Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, l:4 (Primavera, 2020), 547–566.
Anne E. C. McCants
Economic History and the Historians
The 50th Year: Special Essay 10
A good economist “must be mathematician, historiador, statesman, philosopher—
in some degree. Él [sic] must understand symbols and speak in words. He must
contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete
in the same flight of thought. . . . He must be purposeful and disinterested in a
simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near
the earth as a politician.”
John Maynard Keynes, “Obituary Essay
in Memory of Alfred P. Marshall”
Without an historical account of economic behavior, “analysts slip into cul-
tural or functionalist explanations, both of which usually make their appear-
ance when historical dynamics have been neglected.”
Mark Granovetter, Economy and Society
Of all the social sciences, economics is perhaps the most likely to
be characterized as ahistorical. Core economic relationships—say,
between demand, supply, and price; or fundamental motivations,
such as the drive of possessive individualism—are posited as re-
markably stable phenomena across time and place. The neo-
classical model can be applied to seemingly any situation, and homo
economicus increasingly makes his home everywhere, even in a past
that had no specific notion of him. Historia, por otro lado, es
the social science least amenable to generalizable rules of causation;
en efecto, many have argued that it is not a social science at all.
Anne E. C. McCants is a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and Professor of History at MIT,
President of the International Economic History Association, and an Associate Editor of the
JIH. She is the author of Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam
(Champaign,1997); “Historical Demography and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,"
Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XL (2009), 185–214; co-editor, with José M. Lopes Cordeiro,
Paulo B. Lourenço, and Eduardo Beira, of Railroads in Historical Context: Construction, Costs,
y consecuencias (2011–2013).
© 2020 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª, https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01485
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Individual men, and women, might do anything, and the contin-
gency of their choices might just matter profoundly. History in this
guise is, above all, the province of the well-crafted narrative that
revels in gritty particulars that defy easy generalization. In its most
extreme form, what we learn best from someone’s history is pre-
cisely their story, little more but also no less. It is the very specificity
and complexity of that story that makes it worth telling, not what it
might be able to tell us about the future.
Contrast this view with what Gaddis, in his influential book for
teaching historical methods, calls “the pressure for reductionism
within the social sciences. . . . [entonces] as to be able to forecast the future.”
His rejection of this agenda fairly drips with disdain. “The trouble
with the future,” he quips, “is that it’s so much less knowable than
the past.” What reasonable prospect is there then for a long or happy
marriage between economics and history? What hope is there that a
shared topical interest—the economic behavior and outcomes of
temporally distant societies—can truly overcome such fundamental
differences of disciplinary temperament and orientation?1
Neither history nor economics is well served by local practices
that conform to either of these caricatures. Both the neglect of con-
text and the provision of superabundant context limit our ability to
grasp and appreciate what has preceded our moment in time, not to
mention what we might reasonably expect to happen next. Well-
functioning markets (as defined by neo-classical economics) may in-
deed churn along in roughly similar ways across space and time, pero
surely the many instances of what economic rhetoric dismisses as
“market failures,” just like Leo Tolstoy’s many unhappy families,
each need to be situated in the details of their particular evolution.
Además, as economic sociologists such as Mark Granovetter have
cogently argued, all market transactions—especially the successful
unos!—are dependent on human relationships, and so must be sim-
ilarly embedded in their multivalent logics. An economics without
contingency or context is no more useful as social science than are
100 billion (a more or less reasonable estimate of the number of
people who have ever ventured on our planet) individual histories
bereft of a framework in which to situate and evaluate them.
Economic history, done well, could model a path forward for
the social sciences more broadly. It would not discount the agency
1
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Nueva York, 2004), 56.
