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CLAH Lecture: Living with History as a Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

Herbert S. Klein
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Extract

Looking over the course of my half century working in the fields of LatinAmerican and US history, I find that from the beginning to the end I have beenworking in a relatively isolated area of our historical profession. I have beencommitted to history as a social science, and in that framework, using mostlycomparative and quantitative analysis to study themes related to basic socialand economic structures. In this I have been much influenced by the traditionalvision of the Annales school of historical research. I have also been totallycommitted to working within the social sciences, having completed a minordoctoral field in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Articles
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The Americas , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 291 - 301
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Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2016 

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References

1 Herbert S. Klein, the Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and long-time professor at Stanford University, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator of the Latin America Collection at that institution's Library & Archives. He is the 2015 recipient of the Conference on Latin American History's Distinguished Service Award. This lecture was delivered as he received the award at the CLAH annual conference in Atlanta, January 2016.

2 Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, Klein, Herbert S., and Engerman, Stanley “Nineteenth Century Cuban Slave Prices in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 88:4 (December 1983): 1201–1218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Klein, Herbert S., with Carmagnani, Marcello, “Demografía histórica: la población del obispado de Santiago, 1777–1778,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de Historia 32:72 (Primer Semestre, 1965): 57–74.Google Scholar

4 The works cited in this note and the succeeding are largely by Herbert S. Klein, with collaborations and exceptions as noted. With Engerman, Stanley, “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor: Notes on a Comparative Economic Model,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century, Fraginals, M. Moreno, Pons, Frank Moya, and Engerman, Stanley L., eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 255–269;Google Scholar “Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro,” Cahiers d'Études Africaines (Paris) 15:59, pp. 381-398; “Slave Mortality on British Ships, 1791–1797,” in Liverpool, The African Slave Trade and Abolition, Occasional Papers, Vol. 2, Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair, eds. (Liverpool: Historical Society of Lancashire and Chesire, 1976), 113–122; “Facteurs de mortalité dans le trafic française d'esclaves au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales. Économies, Societés, Civilisations 31:6 (l976), 1213–1223; “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and their Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly 35:2 (April 1978): 357–374; “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor: Notes on a Comparative Economic Model,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor, Fraginals et al., eds., 255–269; “A demografia dos escravos americanos,” in População e sociedade. Evolução das sociedades pré-industriais, Maria Luiza Marcílio, ed. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984), 208–227; jointly with Katia Mattoso, “Trends and Patterns in the Prices of Manumitted Slaves: Bahia, 1819–1888,” Slavery & Abolition (London) 7:1 (May 1986): 59–67; “Methods and Meanings in Price History,” in Growth and Integration in the Atlantic Economy: Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America, Lyman Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 9–20.

5 With Leff, Nathaniel, “O crescimento da população não Européia antes do início do desenvolvimento: O Brasil do século xix,” Anais de História 6 (1974), 51–71 Google Scholar

6 With Kelley, Jonathan, “Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory of Stratification in Post-Revolutionary Society,” American Journal of Sociology 83:1 (July l977), 78–79;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory Applied to the National Revolution of Bolivia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

7 With Tepaske, John, Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America, 1580-1825. (3 vols.; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Ingresos e egresos de la Real Hacienda en Nueva España (2 vols.; Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia, 1986, 1988; These 5 volumes are available in Excel files at http://realhacienda.colmex.mx/.

8 With Barbier, Jacques, “Revolutionary Wars and Public Finances: The Madrid Treasury, 1784–1807,” Journal of Economic History 41:2 (June 1981): 315–339;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Las prioridades de un monarca ilustrado: el gasto público bajo el reinado de Carlos III, 1760–1785,” Revista de Historia Económica 3:3 (1985): 473–495; and “Recent Trends in the Study of Spanish American Colonial Public Finance,” Latin American Research Review 23:1 (1988): 35–62.

9 With Paiva, Clotilde, “Slave & Free in 19th-century Minas Gerais: Campanha in 1831,” Slavery & Abolition (London) 15:1 (April 1994): 1–21;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Freedmen in a Slave Economy: Minas Gerais in 1831,” Journal of Social History 29:4 (June 1996): 933–962.

