The 1970 meeting of the Economic History Association in Dallas, Texas, marked die organization's thirtieth anniversary. Occasions such as this call for certain ritualistic responses—as every husband knows—and the Program Committee was more than willing to satisfy the demands of tradition. Thus our anniversary program included a review of past accomplishments in the various branches of economic history. To balance this review, however, we introduced an element which seldom plays a visible role in the anniversary: a set of resolutions or guidelines for future work in the field. By design, each of the sessions had both a past and future dimension.

The President of this Association is like a species of short-lived insect, whose only function in life is to lay an egg, and then to die. Yet, like the walking candle, a President has this brief moment on stage, and his obscurity before and after it makes him determined to burn all the more brightly.

Few recent intellectual currents have been so self-consciously controversial as the New Economic History. It has been a rare meeting patronized by historians or economists that has not featured a discussion of the merits and defects of applying theoretical and quantitative constructs to historical problems. This occasion is obviously no exception. Yet milestones must be respected, and on this thirtieth anniversary, a review of the profitability, if not the viability, of the new techniques being applied to economic history seems very much in order.

This paper attempts to illustrate some future areas of quantitative historical research which have not yet received the attention we think they deserve. Our interest is primarily in aggregate economic systems. This emphasis is not motivated by a distaste for the analytical tools of microeconomics. On the contrary, a central premise of this paper is that macroeconomic models are ideally deduced from propositions about the behavior of individual decision-making units, and that they also critically depend on rules for the aggregation of such behavioral relationships. In fact, quantitative economic historians have long recognized the critical role played by aggregation rules in historical analysis. And, in the end, it will be the quantitative economic historian who will best be able to evaluate the efficacy of the employment of such rules in specified historical circumstances.

In this paper, I will discuss three classic problems in economic history. I label them “classic” because they are problems of general interest that share the central characteristic of classic problems: an extensive literature has not led to general agreement. They are taken from the literature on the history of the United States because of the wealth of data and secondary material on this country's history, but they all have their analogues or reflections in European history. They are the problems of labor scarcity in America, the depression of the 1930's (which Americans call the Great Depression), and the deflation of the late nineteenth century (which the British call the Great Depression).

The production of economic history, like that in many fields of scholarly endeavor, increased sharply in the past quarter-century, compared to the rate of output in earlier eras. While the “new” economic history, with its emphasis on economic theory and measurement, has attracted considerable attention during the last decade, “traditional” economic history, written along institutional lines, has continued to be significant, both quantitatively (in terms of numbers of books and articles) and qualitatively (as assessed by contributions to our understanding of economic processes.)

Forecasting developments in firm and industry studies during the next decade is a risky business. Students of firms and industries ask widely different questions about the causes, processes, and/or results of change, and they employ an equally wide variety of methodologies in seeking answers. As a result, objectives are more surrounded and enveloped than taken in accordance with a widely accepted and nicely articulated battleplan. This paper, then, is not offered as a battleplan for the next decade but as a survey of the fronts where the possibilities of advance seem most promising, with some effort to suggest targets and weaponry that are or might become relevant.

The meteoric rise of the new economic history reflects the fact that historians abhor a vacuum and sometimes it seems to reflect an even baser instinct that any theory is better than no theory. Of course, any explanation always uses theory; however, it was usually implicit and frequently a bouillabaisse in which Marx, Veblen and the German historical school floated around in as equally indigestible lumps. But the combination of an internally consistent paradigm based on a few simple assumptions and the mysteries of econometrics simply overwhelmed the older historian, as much as anything else, because he could not understand the rules of the game, much less play it. But even while the new breed was destroying one traditional explanation after another, the traditional historian even in retreat kept muttering over and over, “But you are destroying the existing myths without replacing them. Soon there will be no explanation—no economic history—just an immense heap of numbers.” And sometimes, plaintively from the left flank of the retreating historians, there would come the cry, “But institutions ARE important!”

When World War II broke out, the economic history of Modern Europe was largely an underdeveloped and uncultivated field. One country only, Britain, had a well-established school of economic historians, which was already quite prolific. In Germany, there had been a promising start at the end of the 19th century, mostly with the historical school of economists, but it had largely petered out, even before the deadly influence of Nazism set in. In other countries, a number of scholars had done valuable and even brilliant work, but they were few and isolated, and political, diplomatic, religious history remained supreme. This was the case, for example, in France, which had one single chair of economic history in its eighteen universities, despite the passionate campaign which had been waged during the 1930's to promote work in economic and social history by the new journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, under the leadership of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Moreover, pre-war economic history was mostly institutional, with a side-line in the study of techniques and innovations. As Professor Herlihy points out in another article for works on the earlier centuries, scholars were “thinking primarily in terms of institutions and of total economic systems based upon them.”

