Need a Break From Reading Economic History?

If you need a break from reading economic hsitory you can watch these videos or listen to these podcasts about economic history.

Videos:

Greg Clark at Lewis and Clark on “Unequal chances or unequal abilities: What determines social mobility?" (ht @antonhowes)

Tim Leunig’s Ted Talk is about education and creativity, but part way through he explains the benefits of studying economic history.

Professors and students make a pitch for economic history at the LSE.

Podcasts:

Judy Stephenson at the Economics Detective discusses her work on wage rates and the implications of recent work on English wages for our understanding of the Industrial Revolution.

Gavin Wright talks about the economic history of slavery at The Exchange (from August 2015).

Christy Clark –Pujara discusses the business of slavery in Rhode Island with Liz Covart at Ben Franklin’s World

Economic History in 2016: American Economic History

I posted recently about economic history in 2016 and said that I would have another post that focused on American Economic History. Here it is. Again, 2016 is loosely defined for the purposes of this blogpost, though I think most of the stuff here was published or presented in some way during the year. Also, please do not think that this is intended as an objective list of the best or most important work. This is more like a list of things that came to my attention and will influence what I teach my students in American Economic History.

Measuring Income and Inequality

Lindert, Peter H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700

This book did not get nearly as much attention as Robert Gordons’ book, but it is far more important for American economic history. There are a lot of reasons why this is an important book. It provides the most up to date picture of long term economic development in America, and it provides a model for economic historians of careful use of primary sources, making the most of the limited sources available.  

Some of the findings:

1.       The U.S. was among the most developed nations very early on.

2.       The Revolution had a large negative effect on incomes.

3.       The relative decline of the South began long before the Civil War.

4.       There is no fundamental law driving inequality. Instead, inequality has risen and fallen over time in response to a changes in demographics, finance, technological change, politics, education policy, and trade.

See also Lindert, Peter H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American colonial incomes, 1650–1774." The Economic History Review 69.1 (2016): 54-77, which shows that “The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the twentieth century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or more.”

Race, Racism, and the Effects of Slavery

Marcella Alsan and Marrianne Wanamaker. "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men." (2016) used survey data on mistrust of doctors, data on health care utilization, and mortality to show that the Tuskegee experiments had a significant negative effect on the health of older African American men.

See also Celeste K. Carruthers, and Marianne H. Wanamaker. Separate and unequal in the labor market: human capital and the Jim crow wage gap. No. w21947. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016 on the effect of unequal eduction on skills and wages.

John Parman, Trevon Logan, and Lisa D. Cook used census records in innovative ways to answer questions about segregation and the consequences of distinctively black names. Many of their working papers are available at their websites.

Logan, Trevon, and John Parman. The national rise in residential segregation. No. w20934. National Bureau of Economic Research, found that “The likelihood that an African American household had a non-African American neighbor declined by more than 15 percentage points (more than a 25% decrease) through the mid-twentieth century.” Using this measure of segregation, they also find that higher levels of segregation were associated with an increase in lynching (go to Parman’s website for a link to this paper.)

Lisa Cook, Trevon D. Logan, and John M. Parman. "The mortality consequences of distinctively black names." Explorations in Economic History 59 (2016): 114-125 see Vox for a summary of this work. They found that distinctively black names raised male life expectancy by about 4 years. “One possible explanation lies in the nature of those historical black names. They often draw on biblical names or denote empowerment. Coupled with evidence that names were often passed from father to son, these name characteristics suggest that those with a distinctively black name may have stronger family, church, or community ties. These stronger social networks could help an individual weather negative shocks throughout life, ultimately leading to far better long-term outcomes, as demonstrated in Cook (2011, 2012).”

Evolution of Institutions, Organizations and Markets

Several economic historians are using the North, Wallis and Weingast (transition to open access order) framework to explain the evolution of institutions, especially those governing business organization and finance, in early America.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, “States, Not Nation: The Sources of Political and Economic Development in the Early United States” 

Hilt, Eric. "Corporation Law and the Shift toward Open Access in the Antebellum United States." In Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development. University of Chicago Press.

