Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Bailyn, Wood and American History



I was a bit surprised when Wood suggested that historians had not liked the Barbarous Years. I quickly looked at the reviews in AHR and JAH. They weren’t really too negative.    Archer thought that the book was “a marvelous accomplishment and a testament to Bailyn’s standing as one of our finest historians.” Pulsipher declared that it was the “kind of book that the word “magisterial” was made for.”

 

I’m not sure to what extent Bailyn is regarded as an economic historian, but his early work appeared in the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Entrepreneurial History as well as The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century .

Here is some more recent work on New England merchants and credit by David Flynn and Jeremy Schwartz

Monday, February 16, 2015

Economic Growth


This last week I have been reading Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and Sheilagh Ogilvie and A.W. Carus Institutions and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective. Both deal with the relationship between institutions and economic growth.

Beckert’s book reminds me of the old saying that “There is much here that is new and much that is interesting. Unfortunately, that which is new is not interesting, and that which is interesting is not new.” The interesting parts are the discussions of the industrial revolution (mostly Robert Allen’s theory), the role of force in promoting trade (Findlay and O’Rourke, and others, have made this argument); the capitalist nature of slavery (Conrad and Meyer and Fogel and Engerman said this a long time ago). What’s new is the argument that cotton, slavery and empire were not just important parts of economic history, they are the key to how the west got rich and capitalism was born. The book falls into the popular “________ that changed the World” category, where you insert whatever it is you are writing about into the blank. It places too much emphasis on one part of the economy: cotton. This is particularly true for the United States. We see many references to the importance of cotton as an export, but we never see any information about how important exports were to U.S. growth. The problem is that economic historians for more than half a century have been moving away from simple monocausal arguments about economic growth.  Beckert declares that slavery was the first big business, not railroads. But the new history of capitalism is on no firmer ground making slavery the driving force behind economic growth than Rostow’s non-communist manifesto was in making railroads the driving force. The only difference is that much of the evidence about railroads the importance of railroads was developed after Rostow wrote.

Of course, one can make the argument that “Plunder may not have directly fueled the Industrial Revolution, but mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the context within which it originated, expanding markets and ensuring the supply of raw materials.” (Findlay and O’Rourke, xx) But Findlay and O’Rourke already made this argument in Power and Plenty.

Sheilagh Ogilvie and A.W. Carus Institutions and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective is at the opposite extreme. For them the devil is in the details. One of their key points is that it is not really productive to consider the influence of one institution in isolation; particular institutions can only be understood within the broader institutional framework that they are a part of. Beckert should have given more consideration to this point because the most obvious problem with his argument is that the institutions at the center of his story (slavery, expropriation, and the use of force to control trade) have existed for a long time. They did not lead to modern economic growth. If Ogilvie and Carus are right understanding modern economic growth might be hard work.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Pioneer Girl



I ordered a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography several months ago, but I just got it last week. The University of South Dakota Press underestimated the demand by a pretty wide margin. I did not read the any of Wilder's books until I was an adult and read them to my kids.  I loved all the detail about life on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. I remember great descriptions of things like how to build a log cabin and what the brake man did on a train.

http://pioneergirlproject.org/

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Financial History

John Turner on Financial History and Financial Economics

Sean Kenny and Anders Ogren on Corporate Governance of Regulation : Unlimited and Limited Banks Compared in the 1907 Crisis (the paper examines Swedish banks in the 1907 crisis)
It is nice to see some international perspective on 1907. In addition, the paper examines some of the same questions regarding regulation of financial institutions as my recent paper on trust companies in the Panic of 1907.

Monday, January 19, 2015

New Books in Business History

From the Exchange

If you are working on a book you might want to think about how to put capitalism in the title.

In his keynote address to the Economic and Business History Society when it met in Baltimore Lou Galambos discussed the success of history of capitalism as a brand.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

New Stuff on the History of Bankruptcy


Mary O’Sullivan “A Fine Failure: Relationship Lending, Moses Taylor, and the Joliet Iron and Steel Company, 1860-1888,” Business History Review (Winter 2014) examines how one industrial failure actually played out under the 1867 Bankruptcy Act. I found particularly interesting the discussion of conflicts over jurisdiction and the attempts of local courts to protect local interests, including employees and local merchants.

 

M. Susan Murnane, Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. (University of Akron Press) provides a detailed study of how bankruptcy courts actually operated over a long period of time. I learned a lot about how referees were selected and how they operated.