714/1723). 33 The list of classic studies is, of course, longer. See, for example, Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990). See also recent studies on cooperative breeding, the notion that forms of human behaviour - such as family systems and mutual aid have evolved out of a relatively strong innate human drive to cooperate, Sear/Coall, How much does family matter? (2011). 34 Olson, Logic (1977). 35 Axelrod, Evolution (1984).
30
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they do when helping to coordinate ones behaviour with that of the partner. Interestingly, past cooperation thus fosters future cooperation; if a society has historically progressed along the road to greater cooperation, this may stimulate further success. In Europe, most individuals over the past few centuries have enjoyed some protection against hardship through mutual aid societies, philanthropic organisations, and, for more than a century now, through state social services dispensing taxpayers money. How have these various forms of human cooperation come about? And why have they taken on such different forms? To what degree, when, where, and why has there been a transition to a predominantly tax-based system?36 From a social science perspective, the situation before the compulsory welfare state is the more interesting. In the current era of downsizing welfare states, documenting and explaining philanthropy and mutual aid are likely to be pivotal themes for social science history. Philanthropy has a long history in most societies. Why? Why do some give to others who are neither friends nor family? Is it because of selective incentives, such as gaining status or making connections with elite members running charities? Is it in the hope of reaping heavenly interest? Or is it just for the warm glow that doing good brings? Can the historical track record on philanthropy elucidate how, and under what conditions, it can be organised in such a way as to maximise revenues, minimise costs, and optimise the effects on society? The social sciences have developed important insights that can usefully be tested for historical societies. A similar set of questions applies to organised mutual aid. Why are some historical societies better able to organise citizens into a group helping its needy members from shared funds to which the members contribute? How is it possible to organise such organised mutual aid, especially in view of the problems of moral hazards and adverse selection?37 Here there seems to be a self-strengthening effect: once a group is in place, the costs of preserving it diminish, and the longer the group exists the greater the trust that might be shown by prospective members.38
2.2. Research designs Having sketched the future of social history as global social science history in the three research domains of social inequality, rationalisation and cooperation, it is time to discuss research designs, including types of data and approaches to collaboration. If social history is seen as a branch of the social sciences, it is inspired by the formal research designs of the social sciences. Starting from a question, on an
See, for example, Alber, Vom armenhaus (1982). Lindert, Growing Public (2004); For my own research on charity, philanthropy, and mutual aid see van Leeuwen, Trade Unions (1997). Guilds (2012). Giving in Early Modern History (2012). van Leeuwen/Wiepking, National Campaigns (forthcoming). For a recent summary of the findings of philanthropic studies, see Bekkers/Wiepking, Literature Review (2011). 37 Akerlof, Market (1970). Arrow, Uncertainty (1971). Stiglitz, Economics (1988); for a discussion of social mechanisms to combat moral hazards, see Hechter, Principles (1987); for examples of the historical development of mutual aid societies globally, see van der Linden, Social Security (1996). 38 North, Institutions (1990), 60. Weisbrod, Nonprofit Economy (1988), 101, 156 7.
