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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Our conference today on comparative economic history is in some clanger of rushing into the wide-open spaces of ambiguity, for the term is new, and to agree too quickly on its meaning and implications may not even be desirable. In order to avoid engaging in a mere game of definitions, this paper will deal first with three general types of comparison in relation to their bearing on problems of evidence. It will then review some of the chief uses to which these types of comparison have been put in building up our body of knowledge about Western economic history. The survey will close with particular reference to our own preindustrial stages of economic growth, when western Europe was, in our uncomplimentary phrase, an underdeveloped or backward area.
1 This summary of Bloch's views is based on his long series of critical reviews in the journal that he and Lucien Febvre founded in 1929, now known as the Annales, and on his article on comparative history, published in the Revue de Synthése, 1928 and translated in , Lane and , Riemersma, “Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1953), pp. 494–521Google Scholar.
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8 Ibid., Part I, Sec. II.
9 Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, Book VI, ch. ii.
10 Adam Ferguson, Civil Society, Part III, Sec. I.
11 Ibid., Part V, Sec. III.
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