Economic History and the History of Capitalism

On two occasions, at Dartmouth and the AHA meetings economic historians and historians of capitalism got together in the same room. Caitlin Rosenthal was involved both times, and in a recent paper in Journal of the Early Republic she continues to argue for more interaction. 

Economics of Mixed Martial Arts Training

This is from bjpenn.com.

Firas Zahabi is the head coach at Tristar Gym in Montreal. he has worked with Georges St. Pierre and number of other UFC champions.

Here he is explaining why Ronda Rousey's problems as a standup fighter might not be entirely the fault of her coach. I actually think her coach is a big part of the problem, but I liked Zahabi's analysis of the problem, especially the last two sentences.

“The reason why a Ben Askren or a Ronda Rousey’s striking usually — not always — doesn’t hit that high level, is because they’ve spent so much time wiring their brain and their body and their nervous system to fight in one particular way. It’s opportunity cost. Every time you do one thing, you’re costing yourself in another.”

Economic History in 2016

This is my subjective assessment of some of the major developments in economic history in the last year. Most of the papers I cite are from 2016 (or at least the versions I cite are from 2016) A few are from earlier, but you can just think of it as the long 2016. It seemed long. By the way, I intend to do a another post that focuses more on developments in American economic history.

Measuring Long Run Economic Performance

One of the most significant developments in economic history over the last several decades has been the work to improve our estimates of long run economic performance. Responding to challenges presented by Pomeranz’s Great Divergence and obvious weaknesses in Madison’s estimates, a number of economic historians have worked to develop better estimates of economic performance in Europe and Asia over the very long run. Economic historians continue these efforts but also recognize the limitations of what they have done and, possibly, what they can do.

Stephen Broadberry has done much of this work with a number of different co-authors.  For a recent example see Roger  Fouquet and Stephen Broadberry. "Seven centuries of European economic growth and decline." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 4 (2015): 227-244.

Deng and O’Brien raise numerous questions about the usefulness of these estimates for Asia.

New estimates of long term economic performance have prompted new attempts to explain differences in long term economic performance. 

State Capacity and Economic Growth

Economic historians have long recognized that the countries that led the way in modern growth, England and Holland, also led the way in the development of state capacity (the ability to tax and borrow to spend on public goods.) But recent work has attempted to establish this relationship more generally and identify the specific mechanisms by which state capacity contributed to economic growth. Recent work has focused on the combination of state capacity and constraints on state action. The problem, of course, isn’t new: it is the fundamental Hobbesian problem, but economic historians are trying to understand how effective solutions evolved.

See the survey paper on state capacity by Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama (available through Noel’s website). The published version of Johnson and Koyama is "States and economic growth: capacity and constraints" Explorations in Economic History.

And this recent Economic Journal paper by Mark Dincecco and Gabriel Katz

Religion and Economic Growth

Related to the work on state capacity, economic historians have shed new light on the relationship between religion and early modern growth. The idea that there might be some connection between economic growth and religion has a long history. This connection was, for instance, central to the stories told by Max Weber and R.H. Tawney.  What is new is that economic historians have gathered evidence and employed techniques that enable them to identify specific mechanisms through which religious beliefs and institutions influenced economic performance.

See, for instance,

Eric Chaney on Religion and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science

Anderson on Inquisition and Scholarship

Jared Rubin’s forthcoming book

Anderson, Johnson, and Koyama Jewish persecution and weather shocks

Johnson and Koyama Jewish communities and city growth

This working paper  by Dittmar and Meisenzahl on the religion, politics and public goods in Germany during the Reformation

English Wages and Industrialization

Recent research on wages in England have challenged Robert Allen’s theory of the industrial revolution. Allen’s theory was attractive in its simplicity: relative prices drove the Industrial Revolution in England. People invested in machines because labor was expensive and coal was cheap. Several recent studies have, however, challenged the evidence of high wages in England.

See Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider

And these great videos of Humphries describing the project.

See also Judy Stephenson’s work on the building trades and her blog post about the papers presented at a workshop on English wages.

