ither Economic History, or Economic History is what Economic ...

REVIEW ARTICLE

W(h)ither Economic History, or Economic History is what Economic Historians Do? ROGER MIDDLETON University of Bristol

JOEL MOKYR (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, Vol.I, pp.xli + 538, Vol.II, pp.v + 550, Vol.III, pp.v + 550, Vol.IV, pp.v + 553, Vol.V, pp.v + 539. H/back ISBN 0-19-510507-9 (5 volume set), £450.00). The publication of this encyclopedia should be a cause for celebration, for it has been long-awaited and at last we can look the economists in the face as we now have an equivalent resource to their New Palgrave Dictionary; indeed, possibly a less tendentious resource given the storm that erupted about its partiality and idiosyncrasies.1 It should also be an opportunity for reflection upon the disciplinary health of economic history and of its constituent parts, and most especially in this context business history which, I can reassure readers, features prominently in this enterprise now brought to fruition. If, in the reference work market, size matters then this is a true heavyweight: five substantial volumes, weighing in at 8.5 kg; 2,791 pages in total, comprising 895 entries generated by 629 authors; and all co-ordinated by a US editor-in-chief and a genuinely international editorial board and their advisers. My second reassurance for readers of this journal is that, in terms of the ever-present anxiety about the Americanisation of the social sciences, the entries here are not USdominated. Indeed, on the basis of somewhat casual empiricism, I would estimate that UK-resident contributors constitute approximately 22 per cent of the authors and total entries, and are thus somewhat over-represented in terms of the supplyside of economic history. Moreover, in terms of the largest category of entries (geography: countries and regions, amounting to 182 of the total of 895), Europe (65 entries), Asia (51) and Africa (25) have considerably more presence than do the Americas (28, of which the United States itself has only five entries), this in part no doubt because of the very long time span here covered in many of the country entries, another of the major attributes of this enterprise. II Our favourable initial impressions in terms of size (a proxy for comprehensiveness), time, geography and the international nature of this encyclopedia, can Business History, Vol.46, No.3, July 2004, pp.461 – 473 ISSN 0007-6791 print/1743-7938 online DOI: 10.1080/0007679042000219201 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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then be built upon by applying more formal evaluation criteria. But what are the appropriate criteria for dictionaries, encyclopedia and other reference works; and, given the enormous scale of these volumes, approximately 2.4 million words for the 895 entries, is it acceptable to sample the entries rather than to attempt to read and to encompass the whole? Certainly, the evaluation criteria are less clear-cut than for a scholarly monograph or textbook, but they can and should be made explicit.2 Additionally, and hopefully for this venture, it can be agreed that the reviewer can acquit his responsibilities on the basis of a sample – or at least that he is being more honest than many reviewers of much shorter works in admitting that his judgement derives not from a complete but from a partial reading! – and the significant question then becomes how that sample is derived and analysed. Our criteria are first generic and secondly specific. The former build upon Whitaker’s superb review article of the New Palgrave,3 with which this encyclopedia will naturally and rightly be compared, whilst the latter derive from the preface where the editor-in-chief briefly but adequately explains the encyclopedia from conception to birth, a gestation period of close to a decade and requiring a degree of collaborative activity which perhaps only the close-knit tribe of economic historians could hope to accomplish. Our generic criteria begin appropriately with Adam Smith’s review of what was to become the standard English dictionary for over 150 years until it was superseded by that ultimate of reference works, the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Is it the first port of call for the economic historian, whether they be student or scholar; the indispensable source of ready reference? Thus, as Adam Smith observed in his review of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), ‘Its merit must be determined by the frequent resort that is had to it. This is the most unerring test of its value: criticism may be false, private judgements ill-founded; but if a work of this nature be much in use, it has received the sanction of public approbation.’ 2. Does it provide a magisterial overview of the discipline, of its achievements hitherto and – through establishing its research frontiers – of its future promise and direction? 3. Does it attempt a balanced view of the subject, or like the New Palgrave, encourage ‘diversity and vivacity’ through multiple entries on the same subject? 4. Is it tolerant of the many different schools and divergent views that comprise economic history? 5. Are the selection criteria for entries explicit and defensible; and has the whole been edited for consistency and to excise idiosyncrasy? 6. Are the chosen authors the most distinguished, representative and appropriate in relation to their allotted entries? Have they all given of their best; or, as is so often the case with the genre, have the weak incentives to produce quality products (low pecuniary rewards and low marginal

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7.

