New in Business History

The Business History conference has posted the Program for the 2016 Annual Meeting.

There are many interesting looking sessions. For instance

4.D  Reinterpreting Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Financial Markets
Location TBA
     Chair:  Edward Fertik, Yale University
     Discussant:  David Weiman, Barnard College

Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics
Reinterpreting Corporate Finance: Did the U.S. Really Lag Europe Before 1914?

Mary O’Sullivan, Université de Genève
A Failed Revolution: The U.S. Securities Markets, the Call Market, and the Federal Reserve Act

Eric Hilt, Wellesley College, and Carola Frydman, Kellogg School of Management
Investment Banks as Corporate Monitors in the Early Twentieth Century

The last issue of the 2015 volume of Business History Review is out. The editor's note describes the contents

Fleming on Slavery and the Civil War

The History News Network posted a bizarre essay on slavery and the Civil War by Thomas Fleming. I presume that it is based on his book, which, based on his essay, I have no intention of reading. He suggests that he has a new understanding of the causes of the Civil War. He notes that he is 

“ forced to ask – not for the first time – why Americans in general and scholars in particular do not want to look at two solutions to slavery that might have avoided the holocaust we call the Civil War and its aftermath of hate-laden racism. “

The first of these solutions that scholars do not want to look at is compensated emancipation.

Not once but twice Lincoln offered the South millions of dollars if they would agree to gradually free their slaves over the next 40 or 50 years. With smears and sneers of rage the South refused the offer. Why? –

Why? Perhaps it was because the value of slaves on the eve of the Civil War is estimated to be about 3 billion dollars, not several million. It has been estimated that even if the payments had been spread out over twenty years the payments would have tripled the federal budget. See Roger Ransom’s essay at EH.NET for a quick review. The fact that it has been estimated suggests that historians have considered this solution. Fleming seems to be suffering from “If I haven’t read it, it hasn’t been written” syndrome.

I’m not going to go into Fleming’s second solution. The essence of Fleming's argument is that there could be no peaceful emancipation because white people in the South were afraid. Real historians, such as Alan Taylor, have written about this fear, but they did not use it to make statements like

The South’s embrace of slavery was not rooted in greed or a repulsive assumption of racial superiority.

I understand that HNN has a commitment to ideological diversity, but they should also have some commitment to reasonable standards of logic and evidence. Even if one were to make a reasonable case that fear had come to dominate Southern thinking on emancipation during the Antebellum period, how could you argue that slavery was not rooted in greed (profit seeking) and racism: They originally imported African slaves as a humanitarian gesture toward people that they regarded as equals? How exactly does that argument work? 

The Cotton Kings

Brian E. Baker and Barbara Hahn’s new book The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn of the Century New York and New Orleans shows that it is possible to put capitalism in the title and still write a good history book. I am not going to write a full review, but I will say that I like the book. I’m not sure they are considered part of the new history of capitalism; if they are, the field has taken a turn in a positive direction. Their objective is not to make any sweeping generalizations about capitalism but to examine how it actually functioned in a particular instance. Their focus is first and foremost on understanding what happened. How did people at the cotton exchanges manipulate prices and why did it matter?

In The Cotton Kings people do things. People create the rules that govern markets, they manipulate the rules of those markets, and they form networks and use courts and legislatures to pursue their goals. Sometimes they create rules that bring great benefits to a small number of people; at other times they create rules that spread the benefits more broadly.

They also did two interesting things in terms of the telling of the story. Historians generally struggle with the tension between telling a story so that historians in their field will appreciate it and telling a story so that others will appreciate it. Stories about business, especially those that involve finance, can be particularly difficult to tell. We can’t all have Selena Gomez get people to pay attention to explanations of financial instruments. Baker and Hahn use two devices to try to ease this tension. The first is that terms regarding markets are highlighted throughout the text and defined in a glossary at the end of the book. The approach provides the necessary information without long interruptions in the story. The second device is to place an essay on sources at the end of the book. The term essay on sources may be a bit misleading; it is not about the primary sources. The essay on sources is actually a historiography. It places the book in the literature for other historians. Typically, this discussion would be at the beginning, telling historians why the book is important. Baker and Hahn try to sell the story on its own merits as an interesting and important chapter in American history. I would have actually liked more discussion of the primary sources and how they were used, but that may just be my preference. I find historians stories about how they write history almost as interesting as the history itself.