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of individual actors, nor the social and political considerations (nor
the obvious constraints) that frame many economic decisions. En el-
ther would it overlook what long runs of observational data and
theory-driven models can contribute to the rich description of the
pasado (or an anticipation of forthcoming) decision patterns of indi-
viduals and groups. There could even be room for a modest—not
so much small as humble—appeal to causal analysis to explain not
just what happened and to whom but also why some things hap-
pened when others did not. The future of economic history could
be as promising as our commitment to hold these two disciplinary
inclinations in fruitful and balanced tension will allow.
THE ECONOMIST AS HISTORIAN The informed reader might object
that this is hardly a new observation. A number of prominent econ-
omists have been making this argument for a long time. As Solow
pointed out in 1983, with a hint of dry sarcasm, “It would be a use-
ful principle that economists should actually believe the empirical
assertions they make.” He then suggested, in a more serious vein,
that “the true functions of analytical economics are best described
informally: to organize our necessarily incomplete perceptions about
la economia, to see connections that the untutored eye would
miss, to tell plausible—sometimes even convincing—causal stories
with the help of a few central principles, and to make rough quan-
titative judgments about the consequences of economic policy and
other exogenous events. In this scheme of things, the end product
of economic analysis is likely to be a collection of models contingent
on society’s circumstances—on the historical context, you might
say—and not a single monolithic model for all seasons.”2
In an even more capacious statement, Keynes defined the best sort
of economist as a “mathematician, historiador, statesman, philosopher—in
some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. Él
must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch ab-
stract and concrete in the same flight of thought.” In a recent blog post,
DeLong expressed a similar view in a critique of the typical, blunted
education in economics: “We have no business offering a narrow
economics B.A. en absoluto. At the undergraduate social-science level,
the right way of organizing a major curriculum is to offer some
2 Robert Solow, “Economics: Is Something Missing?” in William Parker (ed.), Económico
History and the Modern Economist (Nueva York, 1983), 23.
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flavor of history and moral philosophy: enough history that students
are not ignorant, enough sociology and anthropology that students are
not morons, and enough politics and philosophy that students are not
fools.” For good measure, DeLong ends this statement by recom-
mending, “a double dose of economics to ensure that majors under-
stand what is key about our civilization and do not get the incidence of
everything wrong.” In his conception of an ideal education, econo-
mists may deserve the last word (on civilization no less!), but at least
they are not so privileged as to offer the only word.3
As someone whose professional training and academic career
have bridged what sociologists might call the “structural hole” be-
tween the disciplines of history and economics, I am especially eager
to reflect on the tensions within that space, as well as the opportuni-
ties that those tensions might afford. This seems particularly apposite
as we mark the birth of the JIH fifty years ago, a time that saw less
hype for interdisciplinary projects than seems to be the case now,
though possibly better prospects for its success, particularly in the case
of the interdisciplinary project of economic history. The death, or at
least serious illness, of economic history in the United States has been
much lamented of late, ironically by practitioners on both sides of the
growing chasm, albeit with different narratives. On his retirement
from the Department of Economics at MIT, Temin wrote a
much-discussed essay on the “rise and fall” of economic history at
CON. People interested in economic behavior in historical contexts
were not entirely missing from the MIT faculty after 2015 (to wit, el
economic sociologists in the Sloan School of Management or the
Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as a few holdouts
in the History Department like myself ), but they were largely miss-
ing from the Department of Economics by then.4
John Maynard Keynes, “Obituary Essay in Memory of Alfred P. marshall,” Economic Journal,
3
XXXIV (1924), 311–372. Brad DeLong’s blog is available at https://www.ineteconomics.org/
perspectives/ blog/thoughts-on-skidelskys-rant-against-the-current-economics-curriculum
(accessed August 25, 2015).