36
240 G. Jones et al. intriguing topic, theories are selected that propose testable answers or hypotheses, and these are put to a test, which allows us to prefer one theory rather than another, to modify a theory in the light of the results, or to accept it momentarily as the best currently available.39 Simple questions, incidentally, are often also those that can fruitfully be posed for a wide range of historical contexts, globally so to speak. A typical social science history research design allows for a replicable test and allows one to judge, preferably formally, which of a set of competing theories best fits the historical record. A plea for social science history is also a plea to proceed likewise. In some cases it might even be possible to mimic experimental research designs in the life sciences, using a varied historical record to compare societies where a particular event took place with different societies, identical in other respects, where it did not take place. The track record of history may then be seen as the laboratory of mankind, and the discipline of history becomes in a sense experimental.40 To the extent we can truly control for confounding influences by using an appropriate research design, we may be able to answer such questions as what effect did Napoleonic reforms have on economic growth, or, what effect did they have on social mobility. It is sometimes said that the historical record can be bedded by theory only if the bed is a Procrustes bed. You may recall the ancient villain Procrustes, who doubled as a smith and a bandit and made his victims fit his iron bed, by either cutting off excess limbs or pulling his victims apart until their length matched that of his bed. Such unhealthy practices gave Procrustes, and by extension the application of social science theory and methods to the historical record, a certain reputation. There are, indeed, differences between the humanities and the social sciences (and, for that matter, also among historians and among sociologists) in the appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of using general theories. There is one traditional disciplinary divide between history and sociology that merits attention. The traditional historical way of proceeding is to start with a description followed by an interpretation of the findings, whereas standard social science research starts by selecting theories yielding predictions for answers to the research questions. The traditional historical way of proceeding first describing and later explaining has its advantages, especially in exploratory research when the problem to be posed is not yet clear; it may help to formulate an interesting question optimally; it may also help to monitor unexpected historical findings otherwise perhaps unseen or not fully appreciated. However, the social science approach has its advantages too. To begin with a practical advantage, there is always a structured story to tell. Ones expectations might be met (theory confirmed), or the historical record might surprise us (theory rejected). Furthermore, it helps to connect ones particular research with that of others, notably when using broader, overarching theories that can shed light on our particular topic too. Thus it helps too to make social history more of a cumulative science. Finally, the true test of a theory is arguably its predictive power. The social sciences can be rather more a source of inspiration for social historians than a Procrustes bed.
Ultee et al., Sociologie (2003). Acemoglu et al., Ancien Re gime (2010); Diamond/Robinson, Comparative Methods (2010).
40 39
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The data one needs for social science history depend entirely on the questions asked and the hypotheses being tested. Even the limited set of examples given above makes it clear that the three research domains of social science history give rise to countless questions, and thus to the need for numerous types of data. For present purposes, it seems best to once again take a birds-eye view and discuss two general issues: data and collaboratories. One may distinguish three levels of historical data: individual, community and national. Individual-level data relate to an individual, and the household he or she lives in. Such data exist in many different shapes, sometimes offering abundant information; it is perhaps not surprising then that legislation protects living persons against excessive gathering and use of such data.41 Here the historian sometimes has a comparative advantage. Individual life courses in the past can be reconstructed using certificates of birth, marriage and death, fleshed out with census and tax data, conscription registers, land-register data, and data from a myriad of other sources.42 Important databases now exist covering various countries.43 Furthermore, attempts are underway to make such data comparable. Some of these datasets span the globe; most still relate to the West. If individuals and their families form the microcosm of our research, the nations they live in are the universe itself. Here, relevant historical data of many different kinds have been created or are in the process of being created, on political regimes, welfare arrangements, family systems, and much else.44 Both individual-level data and national data are invaluable for global social historians, but their creation and continuous dissemination sometimes present major challenges. The main challenge at present, however, is the creation of a middle level of data, on the communities individuals live in. Such data are in very short supply. And they matter in a substantive and statistical sense. Substantively, since for many purposes communities constitute a meaningful geographical area, the space historical actors live in and are most influenced by. Statistically, it means that the units that serve as a basis for comparison are not the over 190 countries currently in existence, but a manifold multiple. If, in a researchers utopia, we were to have relevant individual, community, and national data, we would still need to standardise these data. Here too, much has been done, is being done, and remains to be done. Vital registration data are usually fairly uniform anyhow. Our lives are, in a demographic sense, not as unique as we might think. We are born, named by our parents, die, and are buried, often by our family, and in between we have relationships and possibly children. The priest, the vicar and the civil servant duly note these events in relatively simple and uniform documents, and have done so for centuries across large parts of the globe, certainly in the West
41
Not that these data are not used today, but they are the preserve of intelligence agencies, states, banks, and other corporations, such as Facebook, and subject to privacy rules. Such rules do not usually apply for those long dead. 42 Kok, Principles (2007). 43 See note 53, see also the survey of historical databases with longitudinal microdata by K. Mandemakers and G. Alter, accessible at http://historicaldemography.net/documents/ questionaire_longitudinal_databases_balsac_version2.pdf 44 See notes 53 and 54. An interesting anthropological database is formed by the Murdoch Atlas, http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/drwhite/worldcul/atlas.htm, and the current reworking by Bolt, Long-Run Economic Development (2010).