10 With Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Brazil since 1980 (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also, with the addition of de la Costa, Iraci, Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (São Paulo: EDUSP & Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2009);Google Scholar Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

11 With Vinson III, Ben, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed., revised (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

12 A Population History of the United States, 2nd ed., revised (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); with Bergad, Laird, Hispanics in the United States, 1980–2005 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar

13 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, chapt. 1.

14 See for example Eichengreen, Barry, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Misuses of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015);Google Scholar and Reinhart, Carmen M. and Rogoff, Kenneth, This Time Is Different (Princeton University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

15 See for example Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014);Google Scholar and Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).Google Scholar For reviews by economic historians of the Baptist book, see Logan, Trevon D., Olmstead, Alan L., et al., Journal of Economic History 75:3 (September 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46708, accessed August 14, 2016; and the review of the Walter Johnson book by the historian Philip Morgan in the American Historical Review 119:2 (April 1915), pp. 462–464. These authors note the absence of an engagement with the traditional economic history literature on the subject, and even the absence of historians who wrote on these subjects in the past century. In contrast, see the very positive review of the Baptist book by Eric Foner, New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 3, 2014, which shows no awareness of these problems. As Naomi Lamoreaux has noted, both this book and Becket's, Sven Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)Google Scholar “reveal the significant errors that resulted from the author's lack of economic intuition or knowledge of research findings bearing on their topics.” Lamoreaux, Naomi, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,” Journal of Economic History 75:4 (December 2015): 1251–1257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 A key pioneering work is North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A useful survey of the early work in this new institutional economic history is found in Nunn, Nathan, “The Importance of History for Economic Development,” Annual Review of Economics, 2009, Vol. 1: 65–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For compilatons of many of their earlier articles, see Sokoloff, Kenneth L. and Engerman, Stanley L., Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);Google Scholar and Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James A., “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91 (2001): 1369–1401;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002): 1231–1294; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95 (May 2005):546–579; and Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A subset of these debates concerns the development of differing legal institutions and their impact on the economy. See La Porta, Rafael, de Silanes, Florencio Lopez, and Shleifer, Andrei, “The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins,” Journal of Economic Literature 46:2 (June 2008): 285–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Coatsworth, John H., in “Inequality, Institutions, and Economic Growth in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40 (2008): 545–569 CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a useful critique of these new models as they apply to Latin America.

17 Wong, R. Bin, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);Google Scholar Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Hajnal, John, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History, Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C., eds. (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 101–146;Google Scholar Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Wong, R. Bin, Before and Beyond Divergence; The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the new work of Hoffman, Philip T., Why Europeans Conquered the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 The basic works are by the sociologists Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1990)Google Scholar, and Skocpol, T., Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University. Press 1995).Google Scholar In addition, there is the important historical survey by the economist Lindert, Peter, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Among historians producing first-class research on this topic are Baldwin, Peter, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Dutton, Paul V., Origins of the French Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Limiting discussion to only a few of these themes, one can begin with the older studies by O'Donnell, Guillermo, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1979)Google Scholar; and the volume edited by O'Donnell, Guillermo and Schmitter, Philip, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. From there, one might go on to raising such questions as why military regimes peacefully leave office, which occurred throughout Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. That theme is analyzed by Wintrobe, Ronald, “The Tinpot and the Totalitarian: An Economic Theory of Dictatorship,” American Political Science Review 84:3 (1990): 849–872 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One might also ask why and how it is that states adopt similar reforms or even common revolutionary activities. See Weyland, Kurt, ”Theories of Policy Diffusion: Lessons from Latin American Pension Reform,” World Politics 57:2 (January 2005): 262–295 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A good review of the debates in political science about the role of presidents and parliaments in Latin America is found in Munck, Gerardo L., “Democratic Politics in Latin America:New Debates and Research Frontiers,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 437–462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Tilly, Charles, “Why History Matters,”in Oxford Handbook of Political Science, Goodin, Robert E., ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 525 Google Scholar.