8.

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10. 11.

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additions to professional status) resulted in a plethora of routine entries bearing the hallmark of the jobbing economic historian at work? Is the writing clear and the level of technical vocabulary appropriate for the intended audience(s)? In particular, for entries which are necessarily technical (for example, ‘demographic methods’, ‘economic growth’, and ‘market structure’), have authors explained key concepts and empirical relationships and guided the non-specialist reader to the key theoretical and historical literatures? Are the key entries of sufficient standard that they will find a place on undergraduate/postgraduate reading lists, and, if so, for how long if we apply the rule of thumb that the median age of an entry’s bibliographic references at time of publication approximates to its useful life? Is this a reference work or a self-instruction manual which, in lowering the barriers to entry into specialist areas, contributes to the broader education of the economic (business) historian? Are the finding aids appropriate for efficient and accurate location of all entries on or around a topic? Will it endure or quickly become out of date?

Our specific criteria turn from the utility of potential users to the supply-side, as provided by the editor-in-chief, and the ambitions that he and his team had for this enterprise. These necessarily begin with their conception of economic history and of economic historians, of likening, in familiar fashion, the tribe and its endeavours to the inhabitants of a sparsely populated country, surrounded by more numerous neighbours in adjoining disciplines, and confronted with the enormity of their task when ‘economic history encompasses all the material aspects of human existence through and before written history, describing a myriad of diverse forms of economic activity and organization’4 Developing the metaphor, Mokyr then likens these inhabitants to agents in a small open economy who of choice (but also, of necessity) trade with their neighbours, maintaining a high propensity to import from elsewhere in the social sciences and thereby developing methodologies and research agendas which are renowned for their eclecticism. Thus: Economic historians, by the very nature of their field, ask questions that require a bewildering array of diverse specialists. The power and the glory of the discipline has always been its willingness to venture out far afield, to bring to the worlds of the economist and the historian insights and information originating in the netherworlds of engineers, physicians, agronomists, biologists, and geographers, as well as from the more lofty spheres of political philosophy, social thought, and game theory. If ever there was a bunch of eclectic intellectuals who will go almost anywhere to find their models, their evidence, and their inspiration, economic historians are it.5

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This, I think, provides our first criterion: does this encyclopedia generate that sense of intellectual excitement which can bind the tribe together? Does it strengthen disciplinary identity; promote regeneration by attracting newcomers (in face of the stiff competition from adjoining fields for postgraduates); and at least defend, if not improve, the standing of economic history as a distinct and durable sub-field of economics and history (this perhaps a sub-criterion most keenly felt this side of the Atlantic where economic historians, having fallen more amongst the historians than the economists, are somewhat beleaguered)? If interdisciplinarity underpins this first specific test, then the second relates to the success with which the three dimensions of economic history (time, space and complexity of material existence) are constructed and conveyed. Thus, does the encyclopedia live up to its ambitions: 1. 2.

3.

Does it cover all of history, invoking where necessary archaeological and paleontological evidence? Is it genuinely global and international, notwithstanding that the current stock of the economic history literature is largely produced and consumed within Europe and North America? And is it comprehensive in its vision of the entire material existence of the past, embracing not just the agents with which mainstream economists operate (households, firms, organisations/institutions, markets and nationstates) but the anthropology, ecology, sociology, etc. of how people have, in Marshall’s words, gone about the ‘ordinary business of life’?6

If the global economic history that emerges takes us beyond prices and markets to the underlying world of economic interactions within families and other organisations; if it is sensitive to strategic and to opportunistic behaviours, and to where they appear not to be evident; and if it is attentive to behaviours of violence and ignorance as well as to co-operation and rational action, we would truly have something of lasting worth. For that is Mokyr’s ambition in the ‘richness and vastness of the field’; but it seems also his lament when he admits ‘So many topics, so few scholars, so little time’. Our third test is, therefore, one of balance: how do the editors handle the reality of our ignorance of so much of time, space and complexity amidst the sheer weight of what we think we know: those ‘vast patches of terra incognita surrounding little islets of knowledge’?7 With our criteria established, we come then to my reading plan, which was to systematically explore the areas:8 1. 2.