You can also look at these blog posts for descriptions of the state of the debate Pseudoerasmus  and Vincent Geloso. By the way, based upon the volume of tweets, blog posts, papers, and working papers I am beginning to believe that Vincent Geloso must actually be the name of a consortium of economic historians.


Note: This post was edited on December 4, 2017 to add a link to he published version of the Johnson and Koyama paper on state capacity.

My Response to Seth Rockman's Tweetstorm

I prefer blogging to tweeting. Below is my response to Seth Rockman’s tweetstorm. His tweets are in bold.

2. @BAllanHansen Your piece on counterfactuals makes good sense. I also like the one by Dietrich Vollrath

Thank you. I try to make good sense. I also like Vollrath’s post

4. But when the counterfactual is “pretend slavery didn’t happen,” then it gets bumpy.

Which economic historian has put forward this counterfactual? I don’t recall it from Fogel or Olmstead and Rhode. I believe that Robin Blackburn considered a counterfactual in which there was an early abolition of slavery, but he is an historian so I don’t think this is referring to him.

6. It is different from “pretend there were no railroads.” It isn’t merely “academic.”

The debate over railroads was not merely academic. I tried to make that point in my post yesterday. To the extent that Rostow’s theory influenced policy, the debate over whether dumping a lot of funds into some targeted leading sector could drive economic growth mattered. Robert Wright has argued that the current argument over slavery and economic development matters in a similar way: to the extent that you argue that slavery is a necessary, or even useful, means of promoting growth it can provide support for regimes that allow modern slavery to continue.

10. And although economists have known slavery was capitalistic since Fogel, it seems delusional to claim this is mainstream US knowledge

It is one thing to say that it is insufficiently recognized by the public. It is another thing entirely to suggest, as Baptist does, that economists and historians generally accepted that it was not capitalist.

11. Nor clear to me what work economists have done to make this “commonsensical” in American culture and politics... or in Econ 101.

Scholars like Fogel, and Wright have written numerous books, many of them accessible to a general audience. It is in every American Economic History textbook. Maybe economic historians need to take some marketing classes.

14. Especially when the haggling involves (a) pretending slavery didn’t actually happen

Saying something over and over again does not actually make it true.

15. or (b) privileging white testimony in problematic historical sources over black voices in other differently-problematic sources.

Again, who are you talking about? Olmstead and Rhode’s latest paper makes extensive use of slave narratives as well as plantation records. It is easy to find on google scholar. And I am pretty sure that Trevon Logan was not privileging white testimony here.

16. I’d be encouraged if I thought economic historians were also grappling with slavery’s archive by reading Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan

Good suggestions. At least listen to Jennifer Morgan on Liz Covart’s podcast Ben Franklin’s World. By the way, I would also recommend Kathleen Hilliard.

19. I will gladly read more econ.hist. when econ. historians are really grappling with race, power, & knowledge production—past and present.

You might try the literature on the negative consequences of slavery, beginning with Sokolof and Engerman, and more recently Nathan Nunn and others. You might also look at some of the recent work by Trevon Logan, Lisa Cook, and John Parman. You can find a lot of it at Logan’s website. Let me know if you want more suggestions.

Overall, my response to Professor Rockman’s tweetstorm is the same as my response to much of the work that Baptist et al have done: he continues to think that presenting a false picture of what economic historians have said is a legitimate form of argument. When I criticize Baptist or Beckert or Rockman I try to quote them. Rockman puts quotation marks around “pretend slavery didn’t happen,” but he does not tell me who actually said this.

Counterfactuals and the Study of History

This blogpost was prompted by Marc Parry’s Shackles and Dollars article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Specifically, the idea attributed to Eric Foner that counterfactuals are a waste of time. There was extensive discussion of the issue on Twitter by Pseudoerasmus, Kevin O’Rourke, Leah Boustan, Vincent Geloso and others, which Brad DeLong collected, and a blogpost by Dietrich Vollrath.

What follows is my attempt to provide some background on the use of counterfactuals in historical analysis and my thoughts on the extent to which there is a methodological divide between historians and economists regarding counterfactuals.

