An appreciation of E.P. Thompson

This is The American Conservative's Christmas reading list. Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of The American Conservative, chose E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.


"Steeped in English literature—see the constant, apposite, and often starling allusions to Bunyan and Byron, Defoe and the Bible—Thompson wrote powerfully, concretely, plangently, with an exquisite sense of cadence and rhythm. That style deepens this elegiac book, elevating it to a masterpiece of literature as well as of scholarship. This is a work, Thompson unabashedly makes clear, about history’s losers, and in its embrace of the losers, as well as in other ways, The Making of the English Working Class is a profoundly anti-progressive book. Its protagonists’ values and their 50-year struggle to resist being turned into a proletariat may have seemed merely primitive and retrograde to strident Marxists (and may seem so to progressives of all stripes today), but Thompson’s historical imagination and sympathy allowed him to see the value, and the tragedy, of lost causes."

Does History Need a Manifesto?

Peter Mandler and Deborah Cohen review The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. The review provides an interesting and optimistic assessment of the current state of the discipline of history.

Here is an earlier review by Pseudoerasmus, focusing on the books false claims about economic historians.

Business History from HBR

The Birth of Commercial Credit

Cotton, Slavery and Economic Growth

Recently, several historians (Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert) have attempted to make slavery and cotton the driving force behind American economic growth in the nineteenth century. I believe that they present a misleading view of economic growth and the relationship between slavery and economic growth.

1.       Slavery was predominately associated with one product: cotton. Cotton was a very important crop. It is true, as Beckert points out, that cotton accounted for over half of U.S. exports on the eve of the Civil War. 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. The attempts to make cotton the driving force of the American economy misses one of the most important finding of economic historians: do not get too focused on a single sector of an economy (see Fogel on the railroads and McCloskey on the textile industry in England). There is no Rostovian engine of growth.  

2.       Baptist’s attempts to enlarge the impact of cotton on GDP are nonsensical.

3.       Slavery appears to have had a negative effect on long run trends in per capita GDP. The more a region depended on slave labor in the past the lower its per capita income now.

 

 

 

 

These figures are from the working paper by Nathan Nunn “Slavery, Inequality and Economic Development in the Americas: An Examination of the Engerman-Sokoloff Argument (October 2007). There is no question that slaveholders benefited from slavery, but that does not mean that the economy as a whole was better off as a result of slavery. Arguments and evidence presented by Gavin Wright, Sokoloff and Engerman, and David Meyer also suggest that slavery had long term negative effects on economic growth.

 

4.       The abolition of slavery did not have a negative effect on per capita GDP in the United States or its rate of growth.
You can go to measuringworth.com and graph the log of per capita GDP from 1800 to 1900. Does it appear to you that the rate of growh declined after 1865?

 

 

 

If all else fails just make it up

In the Washington Post today Jim Tankersley reports on the negative influence of finance on the economy. He reports that “In perhaps the starkest illustration, economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote in a recent paper that every dollar a worker earns in a research field spills over to make the economy $5 better off. Every dollar a similar worker earns in finance comes with a drain, making the economy 60 cents worse off.” I clicked on the link to the paper (Lockwood BB, Nathanson CG, Weyl GE. Taxation and the Allocation of Talent). As best I can tell it says no such thing. It seems to me that the authors are quite explicit that they do not have such estimates of the spillover effects of different occupations. They use a variety of guesses about what they might be to examine the implications of their model.

More new "history" of capitalism

Sven Beckert has an essay in the Chronicle Review, markting his new book.

 

 

Historians “observe, quite rightly, that the world we live in cannot be understood without coming to terms with the long history of capitalism—a process that has arguably unfolded over more than half a millennium. They are further encouraged by the all-too-frequent failings of economists, who have tended to naturalize particular economic arrangements by defining the "laws" of their development with mathematical precision and preferring short-term over long-term perspectives.”

The need to offer some vague critique of economics in everything they write is one of the most tiresome features of the new historians of capitalism. I suggest that he take a look at some of the work by economists that examines the influence of differences in institutions and endowments on long term economic performance: North, Sokolof and Engerman, and Nunn would be good places to start.

“What distinguishes today’s historians of capitalism is that they insist on its contingent nature, tracing how it has changed over time as it has revolutionized societies, technologies, states, and many if not all facets of life.”

Who does this distinguish them from? Business historians have frequently made such distinctions, writing about proprietary capitalism and managerial capitalism, or just varieties of capitalism. Or, consider the work on the evolution of monopoly capitalism by Marxist scholars. Most of the work by new institutional economic historians is about how capitalist economies have differed from place to place and eveolved over time.

 

“For too long, many historians saw no problem in the opposition between capitalism and slavery. They depicted the history of American capitalism without slavery, and slavery as quintessentially noncapitalist. Instead of analyzing it as the modern institution that it was, they described it as premodern.

Some scholars have always disagree with such accounts. In the 1930s and 1940s, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams argued for the centrality of slavery to capitalism, though their findings were largely ignored. Nearly half a century later, two American economists, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert William Fogel, observed in their controversial book Time on the Cross (Little, Brown, 1974) the modernity and profitability of slavery in the United States. Now a flurry of books and conferences are building on those often unacknowledged foundations.”

Why don’t the people doing the new history of capitalism start acknowledging these foundations?

 

Special Issue on Piketty's Capital

The British Journal of Sociology has a special issue on Piketty's Capital. All the articles are available free of charge.

Happy Birthday to The Junto

The Junto is celebrating its second birthday. I am not an early Americanist, but The Junto is one of my favorite blogs. The contributors are thoughtful and passionate about what they do. Anyone interested in American history, doing history, or teaching history should read what they have to say.