4 Google ngram suggests that the word interdisciplinary did not make its first discernable appear-
ance in English books until the 1950s. The term gained traction from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s
before reaching a plateau and peaking near the year 2000. As a reference point, multi-disciplinary is
substantially less common, barely rising in usage between 1970 y 2000. For a fuller discussion of
this concept in the social sciences, see Harvey Graff, “The ‘Problem’ of Interdisciplinarity in
Teoría, Practice, and History,” Social Science History, XL (2016), 775–803. His book on the same
topic across all academic disciplines is Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth
Century (baltimore, 2015). Peter Temin, “The Rise and Fall of Economic History at
CON,” History of Political Economy, XLVI (2014), 337–350.
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Historians lament not so much the decline in the number of
practitioners of economic history as the nature and quality of the
interdisciplinary conversation itself, especially as practiced in eco-
nomics. Their complaint is not Temin’s, that economics has aban-
doned the field but that economists appropriated it and then
proceeded to impoverish it. In another seminal essay from 2014,
Adelman and Levy at Princeton took their case to the Chronicle
of Higher Education. Their assessment of the divide is simple and
dismissive:
Once a mainstay of history departments, economic history was,
with historians’ complicity, seized in the mid-20th century by
economists who sucked the culture and chronology out of it and
turned it into an obscure province of mathematical formulas. Allá
it languished. The field became increasingly uncool. . . . Desde
[technical economic historians] don’t write for historians, even if
they wring them for data, historians’ basic assumptions about the
contested nature of narratives, and the craft that must go into con-
structing them, do not get through. No wonder, entonces, that many
historians take one look at what passes for cutting-edge economic
historia, shrug, and move on.5
Adelman and Levy end their piece on an upbeat note, invocar-
ing the thriving interest among American historians in the debate
about the “new history of capitalism” as evidence that economic
history is returning to its historical roots. They even express hope
that economists will begin imitating historians rather than the other
way around. Sin embargo, given the recent tenor of the debate (brawl
might be a more apt term) about the economics of American slavery
between cliometricians based in economics departments and the
self-styled historians of capitalism, this hope seems misplaced. En-
deed, por 2017, Cowrie, a New Deal historian at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, could publish an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled
“Why Are Economists so Small-Minded?” Even if the main charges
that he leveled at the economics profession are true—that historical
context and accuracy are essential to social-scientific inquiry and
Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy, “The Fall and Rise of Economic History,” Chronicle
5
of Higher Education, 1 Dec. 2014. The title is an oblique reference to the title of Temin’s essay
when it circulated as a working paper before appearing in print. See Alan Olmstead and Paul
Rhode, “Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism,” Explorations in Economic
Historia, LXVII (2017), 1–17.
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that methodological control can work like a protection racket—
economists were hardly likely to view them as an overture to open
dialog with historians; they had the insulation, at the very least, de
higher academic salaries and greater public status. We can only hope
that Lamoreaux’s sensible plea for a middle ground does not fall on
deaf ears: “Culture is not fate, and neither are the disciplinary prac-
tices that prevent economists and historians from improving each
other’s scholarship.”6
How might a new civil interdisciplinary conversation under
the rubric of economic history be fashioned to create a better un-
derstanding of our world? What might economics stand to gain if
it took history more seriously, in ways that were recognizable to
the majority of practicing historians? What would history gain
from a more open mind toward the insights of social theory? Hace
economic history have a future in the next fifty years of scholar-
ship in the JIH, a journal that, notwithstanding its heavy reliance
on quantitative methods, did not embrace “technical economic
history.” After all, as Adelman and Levy observe, the Journal of
Economic History never did so either. Is there too much water under
the proverbial bridge to revive Keynes’ notion of a good econo-
mist as something of a historian and a philosopher (leaving aside
the statesman’s role for now)? Certainly not.
The aims and discoveries of historians can contribute to fos-
tering “good economics” in at least five ways:
(1) As a first step, historians’ use of archival, material, y
oral sources, parsed through the lens of multiple disci-
plinary methodologies, is crucial to an accurate recon-
struction of the past. Such should be the basis of all
social-science inquiry.