242 G. Jones et al. and its former colonies. Still, even here, classification systems have had to be created to compare household structures.45 Important tasks for the near future include extending the available data geographically and temporally, and harmonising these. Currently, the geographical coverage of historical data is largely restricted to the Western world. To function better as input for a historical laboratory, extensions are needed to other parts of the globe. Most of the data we have relate to the period after 1800. An even longer time span is necessary. Thus data reaching back to encompass the early modern period are valuable. From a comparative point of view, historical data will be of little value if they cannot be made comparable. Extending datasets geographically and temporally exacerbates this problem. Thus we need to take great care to standardise and code data in a comparable way. We need historical international standardised community indicators. Another task is to find and apply suitable ways to analyse data at different geographical levels (individuals, families, communities, countries), where there is not only regional variation, but also temporal change differing by region. Fortunately, multilevel models now exist in the social sciences which allow one to decompose variations over various levels and over time.46 Although historical applications of these models are still few and far between,47 this will no doubt change fast. A felicitous consequence is that a problem that historians have long recognised the varying degree of historical change between various geographical levels and between political, social, cultural, economic and demographic processes48 may be alleviated by the use of these models. Creating truly comparative data for global social science history is a task not easily undertaken by individuals. It often involves a dedicated team of researchers working over a long period. A new way to organise research globally is through collaboratories, with collaborators in different parts of the globe working together through an Internet-based platform functioning as a virtual laboratory.49 Researchers working on a common theme share their information, discuss problems, and document these discussions using a dedicated Internet space. Such collaboratories are instrumental in creating social science history across the globe.50 An early example of a collaboratory is the History of Work website, underpinning HISCO, a historical international standard coding system for occupations. What income and wealth are to economists and economic historians, occupations are to sociologists and social historians. Occupations form the DNA of social science history. They determine life chances, express lifestyles, embody both economic and cultural capital and indicate social status. Nearly every adult, past or present, has
45
E.g. the househould classification systems by Laslett and Hamel. The priest, the vicar and the civil servant may note events duly but not always in a neutral way or uniform e.g. in the case of illegitimate children, see e.g. Szreter et al., Categories (2004). 46 See Snijders/Bosker, Multilevel Analysis (1999). 47 E.g. Zijdeman, Like My Father Before Me (2009). 48 Braudel, La Me diterrane e (1949); Braudel, Civilisation mate rielle (1967 1979). 49 See, for example, de Moor/van Zanden, Do ut des (2008), and Dormans/Kok, Alternative Approach (2010). An example of a collaboratory in the domain of cooperation is http://www. collective-action.info, which is used in de Moors Common Rules project, http://www. collective-action.info/projects_ERCGrant 50 Which is difficult, as Buchmann/Hannum, Education (2001) concluded.
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one although the sources may be silent and they form the common coin of comparison of social status between individuals over time and space, if only they could be made comparable. HISCO serves that purpose, namely to silence the Babylonian confusion of millions of occupational titles across periods, regions and languages. It is collaborative in two senses: it builds on a contemporary global coding scheme for contemporary societies with a proven track record, and its creation was a collaborative effort. For more than a decade now a group of social science historians have been collaborating to build an Internet-accessible database for historical occupational titles coded into HISCO, incrementally expanding, and with the opportunity to discuss problems and solutions.51 It now contains comparably coded occupations from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.52 Work is under way in Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Russia, the Philippines and elsewhere.53 It is a social science history classification connecting past and present, and allowing for comparisons. International comparative measures of continuous social status or discrete social classes in the past are now available based on HISCO. This allows for a comparative analysis of what is arguably the single most important variable in the social sciences: occupation. Armed with such tools, a great many social science history questions of a comparative nature are now being tackled on the global variety and transition of labour relations from 1500 to the present, for example; on historical life courses; and on strikes in the past.54 Such tools help to make social history both global history and social science history.