21 Klein, Herbert S., “A participação politíca no Brasil do século XIX: os votantes de São Paulo em 1880,” Dados. Revista de Ciéncias Sociais (Rio de Janeiro) 38:3 (1995): pp. 527–544.Google Scholar This work formed part of the dataset used by the economists Bértola, Luis, Castelnovo, Cecilia, Rodríguez, Javier, and Willebald, Henry, in “Income Distribution in the Latin American Southern Cone during the First Globalization Boom and Beyond,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50:5–6 (2009): 452–485;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also my work with Willis, Edmund P., “The Distribution of Wealth in Late Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Histoire Sociale/Social History (Ottawa):18:36 (November 1985): 259–283.Google Scholar

22 See for example González, Rafael Dobado, and Montero, Héctor García, “Colonial Origins of Inequality in Hispanic America: Some Reflections Based on New Empirical Evidence,” Revista de Historia Económica 28:2 (2010): 253–277;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Coatsworth, “Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America.”

23 This began with the work of Henry, Louis, Manuel de démographie historique (Geneva: Droz, 1967)Google Scholar. who proposed a model using parish records to reconstruct historical demographic indices, which resulted in producing an abundant literature in family reconstitutions for Mexico and Brazil. For Latin America, see for example my essay “Familia y fecundidad en Amatenango, Chiapas, 1785–1816,” Historia Mexicana 36:2 (October-December 1986): 273–286; as well as the survey by Romero, Cecilia Andrea Rabell, La población novo hispana a la luz de los registros parroquiales (Mexico: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1990)Google Scholar; Marcilio, Maria Luiza, Caiçara, terra e população (São Paulo: Paulinas-Cedhal, 1986)Google Scholar; and most recently Inostroza, Xochitl, “Matrimonio y familia en sociedades andinas: propuestas desde la reconstitución de familias de Santiago de Tacrama o Belén. Altos de Arica, Virreinato del Perú (1763–1820),” Historia (Santiago) 47:1 (2014): 65–90.Google Scholar In turn, the so-called Cambridge School led by Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost, (New York: Scribner, 1973)Google Scholar, and Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, had its impact in early colonial US history in the works of historical demography, including those by Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth; Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Lockridge, Kenneth A., A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: Norton, 1970)Google Scholar. See the survey of this work by Archer, Richard, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 47:4 (October 1990): 477–502 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See the controversial studies of McKeown, Thomas, The Modern Rise of Population (London: Edward Arnold, 1976)Google Scholar; and Fogel, Robert W., The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For alternative arguments on the impact of public policies as primary influences see Cutler, David M. and Miller, Grant, “The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The Twentieth-Century United States,” Demography 42:1 (2005): 1–22;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Szreter, Simon, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline, c. 1850–1914: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine 1:1 (1988): 1–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the significant impact of actual medical interventions in the less developed countries of Latin America in the mid twentieth century—and the rejections of those interventions as a causal for the development of advanced societies—see Arriaga, Eduardo E. and Davis, Kingsley, “The Pattern of Mortality Change in Latin America,” Demography 6:3 (August 1969): 223–242 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 For a survey of the field see Richard H. Steckel, “Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions,” working paper 14536 (Cambridge: [US] National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008). Work in this area for Latin America includes López-Alonso, Moramay, Height, Health, Nutrition and Wealth: A History of Living Standards in Mexico 1870–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2000)Google Scholar; and Frank, Zephyr, “Stature in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro: Preliminary Evidence from Prison Records,” Revista de Historia Económica 24:3 (2006): 465–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 See Diamond, Jared and Robinson, James A., eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. A classic and often-cited study of a natural experiment is that of Card, David and Krueger, Alan B., “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84:4 (September 1994): 772–793.Google Scholar

27 See my essay, “The First Americans: The Current Debate,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 46:4 (Spring 2016): 543–561.

28 Klein, Herbert S., with Luna, Francisco Vidal, “Mudanças sociais no período militar (1964–1985) in Cinquenta anos: a ditadura que mudou o Brasil, Aarão, Daniel et al., eds. (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editora, 2014), 66–91;Google Scholar and Klein, “População e sociedade, 1960–2000,” in Historia do Brasil Nação: 1808–2010, 5 vols., Leila Schwarz, ed. (São Paulo: Fundación Mapfre & Editora Objetivo, 2014), Vol. 5, 31–73.

29 Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy, “The Fall and Rise of Economic History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2014. For an attempt to weld cultural history with a very strange reading of economic history, see the recent essay by Lipartito, Kenneth, “Resassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,” American Historical Review 121:1 (February 2016): 101–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 For a thoughtful discussion of how economists and historians can work together and the problems that will arise if they remain apart, see the essay by Lamoreaux, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,”1251–1257.