This is a short list of book
reviews that I think support an argument that I have been making for a while
now about the relationship between economic and historical research.
Pseudoerasmus recently brought the
Oakes review to may attention and spoke very highly of it. I agree that it is an outstanding review. I also think that together
with several recent reviews it supports my argument that critiques of historians
of capitalism by economic historians are not based on any fundamental
methodological difference between economics and history. Instead, economic
historians have largely been criticizing historians of capitalism for their
failure to follow traditional standards of historical scholarship in their treatment
of both primary and secondary sources. The first two are reviews of works by
historians of capitalism by historians, who raise many of the same concerns
that economists have. The second two are positive reviews by economists of recent
work by historians associated with the history of capitalism.
Oakes reviews
Walter Johnson , River
of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom . Cambridge :
Harvard University Press , 2013. 561 pp. $35.00.
Edward E. Baptist , The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism .
New York : Basic Books , 2014. 528 pp. $35.00.
Sven Beckert , Empire
of Cotton: A Global History . New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 2014. 640 pp.
$35.00.
Calvin Schermerhorn , The
Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 . New
Haven : Yale University Press , 2015. 352 pp. $65.00.
Coclanis reviews
Sven Beckert and Seth Rothman (eds.), Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Here is Oakes take on Baptist’s claims about the economic
impact of slavery.
Baptist's most extravagant and least
persuasive claim is that all of the prosperity of the American
economy derived from slavery. There's barely a sentence in his book that could
justify such a claim, however, and for a very obvious reason: Any study aimed
at calculating the impact of slavery for northern economic development would
not be a book about slavery at all. It would have to be a book about the North.
At the very least, The Half Has Never Been Told would require
a second half that examines the process of economic development in the free
states and demonstrates precisely when and how that process depended on
southern slavery. That will not be easy, at least not based on the
extraordinary scholarship of the last generation or two.
Consider the outcome
of the debate among scholars that raged through the 1980s over the
transformation of the northern countryside. There is now broad agreement that
farmers in the northern colonies always produced surpluses for sale although
they were careful to limit their market involvement in ways that protected
their economic independence. That began to change in the 1790s, when New
England farmers found themselves trapped by the competitive demands of a
rapidly commercializing agriculture in ways that forced them to steadily
increase their productivity. The process spread westward, and the northern
countryside was thoroughly transformed by 1845, when wheat farmers began to
mechanize production at an astonishing pace.17Northern agricultural
productivity skyrocketed even as the rural economy extruded "surplus"
population into cities and factories at a rate that outpaced number of
immigrants--who were by then streaming into the North by the millions. Those
landless workers were attracted by a new form of free labor that had
simultaneously developed in the North in the decades following the American
Revolution. Apprentice contracts became wage contracts, indentured servitude
disappeared, and slavery was abolished. By the 1820s "a day's pay for a
day's work" became the norm--and with it a uniquely mobile population of
free laborers was created. Within the space of a single lifetime forms of
long-term labor subordination that had existed for centuries, even millennia,
were dramatically overthrown. "Thus it was not slavery," Gavin Wright
has concluded, "but the post-Revolutionary abolitions and the exclusion of
slavery from the Northwest Territory that launched the American economy on its
modern trajectory."18Put these two developments together--the
transformation of the northern countryside and the rapidly expanding population
of highly mobile wage laborers--and the stage was set for the dynamic
interaction of the city and the country that so many scholars have seen as the
preeminent characteristic of northern economic development.19
None of this appears
in Baptist's account. Instead, he disinters an older story that told of
industrialization "spiraling outward" from the textile mills of
Massachusetts and Rhode Island--a story long ago abandoned by most economic
historians. Before we revert to this traditional account, however, Baptist will
have to explain where historians like Diane Lindstrom went wrong when they
adduced evidence that the southern trade was relatively unimportant to the economic
development of the Philadelphia. He would have to explain away the evidence
that "metropolitan industrialization" overshadowed New York City's
ties to slavery, that economic development bound the city much more closely to
the wheat and dairy farmers in the Hudson, Mohawk, and Ohio River valleys--as
most scholars now believe. He would have to explain away the extraordinary maps
in William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis demonstrating the
way railroads spread out from Chicago bringing wheat farmers throughout the
Midwest into the city's powerful economic orbit--an orbit that reached back to
the east coast and all the way to Europe but that barely touched the slave
states. In these accounts the history of the northern economy after 1776 is one
of growing independence from slavery, a fact of no small
significance for the origins of the Civil War.
In addition to explaining where generations
of scholarship on northern economic development have gone wrong, Baptist would
have to tell us where he's getting his numbers. He points out that in 1836
cotton production represented about five percent of the gross domestic product.
This is a widely accepted statistic, having been calculated in several
different ways by a number of different scholars. But its significance is not
self-evident. Is five percent a lot or a little? Instead of addressing that
question, however, Baptist quickly moves on to the second- and third-order
effects of cotton in the larger economy, and here a number of problems arise.
To begin with, second-order effects are notoriously difficult to calculate, and
by the time you get to third-order effects, you might as well be floating in
the clouds. At the very least, such calculations require extensive
justification and analytical precision--none of which Baptist provides. In
fact, he provides no sources whatsoever for any of his calculations. From his
brief description he seems to be adding the proceeds of wealth transfers--such
as the sale of slaves--to the figures for output. Finally, having posited suspiciously
large second- and third-order effects, he then adds those
effects to the original GDP statistic, and suddenly, without explanation, five
percent becomes fifty percent. Obviously if you applied the same technique to
every other northern enterprise--the granaries of the Midwest, the printing
shops of Manhattan, the iron foundries of Pennsylvania, the small manufacturers
of Philadelphia, the meatpackers of Cincinnati, the dairy farmers of the Hudson
Valley, the wheat farmers along the Erie Canal--you would end up with five
thousand percent of the GDP. If Baptist's numbers were even remotely accurate,
the abolition of slavery during the Civil War would have been accompanied by a
catastrophic collapse of the northern economy.