2.3. Conclusion I have made a plea for the future of social history as global social science history, inspired by research domains and designs from the social sciences, sociology in particular. As regards the research domains, the natural habitat of global social science history is arguably formed by the three broad fields of cooperation, inequality and rationalisation. Although most of the relevant datasets still come from the Western world, more and more global datasets are being created. Most still relate either to nations and similar large geographical entities or to individuals; few relate to communities. There are noble tasks for social history here: to extend geographical (and temporal) coverage and to gather community-level data especially.
51
It is one of the collaboratories hosted by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. 52 http://historyofwork.iisg.nl; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hisco with files on https://collab.iisg.nl/ group/hisco/documents 53 See, for example, for Russia http://occupations.asu.ru. HISCO codes are used in various collaborative projects to harmonize data. See, for example, the European Historical Population Samples Network (EHPS-Net), http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networkingprogrammes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net. html; the Mosaic project on Recovering Surviving Census Records to Reconstruct Population, Economic, and Cultural History, http://www.censusmosaic.org; the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP), http://www.nappdata.org/napp; the CLIO-INFRA project, http://www. clio-infra.eu; a project at the Centre for Global Economic History at Utrecht University to reconstruct economic inequalities over the past two centuries globally, http://www.cgeh.nl 54 https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelations; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hsn; https://collab.iisg.nl/ web/labourconflicts
244 G. Jones et al. Collaboratories are a way to create, document, and disseminate such data, engage in collaborative research projects, and to create the tools that are needed for this. A social science history approach may lead to interesting questions, well-tested theories, and well-informed, and still readable, writing on the past. A singular advantage is that the global historical record provides a greater variety of testing grounds for social science theories certainly with regard to slow or path-dependent processes. Some may be weary of my plea for a social science history. Others before me have sung songs of praise for social science history, and I know that the optimistic atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s has given way to a certain resignation. But I take this as a healthy sign of growing up rather than as something undermining ones faith in social science history. Some 30 years ago Conzen reviewed American quantitative historical studies dealing with social mobility. She lamented the lack of context: too often there simply has not remained sufficient time or energy to consult the literary sources that would have added depth and local texture, and this, she remarked, has led to a certain arid quality according to critics. She noted that much of the work has been additive rather than cumulative. Still, she expressed hope that greater sensitivity to limitations in evidence, and greater statistical and theoretical sophistication may yet redeem its initial promise. Conzen concluded that:
the answer [. . .] is not less quantification, but [. . .] better quantification, more awareness of the limitations of the data, greater willingness to move beyond descriptive statistics to multivariate explanatory models where appropriate, and greater attention to explicit theory in posing questions and interpreting findings.55
The future of social history as global social science history does exactly that.
3. The future of economic history (by Stephen Broadberry, London School of Economics) One of the advantages of being an economic historian is that under normal circumstances you are not called upon to predict the future. Sadly today I cannot restrict myself to predicting the past. This is slightly unnerving because I recently had to evaluate long run predictions made by economists concerning the future, and uncovered some interesting examples of people being spectacularly wrong. Perhaps I should not be too specific here, but some cases are very well known, such as Paul Samuelsons claim in the 1967 edition of his textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis,56 that the Soviet Union would overtake the USA in terms of real GNP between 1977 and 1995. Each subsequent edition moved the date further into the future until the comparison was dropped in 1985. In an attempt to minimise the risk of an equally spectacular forecast failure, I decided that I would consult with other economic historians, and I will report on the results of this survey in due course. Let me begin, however, with the general outlook for the subject.