3.

That are specifically relevant to the interests of this journal. That I think I know something about, namely modern British economic history, government and the economy and the methodology and practice of economic history. That I ought to know much more about, with respect to countries (China), sub-fields (demography), current hot topics (anthropometrics, globalisation,

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labour time) and the lives and works of leading economic historians (various, but for sampling purposes taken as the first editors of the Annales d’histoire ećonomique et sociale (established 1929), the Economic History Review (1927) and the Journal of Economic History (1941)). A random sample, selected as the most significant entry from every 50th page (beginning on page 1 of volume I) and approximating to ten per cent of the whole.

III As already indicated, business history fares well in volume terms in this encyclopedia, and in particular benefits from the editorial ambition to step beyond the well-trodden fields of agriculture, banking and textiles, etc., to encompass service activities. The range on offer certainly fulfils the ambition to be ‘eclectic, panoptic and catholic’,9 for services are very widely defined in terms of consumption and production, both market and non-market. Ranging alphabetically from ‘accounting and bookkeeping’ through to ‘zoos and other animal parks’, and including substantial entries for the ‘health industry’, ‘leisure industry’, ‘sports and sport industry’, there are also more diverse entries, such as ‘espionage’, ‘gifts and gift giving’, ‘piracy’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘smuggling’, which capture well the interdisciplinarity of much contemporary writing. Business historians seeking entries for the basic manufacturing industries should be well satisfied with the coverage and, in general, the quality of the key entries, whether for the twentieth century (‘automobile and truck industry’) or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (‘cotton industry’). Each is substantial in scale and scope, being organised sequentially – as with all the key entries for this category (production systems, business history and technology) – as a historical overview followed by sections, in the case of automobiles, on technological change and then industrial organisation and regulation. These two entries try to be global, although cotton is much more successful in this respect than vehicles, but it is to be regretted that neither here nor in the majority of the major industry surveys sampled were basic statistics on global production provided,10 an important lacuna given the impulse that often takes the reader to an encyclopedia. Here, as with the other entries of this category so sampled, the bibliographies and cross-references were generally adequate, but the quality of exposition exhibits a greater variance, although I can with pleasure draw attention to Farnie’s historical overview of the cotton industry, which, displaying a certain Manchester e´lan, guarantees its place in the reading lists (Manchester, of course, being the first British university to establish an economic history chair).11 Readers of this journal will also naturally turn to four other types of entry: those for basic concepts (for example, ‘economies of scale’, ‘economies of scope’, ‘factory system’, ‘Keiretsu’, ‘management’, ‘technology’); industrial organisation (‘cartels and collusion’, ‘integration’, ‘market structure’); institutional features of