What are the new interests, the new methods, and the new conceptions of European economic development which over the past thirty years have formed or reformed our discipline? In partial answer to this difficult question, we shall first consider the economic history of what we may call traditional Europe, and which we shall extend, very roughly, from the early Middle Ages until the seventeenth century.

At a time when so many people under thirty regard most people over thirty as hopeless dotards, an almost sexegenarian cannot feel too comfortable as the caster of horoscopes for future medieval research. Surely David Herlihy would have been a more suitable prophet, had he not been assigned the traditionally historiographic role of inspecting the past; so would Harry Miskimin, were he not otherwise employed. Here I am, nevertheless, with no choice but trying to race ahead as fast as I can; fifteen minutes, one and a half per century of the middle ages, are quickly gone.

It is graceless, perhaps, to begin by quarrelling with the program committee in my initial remarks, but I must plead that the assignment itself—to propose an agenda for early modern economic history—provides a mandate for such seemingly uncouth behavior. The controversial issue, of course, is the periodization of economic history into the traditional Middle Ages (pre-1500) and the Early Modern Period (post-1500). The division has never been sharp in political or intellectual history, but it is even less meaningful in economic history—there is no single, dramatic, economic event, no ninety-five theses, to establish a break—and the intellectual consequences of the division at 1500 have often been pernicious. When specialists of the early modern period assert nascent capitalism, medievalists point to thirteenth century Italy. When early modernists lay their claims to discovery and colonization, medievalists point first to the early eastern Mediterranean colonies of the Italian city-states and then to the Atlantic explorations of Spain and Portugal, begun in the fourteenth century. If rapid early modern economic growth is the issue, the medievalist will again cry foul and recall that growth was, at least in part, merely the inevitable recovery from the economic collapse of the later middle ages.

Economists and historians have raked over the economic experience of Europe like a family ransacking the town dump for a diamond ring inadvertently dropped into the trash. Now and then they run hurriedly over the whole field. Most of the time they are digging deep in one corner or rushing anxiously from one spot to another, picking up the objects they find there, examining them closely and then discarding them. The results are a junk collector's delight. But they do not necessarily include any diamonds.

What could and should researchers in Asian economic history do during the decade of the seventies? Given the number and the diversity of Asian nations, this is an extremely large question which a person endowed only with a normal amount of ego and without a thorough knowledge of all Asian economic histories should refrain from even attempting to answer. Apparently, however, my ego is above average in size, and to compensate for my much less than complete knowledge of Asian economic history, I resorted to the most efficient method of remedying this weakness: I picked the brains of the leading specialists.

It is frequently remarked that Africa is so diverse as to defy generalization. Perhaps one generalization that can legitimately be made is that today there exists in every sphere of government in every African country a “development consciousness,” preeminent within this consciousness a dependence on economic planning for growth. The historical lessons of Europe and America are proffered and the lessons are studied and more than occasionally applied in the African setting. The Euroamerican historical record is rich and ripe for study; the African record of economic history, on the other hand, nearly does not exist. The embarrassing lacunae of historical work on the economies of Africa is pronounced, whether one is speaking of the transitional economies which through increased trading links first bridged world and African communities in perhaps an irreversible way, or whether one is speaking of the colonial economies of increased dependence, or of the “development economies” of more recent years. And there is irony here, for when seen against the often thin character of the pre-colonial historical record, work on the economic features of pre-colonial Africa seems relatively more substantial than work on the colonial and post-colonial periods.

It will perhaps clarify the remarks that follow if we observe at the outset that the economic history of Latin America is in its infancy. This is not to say that the development of economic institutions, the operation of economic systems, the formation and growth of economic activities and attitudes, and the formulation and execution of economic policy have gone unnoticed in the history of Latin America. It is only to state that the formal discipline of economic history, even the use of economic history as part of a title, are of recent date. As in the historiography of most areas of the world, political developments and personalities in Latin America have constituted the core of historiography, and even today the “new” interdisciplinary history of half a century ago in the United States or the more recent French school of “total” history have drawn few adherents to Latin America. Many factors may be adduced to explain the delayed interest in economic history, but one may hazard the guess that there is a positive correlation between the degree of criticism of the nature and function of an economy and both the quantity and quality of economic historiography. At least in the United States, economic history owes no small debt to a muck-raking tradition. In Latin America, on the contrary, the nature of the literate elite and the limits on education have tended to stifle until recently the development of a body of economic literature of protest and, by extension, of economic history.