55 56
Conzen, Quantification (1983), quotes from pages 664, 672, 655 and 676. Samuelson, Economics (1967).
Scandinavian Economic History Review 3.1. General outlook
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Probably like many of you, I have been present at many camp-fire talks where economic historians say they are unloved and worried about the future of the discipline. Recently, however, there has been a more optimistic mood. As Barry Eichengreen said in his Presidential Address at the Economic History Association meetings in Boston in September 2011, This has been a good crisis for economic history.57 But there is more to it than that. Even before the crisis, there was a renewed interest in a number of areas, some of which I shall discuss in the next section. So right now, I think the discipline is in better shape than it has been for as long as I can remember. But what will it look like in 10 or 20 years time? 3.2. Topics
I indicated in the introduction that I had surveyed colleagues for their opinions on the future of economic history, so let me now tell you what they said. The first question I asked was What do you think will be the most important topic in ten years time? I can now report that there was complete agreement on this, with everybody giving exactly the same answer. Absolutely everybody said that the most important topic will be the one on which they are currently working. Perhaps I should not have been surprised by this. After all, people tend to work on what they think is most interesting, and if that topic is not popular now, it must just be because other people have not yet realised how interesting it really is. So it is just a matter of time before they do. I will try to guard against this bias, but you have been warned and know to apply a suitable discount factor to what I am going to say. I think there are a number of topics which lie behind the recent resurgence of interest in economic history and which we can expect to read more about in the next decade or so. 3.2.1. Financial crises This is no surprise, since I have already mentioned Barry Eichengreens quip about economic history having a good crisis. But interestingly, the Economic History Review had a special issue on Finance, Investment and Risk in 2009, where the editors pointed out that financial history had been a growth area even before the crisis had broken.58 So maybe economic historians are good forecasters after all! 3.2.2. The great divergence The debate over the Great Divergence of living standards between Europe and Asia, started by Pomeranz,59 has had a phenomenal effect on economic history. This is another area where the Economic History Review has had a special issue.60 However, as well as shedding new light on European economic history, this debate has turned the economic history of Asia into a major growth area in its own right, not just in comparison with Europe. A new Asian Historical Economics Society was launched
57 58
Eichengreen, Economic History (2012), 289. Humphries/Hindle, Editors Introduction (2009), 1. 59 Pomeranz, Great Divergence (2000). 60 Broadberry/Hindle, Editors Introduction (2011).
246 G. Jones et al. in Beijing in May 2010, mirroring the European Historical Economics Society established in the early 1990s, which has done so much to assist with the emergence of a new comparative approach to European economic history. 3.2.3. New institutional economic history New institutional economic history has had a phenomenal impact on the discipline in the last couple of decades, and continues to exercise a strong influence. Douglass North winning the Nobel Prize in Economics was a tremendous boost, and there are now many strands.61 Furthermore, this is one way in which economic history has had a major impact on economics, balancing out the flow of ideas from economics to economic history. 3.2.4. Anthropometric history Anthropometric history has also been phenomenally successful and has enabled quantitative analysis of living standards in societies where previously only speculation was possible, as well as providing alternative interpretations of economic history in more established areas.62 3.2.5. Historical national accounting Historical national accounting has begun to provide a framework for comparing societies over a much longer time period than used to be the case. Estimates of per capita GDP based on hard data rather than guesstimates now reach back to the thirteenth century for some western economies, and work is in hand for a number of Asian economies, including Japan, India and China.63 3.2.6. Environmental history The environment has always been studied at least implicitly by agricultural historians, but environmental history is now being treated much more seriously by economic historians.64 You might want to apply the own topic bias discount factor to some of these areas, but they surely cannot all be dismissed on those grounds. 3.3. Methodology One issue which has generated a lot of controversy over the years is methodology, and whether economic history should be located in Economics or History. I always
61 North et al., Violence (2009). Greif, Institutions (2006). Acemoglu/Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012). 62 Steckel, Heights (2009). Floud et al., Changing Body (2011). 63 Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth (2011). Malanima, Long Decline (2011). lvarez-Nogal/Prados de la Escosura, Rise and Fall, 2012. Broadberry/Gupta, India A (2012). Bassino et al., Japan (2012). Guan/Li, Chinese Economic Growth (2012). Broadberry, S./Klein, A., Aggregate and per capita GDP in Europe (2012). 64 Campbell, Nature (2010). Kander/Lindmark, Energy Consumption (2004).