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trade (‘commercial partnerships’, ‘joint-stock trading companies’); and biographies (amounting to 29 inventors and writers on technology, 62 bankers, entrepreneurs and labour leaders and 35 economists and economic historians). There are no entries for business history or business historians; many of the biographical entries are inferior in quality, relative to the easily available offerings provided by the standard reference works;12 and the more conceptual entries are often overly US-focused and variable in quality, in part because some key entries are quite simply given insufficient space to develop their theme and therefore to make a significant contribution. Take, for example, ‘technology’, established in the preface as a key theme.13 The choice of author (von Tunzelmann) is spot-on as expert and as expositor,14 whilst the geographical coverage is appropriate. However, this entry will undoubtedly raise the hackles of historians and sociologists of technology; they will resent being depicted as preoccupied with invention processes, and particularly ‘heroic pioneering’, and they will protest that the condensed form of this entry results in the technological determinism of many economic historians, including the editor-in-chief,15 going unchallenged.16 The New Palgrave example shows how greater space for key entries can usefully be provided, thereby strengthening the foundations for all the other entries, although care would be needed to avoid some of the mammoth contributions – such as Chipman’s legendary piece on international trade – which graced that enterprise.17 Turning to the second areas of my reading, and beginning with the economic history of modern Britain, this is where the finding aids first got tested to any significant degree. Those wishing to explore the economic history of any nation state and/or its constituent parts, whether in their current or previous incarnations, will need to use the ‘Topical Outline of Articles’ (Vol.V, pp.307–17) and the Index (Vol.V, pp.359–539) because the former does not contain page numbers. There seems no good reason for this, although I can offer reassurance that the index was tested for reliability: it is both accurate and very comprehensive, as indeed it ought to be at 180 pages of closely printed entries. For the territories of current-day Great Britain, the reader is directed to the constituent parts: England (containing two substantial sub-entries, the earlymedieval period to 1500 and the early modern period to c.1760), Scotland (from pre-Union to modern day), Wales (of similar temporal scope, but more briefly) and the longest entry of all, ‘Great Britain’ (comprising two good entries, Tom Tomlinson on the British Empire and Paul Johnson on the modern period). In addition, of course, the entry for Ireland, and the first two of its three sub-entries, ´ Gra´da on which take the story to 1922, is relevant (there is a separate entry by O the Irish famine). Quibbles aside (including my name incorrectly rendered in one of the references!) these are reliable and informative entries; they cover the main debates; excite further study and guide the reader to the appropriate introductory and more specialist literatures. However, I was surprised that the modern British entry did not reference the recent multi-volume Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain,18 nor, in the Scottish entry, was there mention of work by Clive Lee.19


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Unfortunately, the country entries rarely cross-reference other, more thematic material with a high nation-state content, and for this the finding aids must be invoked. Once you understand the encyclopedia’s structure it is relatively easy to locate the desired entries for agriculture and industry, along with revolutions therein, and for individual sectors, cities, regions, key individuals etc. For Britain, however, this is perhaps a little bit more complex: for example, imperialism is absent, but rendered as ‘colonialism’ and ‘economic imperialism’ together with a large number of separate country entries accessible via the index for British Empire. War, another hardy perennial of the British experience, does get systematic treatment in ‘war and economic history’ and ‘war finance’, and in browsing I came across ‘national defense’ which was not cross-referenced from the two war entries and in turn did not indicate their presence. Tracking down entries can thus be something of a hit and miss affair. Of course, for many readers – and I admit this includes myself as a fan of reference works – part of the utility of the genre is the browsing and non-linear delights therein contained. This was to be tested, however, as I sought entries for government and the economy. Using the topical outline, I began with the conceptual category for institutions, governments and markets. This comprises five constituent subcategories: institutions, somewhat diverse but including charities, organised crime and property rights; externalities, public goods and common goods, which is dominated by sanitation and water supply; public finances, the largest subcategory; regulation, dominated by one large multi-part entry which, in addition to an historical overview, surveys controls over price, quantity, quality and market entry–exit; and institutional features of trade, a medium-sized category relating to domestic and international activities. Here we focus on the public finances sub-category, beginning with the expenditure side of the public economy and of the functions of government. Although there is no entry for government expenditure or public expenditures, the relevant entry (‘public administration’) is quickly found. For those interested in government growth, competing theories of which are introduced in that entry, the reader then needs to consult entries for the major expenditure heads of modern governments (especially ‘income maintenance’) and their antecedents (‘Poor Laws’ and ‘Poor Relief’). Whilst ‘public administration’ is appropriately empirical and comparative, it is very modern, as indeed it must be since it relies so heavily on Tanzi and Schuknecht whose first reference date is 1870.20 By contrast, the welfare expenditure entries are largely bereft of empirical matter. Why do they not use Lindert’s comparative research on social expenditures; why is it not even referenced?21 Those following up on the scale and scope of government have also substantial entries on ‘local public goods’, ‘public goods’ and ‘public utilities’, the last of these having five sub-entries covering the main network industries and giving due attention to technology, differing social contexts and regulatory regimes. The revenue side of the public economy is found in less diverse entries, and principally in a long entry for ‘taxation’ which covers public revenue as well as taxation at central and local levels, and is a very