For any reader of this blog who is not an economist, historian, philosopher, or science fiction fan, I would describe a counterfactual history as an interpretation of the past that intentionally departs from generally accepted evidence.  The Man in the High Castle, for instance, is a counterfactual. The generally accepted evidence is that Germany and Japan surrendered; they did not win the war.

Historians asking people to think about how things might have been is not new. Consider this example from G.D.H Cole’s Introduction to Economic History, 1750-1950 (first published in 1952):

“After delays caused by the difficulties of internal migration, the displaced villagers and their children provided the chief supply of labor for the new factories, and without this reservoir of dis-employed labor the revolution in industry would perforce have been greatly slowed down.”.

Cole is asking you to imagine what would have happened if there had not been an enclosure movement in England. Such statements about what might have been did not really attract much attention until a group of economic historians started to write about counterfactuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

To the best of my knowledge, Meyer and Conrad (1957) were the first  to introduce the explicit use of counterfactuals in economic history, making the argument that statemtns about causality always involved a counterfactual. Counterfactuals do not, however, seem to have attracted much attention until Robert Fogel used a counterfactual to estimate the extent to which economic growth was caused by railroads in the nineteenth century. He asked what would the economyhave looked like if there were no railroads in 1890. He concluded that railroads accounted for a relatively small part of the growth in the nineteenth century.

Fogel’s analysis prompted numerous critical responses. Some of the critical responses from economic historians focused on the details of Fogel’s counterfactual rather than the use of counterfactuals (David 1969). Some traditional historians completely dismissed the use of a counterfactuals. E.P. Thompson referred to it as Geschichtwissenschlopff. E.H. Carr called it a parlor game. David Hacket Fisher included the use of counterfactuals in his book on Historical Fallacies, referring to it as the fallacy of the fictional question. Fritz Redlich called them “figments.”

Albert Fishlow also used a counterfactual, in his analysis of the impact of railroads, but neither attracted as much critical attention as Fogel’s work.  Why did people respond so strongly to Fogel’s work? Part of the response was no doubt due to Fogel himself. He was not just an advocate for new methods, he was evangelist: Throw down your old methods, and follow me, and I will make you scientific historians. But Fogel’s counterfactual also required a much greater leap of the imagination than Fishlow’s. It is much easier to imagine a world without the less than 30,000 miles of track that existed in 1859 than it is to imagine a world in which more than 160,000 miles of track have been removed. Fogel compounded that leap of the imagination by asking you to imagine a world that had adapted to the lack of railroads by expanding roads and canals. Both used counterfactuals, but Fishlow only asked you to get rid of the railroads and look at the roads and canals that were actually there. Fogel is asking you to not just make a big leap of the imagination but a very explicit one. Fishlow’s was not as big or as explicit. It is very easy to slip into the notion of thinking of it as a parlor game, or now a computer game, like Robber Baron.

Fogel’s counterfactual required a large leap of the imagination, but it was not a parlor game. It is important to remember that Fogel’s argument was not just against historians like Kirkland, it was against the economist W. W. Rostow and his stages of growth theory, in which the take-off into self-sustaining growth is driven by a leading sector like railroads. Moreover, the dispute with Rostow mattered. Rostow had the ear of powerful people in the early 1960s, people capable of actually influencing development policy (see Easterly 200 , 31-33).  In order to challenge Rostow, Fogel needed to be able to estimate not just whether railroads mattered, but how much they mattered. Obviously many things were important to explaining economic growth in the United States in the nineteenth century. Fogel needed to be able to say to what extent, taking all those other things into consideration, railroads mattered.

Despite the negative responses to Fogel’s work, Foner’s continued aversion to counterfactuals seems like a bit of history itself. Some historians, such as Richard Evans, continue to oppose their use, but counterfactuals have become pretty mainstream. Gary Kornblith (2003) has used a counterfactual to examine the causes of the Civil War. Peter Coclanis and Stanley Engerman (2013) debate whether slavery would have survived in the absence of a Civil War. Niall Ferguson has edited a book of counterfactuals. Joe Crowley has edited two volumes of What If. Bunzl (2004) provided a guide to the use of counterfactual for readers of the American Historical Review. Rebecca Onion argues that more historians should consider the value of counterfactuals. Foner’s student Sven Beckert writes the following on page 97 of Empire of Cotton.