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think the tension between the two approaches was best put by Schumpeter, who noted that:
There are such things as historical and theoretical temperaments. That is to say, there are types of minds that take delight in all the colors of historical processes and of individual cultural patterns. There are other types that prefer a neat theorem to everything else. We have use for both. But they were not made to appreciate one another.65
I agree with Schumpeter that we have need for both, and the outlook seems to me to be better now than for a long time in both Economics and History Departments. Many economists perceive the need for economic history after the crisis of 2008, not least those working in central banks, who were left high and dry by theoretical models which did not even include a banking sector. The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England were shocked to see people queuing outside Northern Rock in 2007, and to realise that the last bank run in England had occurred in 1878.66 What had seemed like arcane historical knowledge suddenly became a crucial gap in economists education. And rudely awakened by the intrusion of material reality, some historians are beginning to recognise the possibility that the cultural turn may have gone a bit too far.67 These developments surely provide opportunities for economic historians in the disciplines of economics and history. In addition to that, of course, many economic historians have been employed in business schools and in other parts of academia, most obviously including departments of sociology geography and politics. Furthermore, there are many distinguished historians of technology in science departments. The diverse programme at the recent World Economic History Congress in Stellenbosch68 is a reminder of the breadth and depth of the discipline of economic history. We should embrace economic historians from diverse backgrounds and celebrate that diversity.
3.4. Global and local economic history One of the most important changes to economic history during my career has been its globalisation. When I started, almost everyone teaching economic history in the UK university was British and the majority of courses were on Britain. As the student body at British universities became more international, and as the faculty also internationalised, it is not surprising that the focus changed. However, it is important that with this globalisation we do not lose the traditional strengths of economic history as a discipline. And this has to involve deep specific knowledge of local economies. In an essay published in a book to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Economic History Society, as I grappled with these issues, I suggested that the economic history of the future needed to be both global and local.69 We have to write economic history of particular economies, but within
65 66
Schumpeter, History (1954), 815. Darling, Back from the Brink (2011). 67 Suny, Back and Beyond (2002). 68 http://www.wehc2012.org/programme.php 69 Broadberry, Economic History (2001).
248 G. Jones et al. a framework that enables international comparisons. We have to be able to fit the experience of a particular economy within the global economy. An example, I have sometimes used is the approach to protectionism in the 1930s. It is not difficult to find individual country studies which praise protectionist policies as helping to lower unemployment. But if you consider all these economies together, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that protectionism raised unemployment. Whilst people wrote local economic history, often in their own languages, it was easy to miss the global perspective. Some of you may have read the recent 2 volume Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, edited by myself and Kevin ORourke.70 More of you have probably written it. The reason I mention it is only partly to get some cheap advertising. I also mention it as an example of combining the local and global. We wanted to look at European economic history thematically rather than by country, as had been the norm in the past. But to ensure that we did not lose the detailed country knowledge, we recruited typically three authors for each chapter, covering northwest Europe, southern Europe, and central and eastern Europe.
