Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T07:13:40.268Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Use and Misuse of Price History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Earl J. Hamilton
Earl J. Hamilton
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 4 , Supplement S1 , December 1944 , pp. 47 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1944

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Since nothing could be gained from the wanton destruction of old account books, they suffered little from the type of warfare that prevailed prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Wars and revolutions have not prevented Mexico from having, in the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, the leading economic archives in the New World. Documents in the archives of Belgium, “the cockpit of Europe,” enabled Henri Pirenne and his students to enrich and revise medieval economic history. By far the best price records extant are in Italy—the battleground of Europe since the Middle Ages. I am willing to hazard the guess, based on a partial exploration, that the richest price data in any archive of western Europe are in the account books deposited in the Archivio di Stato at Florence, which have never been used by a price historian. Since they are housed in the same building with the Galleria di Arte e Uffici, apparently they have survived the battle of Florence. But with aerial bombardment, long-range artillery, robot bombs, and total war— undiscriminating in their selection of victims—historical records run great risks. Too voluminous and unappreciated to find refuge in underground vaults, price records now face greater hazards in total war than do diplomatic and political archives, which are subject to the triple danger of transportation in wartime, destruction by the vanquished, and robbery by the victor.

2 “Del valore e della proporzione de' metalli monetati,” Custodi, Pietro, Scrillori classier italiani di economia politico, Parte moderoa, XIII (Milan, 1804), 335–54Google Scholar.

3 Jevons, W. S., A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold Ascertained and Its Social Effects Set Forth (London, 1863), pp. 15–47Google Scholar.

4 Memoranda on “Measurement of Change in Value of Money” presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1887–89 and reprinted in Papers Relating to Political Economy (London, 1925), 1, 195 ffGoogle Scholar.

5 Price historians have not infrequently discovered, to their dismay, at the end of a quarter century or more of assiduous labor that previously compiled index numbers based on the quotations of a very few articles—sometimes only two.or three—haphazardly thrown together from heterogeneous sources for widely scattered years have disclosed the trend of prices almost as accurately as their laboriously constructed indices from homogeneous series embracing monthly or quarterly quotations for dozens of commodities.

6 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Cannan ed.; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 1, 192–200.

7 Ricardo, David, Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency (3d ed.; London, 1819), p. 15Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Viner, Jacob, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1937), pp. 126–27Google Scholar.

9 “British Prices and Business Cycles, 1779–1850,” The Review of Economic Statistics, V (1923), 223–51Google Scholar; “Financial and Monetary Policy of Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, XXXVIII (1923–1924), 214–33, 397–439Google Scholar.

10 Sayers, R. S., “The Question of the Standard in the Eighteen-Fifties,” Economic History (A Supplement to The Economic Journal), II (1930–33), 575–601Google Scholar; Jevons, Serious Fall, pp. 65–7.

11 Misusing price history in an effort to discredit the Warren-Pearson gold-purchase-plan, Rufus Tucker argues that the gold discoveries did not cause prices to rise in Great Britain and manipulates his data in an effort to prove his point. Rufus S. Tucker, “The Myth of 1849,” Appendix A, Hardy, Charles O., Is There Enough Gold? (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1936), PP. 179–93Google Scholar.

12 Cassel, Gustav, The Theory of Social Economy (London: T. F. Unwin, 1923), II, 438–58Google Scholar.

13 Cassel, Gustav, Money and Foreign Exchange after 1914 (London: Constable and Company, 1922), pp. 33–51Google Scholar.

14 Aftalion, Albert, Monnaie, prix et change: expériences récentes et théorie (Paris: Société Anonyme du Recueil Sirey, 1927), pp. 128–86, 250–89Google Scholar; L'Or et sa distribution mondiale (Paris: Dalloz, 1932), pp. 118–51Google Scholar.

15 Elsas, M. J., “Price Data from Munich, 1500–1700,” Economic History (A Supplement to The Economic Journal), III (1934–37), 76–8Google Scholar.

16 Archivo General de Indias, Contratacion, 39–2–1/8, 39–2–2/9.

17 Wealth of Nations, Cannan ed., II, 396.

18 Pp. 1–16.

19 Pp. 56–7.

20 In his study of real wages in the United States from 1890 to 1926, Paul H. Douglas was not able to include the cost of housing as a component of living costs. Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), pp. 39–40Google Scholar.

21 Beveridge, William Henry, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1939), p. xxviGoogle Scholar.

22 “American Research in Price History,” Studies in Economics and Industrial Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), pp. 95–6Google Scholar.

23 The Industrial History of England (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), pp. 310–13Google Scholar.

24 For example, the index numbers of prices under the greenbacks, constructed by Wesley C. Mitchell, have often been used in this way. See Dewey, Davis R., Financial History of the United States (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1936), pp. 292–94Google Scholar; Barrett, Don C., The Greenbacks and Resumption of Specie Payments, 1862–1879 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp. 72–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Prices and Wages in England, p. vii.

26 Hamilton, Earl J., “Prices and Wages at Paris under John Law's System,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, LI (1936–37), 42–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Prices and Wages in Southern France under John Law's System,” Economic History (A Supplement to The Economic Journal), III (1934–37). 441–61Google Scholar.

27 Schmoller, Gustav, Die historische Lohnbewegung von 1300–1000 und ihre Ursachen (Berlin, 1902), p. 4Google Scholar; Elsas, M. J., Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland (Leyden. 1936), I, 728, 731–35Google Scholar.

28 Hamilton, Earl J., “The Decline of Spain,” The Economic History Review, VIII (1937–38), 171–74Google Scholar.

29 “Les Paradoxes du Seigneur de Malestroict,” in Branchu, Jean-Yvesle, Écrits notables sur la monnaie (Paris, 1934), I, 57–66Google Scholar; “Paradoxes inédits du Seigneur de Malestroit touchant les monnoyes,” Einaudi, Luigi, ed., Colezione di scritti ineditti o rari di economisti (Turin, 1937), III, 99–126Google Scholar.

30 Hauser, Henri, ed., La Response de Jean Bodin a M. de Malestroit (Paris, 1932), pp. 22–32Google Scholar.

31 Means, Gardner C., “Industrial Prices and Their Relative Inflexibility,”Senate Document, No. 13, 74th Congress, 1st SessionGoogle Scholar; Tucker, Rufus S., “The Reasons for Price Rigidity,” The American Economic Review, XXVIII (1938), 41–54Google Scholar.

32 “The Nature and Meaning of Rigid Prices,” The Journal of Political Economy, XLV (1937), 651–61Google Scholar.