Even Foner is willing to discuss counterfactuals.

I do think there are differences in the way that economists and historians typically use counterfactuals. First, economists tend to use them like Fogel to answer the question “To what extent did x cause y?” Consequently, economists tend to focus on very precise counterfactuals that are embodied in economic models, which incorporate all the relevant explanatory factors. (See Tim Leunig’s survey of social savings studies for numerous examples.)

Second, historians are more likely to deal with questions where the answer to “What caused y?” is a story about a series of events. Consequently counterfactual tend to be like Kornblith's, describing a series of events beginning with Henry Clay winning the presidential election in 1844, events that he argues were not just possible but plausible and can shed light on the causes of the Civil War. Counterfactuals in this cases are less about the quantitative significance than they are about the role of contingency in history. The actions of one individual or the repercussions of one event can make a big difference in these counterfactuals. Any one individual is pretty much irrelevant in a Fogel style counterfactual.

In the end, although there are differences, I do not think that counterfactuals present a fundamental methodological divide between historians and economists. Not all historians oppose the use of counterfactuals, and some economists (McAfee 1983) seem to think they are silly.

Finally, the statement attributed to Foner was misleading in so far as it suggests that there is fundamental methodological divide between historians and economists over the use of counterfactuals.The statement  was also inaccurate because the economic historians that have challenged Baptist et al have not done so on the basis of counterfactuals. It is instead, Baptist et al who have created interpretations that are not based on actual evidence. One of the primary features of Baptist’s book is that he overtly and covertly makes things up. 

Bunzl, Martin. "Counterfactual history: a user's guide." The American historical review 109, no. 3 (2004): 845-858.

Coclanis, Peter A., and Stanley L. Engerman. "Would Slavery Have Survived Without the Civil War?: Economic Factors in the American South During the Antebellum and Postbellum Eras." Southern Cultures 19, no. 2 (2013): 66-90.

Conrad, Alfred H., and John R. Meyer. "The economics of slavery in the ante bellum South." The Journal of Political Economy (1958): 95-130.

David, Paul. “Transport Innovation and Economic Growth: Professor Fogel on and off the Rails” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Dec., 1969), pp. 506-525.

Easterly, W. The Elusive Quest for Growth (2001).

Fogel, Robert William. "A quantitative approach to the study of railroads in American economic growth: a report of some preliminary findings." Journal of Economic History (1962): 163-197.

Fogel, Robert W. "The new economic history." The Economic History Review 19, no. 3 (1966): 642-656.

Fogel, Robert William. "The specification problem in economic history." The Journal of Economic History 27, no. 03 (1967): 283-308.

Gary J. Kornblith. “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jun., 2003), pp. 76-105

McAfee, R. Preston. "American economic growth and the voyage of Columbus." The American Economic Review 73, no. 4 (1983): 735-740.

Meyer, John R., and Alfred H. Conrad. "Economic theory, statistical inference, and economic history." The Journal of Economic History 17.04 (1957): 524-544.

Redlich, Fritz. "New" and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and Their Interdependence.” The Journal of Economic History Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 1965), pp. 480-495.

Post-factual history: Seth Rockman edition

Pseudoerasmus sent me a tweet by Seth Rockman.

The message refers to this article on The Other Slavery in the Chronicle of Higher Education and suggests that economic historians will argue that slavery never existed among Native Americans.

The Chronicle article notes that

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez “offers a capacious but defensible definition, including peonage; rebels sentenced to servitude; orphans and vagrants bound to service; victims of the mita (a forced labor quota imposed on Indian villages); and ostensibly free wage laborers whose employers never paid them.”