3.5. Re-integrating economic history Something which I think contributed to the difficulties of economic history and those camp-fire talks in the early days of my career was the excessive specialisation of the discipline. Greg Clark wrote in a review on EH.Net in 1997:
No one has published a paper yet entitled The Heights of Norwegians Inferred from a Sample of 23 File Clerks, 1906 1908: A Quantile Bend Estimate, but given enough time they will.71
One problem with this excessive specialisation was that nobody could put together the advances being made in particular regions or periods without getting their heads chopped off metaphorically (often by Greg Clark, of course). This unsatisfactory situation tempted some economists to write on historical themes such as long-run growth and development but without making much reference to the economic history literature. Recent work in this vein would include that work of Acemoglu and Robinson on institution and Galor on unified growth theory.72 I do not say this to criticise those authors, but rather to point out the gap that we as economic historians have left. In fact, I have to note how useful this literature was in recruiting students to the economic history options while I was working in an Economics Department at the University of Warwick. However, at least partly in response to those developments, economic historians have also begun to work on economic growth and development over periods stretching across the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and there now seems to be quite a bit of engagement between theory and history in this area. The main lesson to be learned from this is that if economic historians get too specialised so that they no longer seem to address the big issues, then someone else will.
70 71
Broadberry/ORourke, Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (2011). http://eh.net/book_reviews/dynamic-society-exploring-sources-global-change 72 Acemoglu/Robinson, Why Nations Fail? (2012). Galor, From Stagnation to Growth (2005).
Scandinavian Economic History Review 3.6. Conclusion
249
I want to end with a story, which was told to me by Leonid Borodkin, who heard it at a meeting of Russian economic historians in the Soviet era, covertly expressing dissent in the presence of KGB officers. There is no political subtext here, but I think it, nevertheless, still captures the essence of the problem that we face in writing economic history:
There was once a king who decided that it was time for his daughter to marry. The princess was beautiful, so had many suitors. The king decided that any young man who wanted to marry the princess would have to prove his worth by painting a picture of the king, and he stipulated that the picture needed to be accurate but also to make him look attractive. The thing which made this difficult was the fact that the king had sustained a badly twisted leg and had lost an eye in battle, and really didnt look very attractive at all. The first young man to put himself forward was the court artist who was sure that he could use his skills to win the hand of the princess. He went away and a couple of days later came back with his painting. The king looked at it and was at first sight flattered to see a picture of an extremely attractive man with two straight legs and two fully functioning eyes. But very quickly he became angry as he realised that the painting was not at all accurate. Off with his head said the king and the court artist was led away to be executed. The next young man to put himself forward was the court physician, who thought that he could use his medical knowledge to paint a very accurate picture of the king. He went away and a couple of days later came back with his painting. The king looked at it and saw a man with a twisted leg and one eye. He noted that it was accurate but was annoyed that he didnt look at all attractive. Off with his head said the king and the court physician was led away to be executed. Word soon got around that this was a difficult and dangerous assignment, and there were no more suitors for a while. Then one day, a previously anonymous young man put himself forward. His painting showed the king in a shooting party with a rifle. He was kneeling on one leg, so that his twisted leg was not visible, and he had one eye closed as he was looking along the barrel of the rifle, taking aim. The king looked very attractive in this sporting pose, and he had to admit that it was physically accurate. The young man had succeeded in painting a picture that was both accurate and attractive, so the king had to allow him to marry the princess. The king then asked the young man what his profession was and was surprised to be told that he was an economic historian. How did you know how to paint a picture that was both accurate and attractive? asked the king. Well that is what we economic historians have to do all the time, said the young man.
So I leave you with that message. If economic history is to thrive in the future, we have to describe economies in ways that are both accurate and attractive. Acknowledgements
Van Leeuwen is grateful to Jan Kok and members of the audience present at the celebration of 60 years Scandinavian Economic History Review for their comments, and to Chris Gordon for polishing this text.
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Scandinavian Economic History Review

The future of economic, business, and social history

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The future of economic, business, and social history

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Jones/Zeitlin, Introduction (2008), 4.

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Musacchio, Experiments (2009).

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Gras, Business History (1934), 388. See http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory.

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Jones/Khanna Bringing History (back) (2006).

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Scandinavian Economic History Review 3.1. General outlook

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