Baptist takes his
title from Lorenzo Ivy, one of the many elderly ex-slaves interviewed by the
WPA in the 1930s. Ivy and his mother were originally owned by a
"mean" master who broke up families left and right. Ivy told the
interviewer that the only good thing his heartless owner ever did, and did
unintentionally, was to sell the boy and his mother to his father's owner. This
endless buying and selling of slaves--the coffles of chained human beings who
passed by Ivy's Virginia home year after year--is the "half" of
slavery's history that Baptist claims has never been told. But Baptist himself
doesn't tell the other half of the ex-slave's own story. Ivy described his new
master as a good man who kept the slave family together, recognized the boy's
talent as a shoemaker, sent him off to Lynchburg to learn the trade, and let
Ivy hire himself out. Ivy's mistress taught the boy to read. When the Civil War
ended, Ivy was sufficiently literate and skilled to set up his own shoemaking
shop and attend Hampton Institute. He was at Hampton when his former master
died, and Ivy was upset that he was unable to attend the funeral to pay his
respects.20”
This is from near the end of Coclanis’ review
“One assumes that the
editors and most of the authors of Slavery’s Capitalism are coming from one or
another critical political-economy position, but which one is difficult, if not
impossible, to tell.
This would not be the
case had the editors and authors engaged more directly with work written before
they started scribbling, a point also made by Scott R. Nelson in an important
assessment of the NHAC movement. And here I do not just mean theoretical work
on the history of capitalism – the huge internal literatures in the Marxist and
marxisant traditions, most notably – but the equally large empirical
literatures by historians and economists writing about capitalism and slavery
within the context of the United States. Since the mid-1950s, “new” economic
historians have been wrestling with questions concerned with slavery and
capitalism, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism became central
to the entire “new” economic history project beginning in the late 1960s and
remained so until the early 1990ss. But this seems like ancient history – so
yesterday – to many devotees of the NHAC. And American historians, likewise,
were wrestling with similar issues at the same time. Not only Eugene Genovese
and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese either, but also their students, as well as dozens
of other scholars, who came at such issues from a variety of points of view.
Here, we can start with names such as Hal Woodman, Jim Oakes, Allan Kulikoff,
Lorena Walsh, John McCusker, Russ Menard, Drew McCoy, Laurence Shore, Barbara
Fields, Joseph Reidy, Steven Hahn, Rachel Klein, Joyce Chaplin, Lacy Ford,
Robin Blackburn, Shearer Davis Bowman, etc. For my part, I wrote an entire book
in 1989 wherein I dealt directly with the relationship between slavery and
capitalism, and, in so doing, dealt explicitly with matters regarding the definition
of capitalism, among other concerns. Now Beckert for one knows all of this. He
has previously acknowledged some of the scholars mentioned above – those operating
in what he sees as the political-economy tradition – as “distinguished
antecedents.” But in Slavery’s Capitalism such acknowledgment is nowhere to be
found, lost perhaps in the frisson of excitement that the NHAC initiative has
evoked.
All of which brings
me to my final points, involving misrepresentation and scholarly comity. As the
paragraphs above suggest, neither Slavery’s Capitalism specifically nor the NHAC
more generally accurately captures and conveys economists’ and historians’ engagement
with the questions treated in Slavery’s Capitalism and the issues of concern to
new historians of American capitalism.”
These are essentially the same claims that economists have
made about Baptist’s misuse of both the previous literature and primary
sources. Oakes also provides the most critical review of Johnson that I have
come across. He is, however, not entirely critical of their work. He finds more
to value in Baptist than I do. And although he is very critical, his motivation
is not just to tear down (I have to admit that when it comes to Baptist, I personally
want to not leave a single brick standing). Oakes and Coclanis, on the other seems
to want to push the new historians of capitalism in productive directions. Most
importantly they want them to integrate their work with earlier work on capitalism,
slavery, and its origins. By the way, here is my review of
Slavery's Capitalism
Economists Logan and Hansen, in contrast, provide
favorable reviews of more recent work by people associated with the history of
capitalism. I’m not sure that Richard White is as strongly associated with the
New History of Capitalism as people like Beckert, Baptist, Johnson or Levy, but
he could make a reasonable claim to having been at it longer. One of the common
features of both books are that, in contrast, some of the work criticized by
Coclanis and Oakes, both White and Maggor attempt to integrate the work of
people, including economists, who have worked in their field. I had previously
noted this in regard to one element of White’s book, the evidence on material
well-being in the late nineteenth century. Although
I disagreed with his conclusion, my argument was based primarily on very recent research. Some of which
probably wasn’t even available at the time he was writing. I believe that White
was probably using the estimates that were most widely accepted by economic
historians at the time he was writing.
The books by White and Maggor are not economic history as economists typically
do it now, but each has something interesting to say. Economists and historians
do not have to use the same methods or even ask the same questions. What is essential
is that where there is overlap we need to honestly acknowledge and address each
other’s work. If a historian is interested investment in the west during the
nineteenth century, they should at least note what economists have had to say
about interregional capital flows, as Maggor does. Conversely, if an economist
is interested in the development of state and local institutions intended to
promote or regulate these investments, they should read what Maggor says.
