Chronicle of Higher Education December 1, 2014
The Fall and Rise of Economic History
By Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy
Irritated, one shoos it out the door, and almost immediately it climbs
in through the window. Without the concept of capitalism, the late
French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote, it was impossible to study
economic history. But the reverse is equally true: We can’t understand
capitalism without economic history.
Once a mainstay of history departments, economic history was, with
historians’ complicity, seized in the mid-20th century by economists who
sucked the culture and chronology out of it and turned it into an
obscure province of mathematical formulas. There it languished. The
field became increasingly uncool. By the 1990s, to be a materialist in
the age of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu was to be
deterministic—in other words, a dinosaur. So economic history further
retreated to economics departments, where many self-described economic
historians had already been gathering under the banner of the new
economic history.
The past decade has exposed some fundamental problems with that division
of disciplinary labor. The now-old new economic history either fizzled
or has become so technical, so unrecognizable to anyone who cannot wield
its finely tuned analytics, that few historians can engage with it.
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer economics departments now consider
history—including the history of economics itself—a relevant domain of
disciplinary inquiry, with many of the top departments having eliminated
economic history from their programs altogether.
Lately historians have started to take it back, spurred by a demand to
better understand the roller coaster of capitalist life, particularly
how inequality and globalization factored into the recession. The
economic crisis pushed courses on the history of capitalism to the top
of the charts in history departments around the country, even making
front-page news in The New York Times. With conferences, courses, and
book series, the history of capitalism, one of the few areas of inquiry
where job postings are growing, is on the verge of becoming an
established subfield. The runaway success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in
the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press) raised even higher
the political and intellectual profile of capitalism and its history.
In this way, a prodigal-son subfield has returned. Historians do not
leave political history to political scientists, or social history to
sociologists. Why should economic history be left to economists,
especially when they ignore it? Besides, the humanities might well
benefit from the revival of a field that once served as a bridge to the
social sciences.
The history of capitalism performs heroic service, but bereft of a
broader grasp of the history of economic life, it can’t provide deep
insights into the makings of systems of production, circulation, and
distribution. Capitalism is a latecomer in that story, and, like all
latecomers, more reliant on its precursors and alternatives than its
apostles and critics like to admit. There can be no history of
capitalism without an economic history near its explanatory core.
Like democracy or modernity, capitalism is a historical problem,
specific to time and place. If only because it eludes easy definition,
it must be studied from different perspectives, with different
historical methodologies. There are social histories of democracy,
intellectual histories of democracy, and, of course, political histories
of democracy. The economy could be the subject of similar multiple
approaches. But it is not. It has been treated as a realm apart.
This is a surprising state of affairs. Looking back to 1960 or even
1980, one would not have predicted the eclipse of economic history. From
the Progressive Age (1900 to 1930) onward, it was almost de rigueur to
proclaim the material roots of everything and to tie one’s research to
the broad spirit of reform. Capitalism’s postwar golden age was good
for economic history, as it was for the world economy. The pairing of
social and economic history was the fallback working methodology of
many professional historians. The works of Eric Hobsbawm, Thomas C.
Cochran, and Braudel himself were touchstones. Even books by the first
generation of new economic historians, such as Robert Fogel and Stanley
Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (Little,
Brown and Company, 1974), were read and reckoned with by noneconomic
historians. Surely globalization, the ascendance of China, and the rise
of Apple should have continued to fuel the field.
A confluence of several forces broke things up. By the 1960s, economic
history was increasingly associated with development economics, at a
time when that field was seen as running out of steam. It often took the
likes of Alexander Gerschenkron and R.H. Tawney as departure points and