Rothman on Slavery and Capitalism

Joshua Rothman has written an essay on the new history of capitalism and slavery. In it he illustrates some of the fundamental problems with the recent work in this area.

First, he perpetuates the misleading historiography that claims the new historians of capitalism have overturned the old orthodoxy that slavery was apart from capitalism, pretending that economic historians had not been making that argument for over a half century.  

Second, although he acknowledges that there have been critics, rather than addressing their claims, he writes them off as a matter of dogma rather than analysis. Evidently it is dogma to oppose inaccurate historiography. And it is dogma to expect a historian not to make up evidence. I am willing to say that I subscribe to this dogma.

Yet, as Rothman points out, this work seems to appeal to many people. It seems particularly timely as people worry about the ongoing effects of financial crises, increasing inequality and racial discrimination. This appeal is in some ways the most fundamental problem with the new history of capitalism. “Like my book because I claim that capitalism was the driving force behind the brutality of slavery.” “Like my book because it shows that slavery was the driving force behind American economic growth.” Numerous fans of Baptist’s book have observed that he showed that slave grown cotton accounted for half of economic activity in 1836. But anyone no one who actually reads pages 321 and 322 can fail to see that the numbers are made up and then aggregated in ways that make no sense. People have, however, chosen to overlook that if they like the conclusion. And this is the most fundamental problem: people evaluating someone’s work based upon how well it fits their preconceptions rather than the actual quality of the work. 

Some Economic History Links

Bob Higgs on Doug North

The list of papers being presented at Clio sessions at ASSA.

Sheilagh Ogilivie on the Champagne fairs.

Michalopoulos and Papaioannou on the effects of the “Scramble for Africa”

Since My Last Post

The end of the semester has kept me away from this blog for a while. Once grading was done, Mary and I went up to Mercatus to see Eric Chaney present his research on “Religion and the rise and Fall of Islamic Science” at the Washington Area Economic History Seminar. Here is the version of the paper available on his page at Harvard.

We also went up to Philadelphia for a couple of days. We had dinner at our favorite restaurant, Pumpkin, and at Fork, which was also very good. While I’m at it, we usually stay at the Palomar and have breakfast at Schlesinger’s

Also went to the Art Museum this is my favorite thing there.

In the world of economic history

There is a new Chinese Economic History blog. Among other things, it has a number of interesting interviews.

In addition to the usual collection of interesting papers Journal of Economic History has four essays on the future of economic history.

Bakker, Crafts and Woltjer put out a new working paper  “A vision of the Growth Process in a Technologically Progressive Economy: the United States, 1899-1941.”

“Abstract

We develop new aggregate and sectoral Total Factor Productivity (T FP ) estimates for the United States between 1899 and1941 through better coverage of sectors and better measured labor quality, and show TFP –growth was lower than previously thought, broadly based a cross sectors, strongly variant intertemporally, and consistent with many diverse sources of innovation. We then test and reject three prominent claims. First, the 1930s did not have the highest TFP –growth of the twentieth century. Second, TFP –growth was not predominantly caused by four leading sectors. Third, TFP –growth was not caused by a ‘yeast process’ originating in a dominant technology such as electricity.”

Historians on Edward Baptist

Al Zambone and Bob Elder discuss the book on the podcast Historically Thinking.

Trevor Burnard discusses Baptist’s responses to his critics. Burnard writes that “repeatedly, Baptist puts himself up as the authority on slave testimony; places himself as the judge of what is contained in slave testimony, and suggests that all of his critics are deficient because they don’t take slave testimony as seriously as he does.”

I tried to explain Baptist’s position to someone by pointing out that he seems to believe he speaks for the enslaved the way the Lorax speaks for the trees. The only difference is that the trees did not speak, the enslaved did.