The subject of the course that I shall offer this year at the Collège de France is the economy and society—or, better, the traditional ecodemography of the world long gone—as they “functioned,” if one may use this term, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, or, more precisely, from 1300-1320 to 1720-1730. Forsake of convenience, this world will be de-limited by the present frontiers of France—a decision of pure form with no implication of tri-color or fleur-de-lys. We shall be concerned with about 15 to 20 million people in every period, although there will be long intervals between actual dates. To be sure, a similar study could be carried out (and probably will be if it has not been already) among our neighbors: Germany, Italy, without a doubt Spain, but possibly not the British Isles. One of the paradoxes of such an undertaking is that the Kingdom of England, where The World We Have Lost was first defined with such penetrating insight, is of all western countries the one where that world was the least typical and the least stable.

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

Migration, social mobility, and social change are questions that have aroused animated international research debate during recent years. Throughout this discussion, migration often is found to be the triggering mechanism for upward social mobility and social change in the life cycle of individuals. The connection between long-distance migration and social progress in an expanding labor market is thus an important one. In American investigations, a significant amount of social mobility, both upward and downward, has been registered between roughly defined strata in the society. With a corresponding social structure in three Swedish cities investigated in the so-called “Three City Study,” almost the same results are evident.

In Part I of this study, our focus was on the bases of crime in Imperial Germany during the 1880s—the “take-off” stage of German industrial development. In Part II, we will extend the time dimension of our analysis to include the period of growth between the 1880s and 1914, and we will also broaden the scope of the issues and explanatory variables to be considered.

In many ways, German society in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I represents an excellent historical context for a study of the impact of urban-industrial development on crime. The German criminologist Aschaffenburg notes: “The last twenty years [1885-1905] of German criminality are especially suitable for such an analysis, because no transfiguring upheavals have taken place; the years having been marked by a great economic and cultural advance.” German society during this time enjoyed a period of international peace unknown since the years between 1815 and 1848. This period of relative tranquility allows the scholar a chance to analyze the problem of crime in its relations to socioeconomic conditions without having to control for the serious disturbing factors induced by war. La belle époque, as this period has been referred to by contemporary historians, also graced Germany with a respite from the bellicose domestic turmoil that it suffered in the past century. The movement for national unification had finally been completed, and the struggle for social reform had changed from the vitriolic confrontations of the watershed years of 1830 and 1848 to a peaceful and evolutionary, if no less manifest, nature.

Douglass North’s The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860, while not the most controversial of the works of “new economic historians” in the 1960s, was among the first and was probably the most widely used of any of these in undergraduate history courses. In addition to its widespread use—possibly the first introduction of many history students to an economic approach to their subject—it framed, if not originated, a number of hypotheses about the process of American economic growth and about various specific relationships which have been and remain the basis of empirical work. In examining its importance the question is not just whether on certain specific points North was right, but also whether the book generated important hypotheses for empirical testing. In these latter regards here clearly was an important book, and, while it may seem to be incomplete or to fail on some specific issues, we should add that even now it is often unclear what the “right” answers might be.