This definition of slavery, which includes a variety of institutions that were used to coerce labor from Native Americans got me to wondering which economic historians Rockman will be the first to try to argue this away. Perhaps he thinks it will be my friend Tim Yeager author of "Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America." The Journal of Economic History 55, no. 04 (1995): 842-859. Wait, that article must be an aberration, economic historians wouldn’t let something like that or Ricardo D. Salvatore’s "Modes of Labor Control in Cattle-Ranching Economies: California, Southern Brazil, and Argentina, 1820-1860." The Journal of Economic History 51, no. 2 (1991): 441-51 into the Journal of Economic History. Maybe Rockman suspects that the firt one to try to argue it away will be Melissa Dell author of "The persistent effects of Peru's mining mita," Econometrica 78, no. 6 (2010): 1863-1903. Yes, Dell seems like a good choice, publishing in Econometrica is about as economist as you can get. Actually, I am a little surprised that Rockman had not at least heard of that paper. It has received a lot of attention. I thought it might be known to even someone who was adamant about preserving his ignorance of the work of economic historians.

Rockman’s own flexibility in interpreting the past can also be seen in his reactions to the recent Chronicle article about slavery and capitalism.

Last week the article highlighted the deficiencies of the economists

Today the Chronicle article was just one of three articles that tried to make slavery tangential to American economic development.

Such abrupt about faces would make my head spin. Moreover, nothing in any of the articles suggested that slavery was “tangential” to American economic development. Questioning claims that slavery was “the driving force” behind economic development or claims that it accounted for half of GDP are not even close to saying that slavery was tangential.

These guys are starting to make me feel like like Michael Palin in this Monty Python skit.

Capitalism and Slavery Debate is not about differences in methodology

Marc Perry wrote about the ongoing argument over the relationship between slavery and the American economic development that is taking place between some economic historians (economists) and some new historians of capitalism (historians)  Some people, including the author of this essay at the Economist, view the argument as a controversy over differences in methodology between economists and historians. Several of the quotes by historians in Parry’s article seem consistent with this view. 

Personally, I do not view it as an argument about methods between historians and economists. The economists, including myself, who have criticized the work of Baptist and Beckert have focused more on their poor use of historical methods than their poor use economic methods.

There is no universally accepted description of appropriate research methods in history or economics. People within disciplines often argue about the appropriate methodology for the discipline. Nevertheless, I think that most historians would agree that good historical work presents an accurate historiography, so the reader understands the current state of the conversation on the topic, and builds an interpretation of the past based upon an honest and critical interpretation of the sources. Economic historians have criticized Baptist and his supporters for failing to follow these practices, for failing to do good history. I haven't criticized Baptist and his supporters  for not having a formal model or not doing econometric analysis. I have criticized them for misrepresenting what economists and historians have written and said about slavery. I have criticized them for creating interpretations of the past that are based upon made up stories and numbers rather than actual sources.

Misleading historiography.

One of the chief claims of Baptist and his supporters is that they have overturned a long held view of the slave economy of the South as stagnant and pre- or even anti- capitalist. This is one of the central claims of The Half. In Parry’s article, Edward Ayers echoes Baptist’s claim to novelty. “What’s exciting about that approach is the way it renders the slave South as a dynamic, changing society, in contrast to Genovese’s static, anti-capitalist vision, says Edward L. Ayers, a historian and former president of the University of Richmond. "To have that overturned so quickly," he says, "it looks more like the sciences than it does the humanities."” But these claims to have overturned long held views about slavery in the United States are based solely upon a misleading historiography.

It is simply a myth that Genovese’s view of the economics of slavery was held by the majority of economists or historians until Baptist and Beckert cam along. While I think it can safely be said that Genovese’s work on culture, such as Roll, Jordan, Roll remains relevant, his work on the economics of slavery, expressed in the Political Economy of Slavery has long been discounted by both economists and historians. Consider the interpretation of the South presented in an undergraduate text book three decades ago: George Brown Tindall’s America: A Narrative History Volume, 2^nd edition (1988). Tindall wrote on page 371 that “More often than not the successful planter was a driving newcomer, bent on maximizing profits. While the profitability of slavery has been a long standing subject of controversy, in recent years, economic historians have reached the conclusion that the slaves on average supplied about a 10 percent return on their cost.” He went on to note that slaves were the most profitable investment available in the South, and that incomes in the South were not only comparable to the wealthiest countries in the World, but that in the newer cotton lands incomes were among the highest in the United States. The view that he presented to undergraduates almost 30 years ago was of a thriving and successful southern economy based on slave labor. There is no indication that he thought this was a controversial interpretation. 