(2) The study of history “disrupts inevitabilities,” suggesting
that events and outcomes might have been different than
they actually were. The paths not taken were not neces-
sarily unviable just because they were not selected. Su-
tory allows us to ponder these discarded alternatives as
possibly relevant in other times and places.
Jefferson Cowrie, “Why Are Economists so Small-Minded?” Chronicle of Higher Education,
6
7 Feb. 2016. Naomi Lamoreaux, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,"
Journal of Economic History, LXXV (2015), 1256.
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(3) History can confer a critical perspective on the present,
tempering our hubris about the supposed virtues of con-
temporary manners and mores. As Butterfield wrote in
1949 as he looked back on two world wars and a devastating
depresión, “The river of time is littered with the ruins of
systems.” Although we cannot now imagine anyone want-
ing these systems to persist, the people who devised them
did. “They did not imagine us,” Butterfield said, any more
than we can imagine those who will follow us. The future
may well disdain our systems with equal vehemence.
(4) The study of history “widens our horizons of empathy,"
helping us to imagine the world of others. Carlo Cipolla
always began his classes with an admonition borrowed
from the first line of L. PAG. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between
(Londres, 1953): “The past is a foreign country—they do
things differently there.” Even if not always true, es
nonetheless always worth keeping in mind.
(5) Finalmente, history can protect us from a truncated view of
the past that tends toward a misguided nostalgia.7
In academic life, nostalgia per se may
THE DANGERS OF NOSTALGIA
not appear to have much weight, but in public life its effect is of-
ten consequential. Nostalgia can be insidious, because it encour-
ages us to sever happy memories from any trace of the less
enjoyable baggage that might have accompanied them.
Getting vaccinated is unpleasant. Dying of measles is worse.
In the decade before the 1963 vaccine for measles emerged, un
average of 475 Americans died from measles every year, most of
them children. Este (absolute) number had dropped to a low of
1 en 1981, despite a steadily increasing population that might have
hypothetically contributed additional cases. Sadly, the number of
measles cases in the United States has been steadily climbing up-
ward again because we seem not to remember the ravages of the
disease so much as the inconvenience of the shot—even without
taking into account the absurd rejection of the solid scientific
7 This list expands on the claims made for historical practice by Paul Kramer in “History in a
Time of Crisis,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 Feb. 2017 (elementos 2 y 4 borrow his felicitous
expresiones). Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (Nueva York, 2009; origen. pub. 1949), 75.
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evidence in favor of vaccinations. Many people still have an elderly
relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of
us has an elderly relative who did not. The blurring of the histor-
ical evidence for and against vaccination that arises from strangely
incongruous historical narratives allows a seemingly inconsequen-
tial but nonetheless deadly nostalgia to run rampant.
The area of public policy can also offer other cases in which a
distorted past can wreak havoc. Take the policy debate about the costs
and benefits of industrial regulation designed to mitigate air pollution.
The costs are relatively straightforward to estimate as they are borne in
the present, but an appreciation of the benefits often requires an active
historical imagination. Por ejemplo, anyone who travels or even just
reads a major newspaper may be well acquainted with the contempo-
rary dangers of toxic particulates for pedestrians or bicyclists in Beijing.
Yet how many Westerners remember the iconic London fog of yore
that was just as toxic or, when not so long ago, smog alerts closed
schools in southern California as frequently as snow days do now in
the Northeast? The research of economic historians on American
cities is suggestive in this regard: Clay, Luis, and Severnini discovered
that early twentieth-century Chicago had higher particulate con-
centrations than do the industrial cities of China today.8
En efecto, in the early part of the twentieth century, American cities
broadly suffered from dire levels of air pollution, largely on account of
the burning of bituminous coal for heat. En 2014, Barreca, Clay, y
Tarr estimated that the impact of this pollution on mortality was
substantial. Reductions in the use of bituminous coal for heating
American homes between 1945 y 1960 decreased overall mortality
in winter by 1.25 percent and infant mortality in winter by 3.27 por-
centavo, saving nearly 2,000 lives per winter month, 310 of which were
infantes. Además, for reasons that the authors explain in detail,
those estimates are likely to be a lower bound, because they capture
primarily the short-run relationship between coal and mortality, no
effects that accumulate throughout extended periods of exposure.9
8 Karen Clay, Joshua Lewis, and Edson Severnini, “Canary in a Coal Mine: Infant Mortal-
idad, Property Values, and Tradeoffs Associated with Mid-20th Century Air Pollution,” NBER
Working Paper No. 22155, Figure A.1, Marzo 2016 (rev. Junio 2019), disponible en https://
www.nber.org/papers/w22155 (accessed Sept. 18, 2019).