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successful attempt to survey disparate national fiscal histories. Another substantial entry, on ‘government borrowing’, completes the major public finance entries, though it does not cross-reference the ‘inflation tax’. It does, however, compensate for some of the temporal deficiencies of ‘public administration’ by considering the rise of the fiscal state.22 So far so good: a broadly mixed bag. My qualified favourable impressions of the whole were then rather dented when I turned to the third of the areas about which I think I know something: the methodology and practice of economic history. One must be realistic here, for this is not a handbook or a companion, but I did hope for rather more on the interfaces between economic history and its neighbours, and especially since the editor-in-chief was so explicit on that theme in the preface. After all, such issues lie at the heart of our disciplinary identity and unity; and a whole generation has now elapsed since McCloskey pronounced that cliometricians may well have demonstrated the utility of economics and quantitative methods to historians but the historians have not yet convinced their economist colleagues of the ‘wonderful usefulness of history’.23 Moreover, the New Palgrave had also tried hard in this respect, with no less than three valuable and durable contributions on economic history and economics.24 I had hoped, therefore, for at least an introspective piece on the discipline of economic history; for entries exploring the interfaces with our social science neighbours;25 and for some consideration of methodological debates and trends, not least some pointers to best-practice econometric applications.26 On the discipline itself, we have Whaple’s very short entry on ‘cliometrics’, but no other explicit disciplinary introspection beyond that of the preface. Whaple notes cliometrics’ spread beyond the US, its ‘sinking [of] deep roots in Europe’ but he only references one canonical publication27 and does not direct the reader to other assessments of cliometrics’ achievements.28 Yet, for Europe, there are a series of such analyses;29 and, of course, as transpired at the 2002 Economic History Association annual conference, there are a number of leading economic historians asking whether the achievements of cliometrics are only in the negative, in ‘debunking bad arguments and eliminating outrageous results’.30 This encyclopedia badly needs entries on the history of the economic history discipline, not least its pre-cliometric stages; on its journals; and, perhaps, on the teaching of the subject. For the student audience, the discipline’s history is not easily available here. There are, for example, no entries on the German historical school or the physiocrats, although both are at least indexed; nothing on classical economics or the classical economists; although ‘mercantilism’ is valuable. As for the interfaces of the discipline with the other social sciences, whilst not directly covered they do appear indirectly in a number of entries, especially on current hot topics, as for example in ‘anthropometric history’. This brings us conveniently to the third strand of my reading plan, where I can return to a more positive note. First, on China, a long five-part entry, where I sought a specialist opinion, I can be very positive. I learnt much about the world’s most populous economy and the one to watch in the twenty-first century. These


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entries will find their way onto the reading lists, and in particular the post-1949 entry, which provides a very useful service in uniting two broadly separate literatures (Maoist China and Reformist China) into a systematic discussion not found elsewhere. It is, however, a very Western view of Chinese economic history. Thus many Chinese scholars, only now beginning to publish in the West, view differently the emergence of a market economy and engagement with the international community, but that perspective is not here recorded. The question arises, therefore, whether similar national economic history identities and stories, with respect to Africa, Asia and South America, are not adequately captured here either. My reading on another area of my ignorance (demography) produced mixed results. The core entries are ‘population’, and the linked entries for ‘fertility’ and ‘mortality’ together with the more conceptual ‘demographic methods’ and ‘demographic transition’. The absence from the index of family reconstitution and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure is striking. When I did eventually track down family reconstitution in ‘demographic methods’ (Vol.II, p.68) the brevity of treatment of J. Louis Henry (1911–91) and the rise of historical demography (a term not indexed) was noticeable, as indeed was the mention of the Princeton European Fertility Project but neither the Cambridge group nor the Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques! Of the three hot topics selected, it remains to say on ‘anthropometric history’ that, whilst adequate, it does make a lot of use of the author’s own work and contains no cross-references (neither does the index connect to any other related entries, for example, ‘diseases’, ‘health’, ‘nutrition’, even ‘Fogel’, the entry for which makes no mention of his most recent book).31 My experience with the second topic, globalisation, was also somewhat unsatisfactory, beginning with the discovery that there is no entry under that heading, that the term is not defined anywhere and it is not made clear just how contestable the concept has become in certain quarters. Clearly, this is another topic requiring intensive use of the index, where, having discovered that there is also no entry for international trade, I began with ‘long-distance trade’, and more specifically the last two of the four subentries under this heading which use the periodisation of 1750–1914 and post1914. Both provide strong accounts of trends in trade volumes, trade intensity and changing patterns of area and commodity composition. The references provided are also right up-to-date, with the expected works of Williamson, Hatton, O’Rourke, etc.32 Related work on migration and the development of the international labour market (‘international migration’) and on capital mobility (‘international capital flows’) then rounded out the trade entries, whilst at a late point I found a brief discussion of globalisation of markets in the last sub-section of ‘markets’ and on globalisation and wage inequalities in ‘wages’. Taking these entries together, an interested student could get some understanding of globalisation as a phenomenon and why it matters, but a unifying entry drawing upon this disparate work would have been preferable. By contrast, the final hot topic is easily accessible and under that title (‘labor time’). Written

