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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Economic history, as a combination of two disciplines, has had a rather curious evolution. This is indicated both by looking at its checkered academic development in the United States, and by contrasting its evolution in the United States with that in England and elsewhere. Whereas in England and most European countries economic history is regarded as a separate discipline, with its own departments and professors, such an academic separation does not exist in the United States. Here, reflecting the dual nature of the subject, economic historians can be found in either history departments or in economics departments, and the nature of academic specialization often means they teach two distinct student bodies, with infrequent communication across disciplinary lines. Separatist tendencies have seemed more pronounced in the past two decades, when there was a marked change in the study of economic history in the United States, a change that has also affected other sub disciplines of history: quantification and model-building have spread into many areas of historical study. But in some measure this movement in economics reflects the recent tendency for economic historians to come from economics, rather than from history departments. Since the causes of the change seem, in part, peculiar to the United States, what I say about recent tendencies in the field may not fully reflect developments in other countries, although there seem to be similar trends emerging, albeit with some lags, in England and elsewhere in Europe.
An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the Symposium: Blueprint for Interdisciplinary Regional History sponsored by the Landon Project, University of Western Ontario. I benefited from the discussion and comments at the Symposium, particularly those of José Igartua. Robert Gallman made very helpful stylistic and substantive criticisms of the first draft, and I was also aided by the comments of Thomas Cochran, Gary Hawke, Donald McCloskey, and Harold Woodman. This broad survey is meant to describe some basic tendencies, and there is no intent to provide a working bibliography of work in economic history.
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16 It is these assumptions relating to alternative use of resources which underlie the revisionist work on, e.g., the importance of the railroad to United States economic development, the role of foreign investment in the late-nineteenth-century British economy, and the contribution of the slave trade to British industrialization. The choice of which model is relevant is not solely one of tastes, and examination of the patterns of wage and price change, unemployment rates, etc., can suggest the extent to which opportunity costs must be considered.
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23 For a recent survey of the literature on this topic, see Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” in Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History, vol. 1 (Greenwich, 1976), 69-123.Google Scholar
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29 This clearly understates the amount of primary data used in the earlier work of “new economic historians,” as noted in Albert Fishlow and Robert W. Fogel, “Quantitative Economic History,” 19, and it may be only that this aspect has recently become more publicly conspicuous.
30 For descriptions of this project, see Foust, James D., The Yeoman Farmer and Westward Expansion of U.S. Cotton Production (New York, 1975)Google Scholar and Parker, William N., ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington, 1970).Google Scholar
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