Tindall was not an outlier, the interpretation in his textbook was the standard one among. In 1995, Robert Whaples surveyed a sample of both economists and historians who worked on economic history. He asked them whether they generally agreed, agreed with provisos, or generally disagreed with a series of statements. For the statement “Slavery was a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests,” ninety-three percent of economists and ninety percent of historians disagreed with the statement. For the statement “The slave system was economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War,” ninety-eight percent of economists and ninety-five percent of historians disagreed.

It is not just the claims about the nature of slavery in the American South that Baptist and his supporters misrepresent. I argued in another blogpost that Baptist’s entire argument against Rhode and Olmstead is about misrepresenting their argument. Beckert also claims an inordinate amount of novelty for his argument about the role of force (“war capitalism”) by choosing not to cite works like Findlay and O’Rourke’s Power and Plenty.

Creating interpretations of the past that are not based on evidence.

The claims about the size of the economic impact of slavery have not been based upon the available evidence. For instance, "The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the economy," Beckert wrote, "not just shaping but dominating it." Or according to Baptist “ All told more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million odd slaves― 6 percent of the total US population―who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery’s frontier.” Beckert makes the claim that slave produced cotton was the driving force based upon its predominant role among exports, and Baptist simply makes up the numbers that he uses to make his “estimate.”

In contrast, economic historians have noted that

1. Cotton was the largest export from the U.S., but exports were only about 9 % of GDP. Similarly, cotton accounted for about 23 % of income in the South, but the South accounted for only 26% of U.S. income. See D. A. Irwin, “The Optimal Tax on Antebellum U.S. Cotton Exports,” Journal of International Economics 60(2003):287) Ultimately, the value of cotton production was equal to about 6% of GDP.

2. The South had lower average incomes than the North; and per capita income was growing more slowly in the South even before the Civil War. See Unequal Gains by Lindert and Williamson Chapter 5. In addition, about twice as many people lived in the Union states.

3. The more important slavery was in a country or state the lower the level of income was in the future. Nathan Nunn “Slavery, Inequality and Economic Development in the Americas: An Examination of the Engerman-Sokoloff Argument (October 2007).

4. Slave states had lower levels of educational attainement and less innovation (measured by patents) than states without slavery. This was true even in the areas that were most like the North in geogrpahy and economic activity. See John Majewski "Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Developemnt and Education in the Limestone South" Chapter 14 in Slavery's Capitalsm.

Foner complains that for the economic historian history “is just a source of numbers, a source of data to throw into their equations." History is not just a source of numbers, but, if you are going to use numbers, shouldn’t they come from history, not the historian’s imagination? The current dispute is not about economic methods versus historical methods; it is about bad history. Because it is about bad history, it is all the more disappointing when historians like Foner, who know better, are willing to stand behind it. After his NYTimes review of Baptist's book I wrote a post titled "et tu Foner?"

Economic historians have criticized Baptist and his supporters because they are doing bad history. By the way, throughout this post I have used the phrase Baptist and his supporters not historians because I do not believe that they represent the discipline of history. There is far too much really good work being done to take the worst work as representative of the discipline. More than a few historians have questioned his historiography, his propensity to make things up, and his use of sources (see for instance this Historically Thinking podcast). After reading Slavery’s Capitalism I am not even convinced that Baptist and his supporters represent people who regard themselves as historians of capitalism.

Caitlin Rosenthal, for instance, said she would like to promote more cooperation between economists and historians (and I thought her paper in Slavery's Capitalism was consistent with this statment). Carlo Cipolla long ago noted that there are differences between economists and historians, but he argued these differences should complement not conflict with each other. Mary and I recently argued in the Journal of Institutional Economics that economists had much to gain by paying more attention to the historian’s craft. Finally, Kevin O’Rourke pointed out on twitter that the economic history department at Oxford has both economists and historians, and they seem to get along just fine.


Note: This post was edited on 11 December 2016 to add point number 4 in the list above and the reference to John Majewski's paper on the Limestone South.