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by the author of a path-breaking book33 which provides the first rigorous statistical analysis of labour and leisure during Britain’s industrial revolution, upon which it lends important support to de Vries’ ‘industrious revolution’, Voth’s entry shows what can be done in capable hands: global in coverage, truly historical and with something interesting to say for multiple audiences. Our sampling of the lives and works of leading economic historians through the founding editors of the three journals was a return to the land of disappointment: direct hits for Marc Bloch, but not Lucien Febvre; for R.H. Tawney, but not Ephraim Lipson; and nothing for the Journal of Economic History, whether E.A.J. Johnson or his perhaps better known assistant, S.B. Clough. All told, 35 economists and economic historians are included (34 men and Eileen Power), far fewer in total than in the New Palgrave, which arguably has a better and certainly more cosmopolitan coverage of economic historians. Thus, and to take just the early part of the alphabet of stars in economic history’s firmament,34 how was the omission of Cipolla justified; or Ashley, or Bairoch, or Crouzet? It is impossible to know, as the preface does not divulge the selection criteria for individuals, but it is certainly a very Anglocentric choice and it falls well short of the editor-inchief’s injunction to avoid the usual Western-centric biases,35 something which they have achieved so magnificently in terms of the country coverage. We come finally to our random ten per cent sample, which, upon inspection, displays all of the strengths and weaknesses evident so far as we have pursued our reading plan. It just so happens that the sample included the core entries for France and for Germany, both of which are highly valuable for the multiple audiences of this encyclopedia. I was also blessed with the ‘Levant’, similarly full of riches; and ‘clockmaking and time measurement’ which, whilst following a basic Landes-type story, suggests that in an earlier age there may actually have been a culture more time-obsessed than our own. IV A generation ago it was claimed for Britain that ‘The effective emergence of economic history has been one of the significant academic achievements of the last hundred years. What was virtually uncultivated territory a century ago, barely explored even, has become one of the most productive fields on the academic map’.36 Yet recent surveys of history and of the history profession have included no contributions by or about economic history, let alone cliometrics.37 Similarly, contemporary British economists typically shun economic history and economic historians, as for example in the series of British Academy centenary monographs where the Academy’s section S2, that representing these ‘twin tribes’ (and historians of economics), was unable to produce a joint volume. As Winch, one of the editors of the volume that did eventually emerge, recounts: ‘One reaction by an economist who is a member of S2 to the proposal for this volume was more frank than tactful: ‘‘We wouldn’t want to read such a book, so why should we write it’’’.38 Fortunately, section H10 Fellows, representing post-1800 history,

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were recruited along with historians outside of the Academy, and the eventual centenary volume amply demonstrated the vitality of British economic historians and of the economic history of Britain.39 Whilst economic history might be in institutional retreat in Britain,40 and – pace the small open economy model – the discipline running a long-term trade deficit with its neighbours, the publication of this encyclopedia is a testament to its global endurance, relevance and vitality. Of course, when measured against the formal evaluation criteria established earlier, we must arrive at a mixed verdict. We have encountered problems with the finding aids; we wish that some of the contributors had given more care and attention to their entries, in particular that they were somewhat more ambitious; and it is to be lamented that the website for this publication was not more fully integrated into the project, for example, rather than including an appendix on relevant internet sites (Vol.V, pp.319–35), which will quickly date; this could have been the vehicle for ensuring that this reference work is kept perpetually comprehensive and current. This already over-long review article has tried but inevitably cannot do it justice; it does not lend itself to brief and obvious summary, although we can be unequivocal in applauding Mokyr and his team for the triumph of logistics and vision which underpin this enterprise. The sheer global and temporal reach of this collection ensures that it is a must-have for all academic libraries and a strong would-like for many individuals who, enjoying budget constraints not set by their academic salaries, can delight in the genre. Once taken up, the volumes are hard to put down. For those of limited budgets, it is to be hoped that the publisher considers following the New Palgrave model of issuing a number of thematic volumes. NOTES I would thank Patrick O’Brien for assistance at an important point; Richard Smith for helpful discussions on this encyclopedia in relation to the New Palgrave; and my colleagues Paolo di Martino, Christine MacLeod and Phillip Richardson, who read sample entries in their expert areas and thereby allowed me to form a much fuller judgement. Chris also kindly provided references and read and improved a first draft. 1. J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds.), The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 4 vols. (London, 1987). The outstanding critical review was M. Blaug, Economics Through the Looking Glass: The Distorted Perspective of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (London, 1988), but see also for a model of how to evaluate such a reference work, J.K. Whitaker, ‘Palgrave Resurrected: A Review Article’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.97 No.2 (1989), pp.480–96. 2. Patrick O’Brien has long been campaigning for historians to devote more resources, transparency and status to book reviewing; see his ‘Historical Reviews’, History Today, Vol.53 No.2 (Feb. 2003), pp.18–19. 3. Whitaker, ‘Palgrave Resurrected’. 4. Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxi. 5. Ibid. 6. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume (London, 1890), p.1. 7. Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxii. 8. For 1, 3 and 4 I have used my colleagues detailed above to compensate for my ignorance of many specialist literatures and sub-fields. 9. Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxiii.

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10. See, however, Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.II, pp.400–401 for the post-1850 chemical industries as a model of good practice. 11. George Unwin in 1910; see N.B. Harte (ed.), The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures, 1893–1970 (London, 1971), p.xxvi. 12. D.J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography: A Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980, 5 vols. (London, 1984–86). 13. Mokyr (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia, Vol.I, p.xxii. 14. See for example, G.N. von Tunzelmann, ‘Technology Generation, Technology Use and Economic Growth’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.4 No.2 (2000), pp.121–46. 15. Most recently and fully in J. Mokyr, The Gift of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2002) and here in this encyclopedia for the ‘industrial revolution’, the sole entry he contributes. 16. The Society for the History of Technology has conducted a number of debates on this problem, most recently in Technology and Culture, Vol.41 No.4 (2000), pp.752–82. 17. J.S. Chapman, ‘International Trade’, in Eatwell et al. (eds.), New Palgrave, Vol.II, pp.922–55. 18. R.C. Floud and P.A. Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2003). The ‘United States’ entry, comprising four sub-entries (pre-colonial, colonial, antebellum and modern period), makes only one mention of the equivalent publication (S.L. Engerman and R.E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1996–2000)), making one wonder whether these and the British entries are a little dated. 19. For example, C.H. Lee, Scotland and the United Kingdom: The Economy and the Union in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1995). 20. V. Tanzi and L. Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000). 21. P.H. Lindert, ‘The Rise of Social Spending, 1880–1930’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol.31 No.1 (1994), pp.1–37; and idem, ‘Poor Relief versus the Welfare State: Britain versus the Continent, 1780–1880’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.2 No.2 (1998), pp.101–40. 22. We thus have a reference to R.J. Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State, c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999) which concludes a decade and more of collaborative research into Europe’s fiscal systems, but not to recent long-term studies of Britain’s tax system, as in M.J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), and idem, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002). Recent methodological advances are also absent, such as generational accounting, upon which see R.P. Esteves, ‘Looking Ahead from the Past: The Inter-Temporal Sustainability of Portuguese Finances, 1854–1910’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.7 No.2 (2003), pp.239–66. 23. D.N. McCloskey, ‘Does the Past have Useful Economics?’, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.14 No.2 (1976), pp.434–61. 24. R. Floud, ‘Cliometrics’; D.N. McCloskey, ‘Counterfactuals’; and N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Economic History’, in Eatwell et al. (eds.), New Palgrave, Vol.I, pp. 452–4, 701–3, and Vol.II, pp.37–41. 25. Models of good practice in the handbook market include R.E. Goodin and H.-D. Klingemann (eds.), A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford, 1996), which devotes over 30 pages to an exploration of political science in relation to the other social sciences; and in the companion mode, D. Greenaway, M.F. Bleaney and I.M.T. Stewart (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Economic Thought (London, 1991), which concludes with an interface section amounting to 100 pages, including Crafts, ‘Economics and Economic History’, pp.812–29. 26. On the last of these, part of the gap can be filled by T.C. Mills, ‘Recent Developments in Modelling Trends and Cycles in Economic Time Series and their Relevance to Quantitative Economic History’, in C.J. Wrigley (ed.), The First World War and the International Economy (Cheltenham, 2000), pp.34–51. 27. A.H. Conrad and J.R. Meyer, ‘The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol.66 No.2 (1958), pp.95–130. He also references his ‘A Quantitative History of the Journal of Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.51 No.2 (1991), pp.289–301, but not his update (‘The Supply and Demand of Economic History: Recent Trends in the Journal of Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.62 No.2 (2002), pp.524–32) nor his survey of disciplinary opinion on core topics, ‘Where is there Consensus among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey of Forty Propositions’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.55 No.1 (1995), pp.139–54.


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28. Using the index, once can relatively easily locate the work of Robert Fogel, Jonathan Hughes and Albert Fishlow and – less easily for the index records Vol.IV, p.117 rather than the correct Vol.IV, p.107 – Douglass North. 29. See, for example, R.H. Dumke, ‘The Future of Cliometric History: A European View’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol.40 No.3 (1992), pp.3–28; G. Grantham, ‘The French Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French Economic History’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.1 No.3 (1997), pp.353–405; N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Quantitative Economic History’, LSE Working Papers in Economic History, 48/99 (1999); and R. Tilly, ‘German Economic History and Cliometrics: A Selective Survey of Recent Tendencies’, European Review of Economic History, Vol.5 No.2 (2001), pp.151–87. 30. D.C. North and J.V.C. Nye, Abstract for ‘Cliometrics, the New Institutional Economics and the Future of Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.63 No.2 (2003), p.559. 31. R.W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago, 2000). 32. It is encouraging that M.D. Bordo, A.M. Taylor and J.G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003) was included, but inexplicable that H. James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2001) was not, not even in the entry for ‘great depression’. 33. H.-J. Voth, Time and Work in England, 1750–1830 (Oxford, 2001); J. de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol.54 No.2 (1994), pp.249–70. 34. In its latest iteration of August 2002. Douglas Farnie had collected brief biographical details of some 2,200 economic historians on five continents who have contributed to the economic history literature over the last 140 years; available via the Economic History Society’s website: www.ehs.org.uk/AbouttheEHS/BioBibliographicalDRAFTBK010902.doc. 35. Vol.I, p.xxiii. 36. Harte, Study of Economic History, p.xi. 37. P. Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002); D. Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (London, 2002); cf. the earlier incarnation of this latter volume as J. Gardiner (ed.), What is History Today?(London, 1988), pp.31–41 which contained five short essays on the discipline, of which one was prescient in asking ‘what was economic history’ (p.37). 38. D.N. Winch and P.K. O’Brien (eds.), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), p.27; see also Winch’s earlier paper, alas still unpublished, on the ‘disputatious pair’ of economics and economic history since Marshall and Cunningham became founding Fellows: www.kings.cam.ac.uk/histecon/docs/winch_disputatiouspair.pdf. 39. Subsequently, within the same series of centenary volumes – albeit originating as a conference to honour Charles Feinstein (another exemplary economic historian not included in this encyclopedia) – there has appeared P.A. David and M. Thomas (eds.), The Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003), which has done much to demonstrate the possibility of useful trade between the twin tribes. 40. P. Hudson (eds.), Living Economic and Social History (Glasgow, 2001).