9 Alan Barreca, Clay, and Joel Tarr, “Coal, Smoke, and Death: Bituminous Coal and
American Home Heating,” NBER Working Paper 19881, Febrero 2014, available at
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19881 (accessed Sept. 18, 2019).
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Another example of dangerous reverence for the past con-
cerns the flurry of popular enthusiasm lately (at least if the pundits
del 2016 American election are to be believed) for the “good
old days” of the 1950s when a family could live securely on just
one income (in these nostalgic accounts, that one income is usually
a man’s). Lest we forget, these are the same good old days of poor
air quality and measles. Maybe trivial in comparison but certainly
indicative of the scope of the cognitive problem that nostalgia pre-
sents, the average size of a new home built in America in 1950 era
983 sq. ft.; por 2010, the average size had risen to 2,392 sq. ft. Given
that families were larger on average in the 1950s than they were in
2010, per capita space allocation had risen even faster than total
área. Although we might not need that much personal space, muchos
of us have become used to it. Older furniture now looks tiny
compared to what is now on offer in showrooms, whereas older
television sets were behemoths with miniscule screens showing
programs in glorious black and white.
Are the people who long to live on one male income also
prepared to lower their standard of living to the then-prevailing
nivel? Do they remember what that level was? How many house-
holds actually lived on just one income, anyway, regardless of
what people believe to have been the case? The boost to income
from boarders, various types of at-home work, and child labor
(whether paid or not) played a much larger economic role in
the not-so-distant past than most popular narratives of the bygone
days suggest. Many supposedly “non-working” women actually
worked extremely hard. But a proper accounting of such matters
requires the data of economic historians, not to mention a histor-
ical imagination sufficiently practiced to situate those data. No
only do the facts not speak for themselves; they also do not gen-
erate themselves. Without the work of historians, they simply do
not exist. The only genuine defense against the obfuscations of
nostalgia is serious, empathic, and quantitative historical study.
If media attention is the correct
THE PROBLEM OF INEQUALITY
métrico, economic inequality is the most pressing economic ques-
tion of our day. Tal como, it demands insights from historical in-
quiry: What causes it, what are its consequences, and what can
we do about it, if anything? The unexpected runaway commer-
cial success of Piketty’s long and dense Capital in the Twenty-First
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Century, as well as the proliferation of academic and popular re-
sponses to it, are a clear indication of the current salience of this
topic. For Piketty, the admittedly “imperfect lessons” that history
has to offer are of “inestimable, irreplaceable value.” Not surpris-
ingly, many of his respondents, even when generally appreciative,
tend to focus their critique not on his application of economic the-
ory but on his reading of the historical evidence. Recent work in
the pages of the JIH argues forcefully that historians have been
much too reticent about the problem of inequality, urging them
to rejoin the fray.10
Historians certainly have not lost interest in studying poverty,
a topic with which they have engaged intensively. Practitioners of
the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s, En particular, re-
garded study of the mostly silent and dispossessed members of the
underclass as a badge of honor. But the leap from the study of pov-
erty itself, and the life stories of its victims, to an analysis of the
social forces that tend toward inequality has proven difficult for
many scholars to make. Milanovic, an economist intent on iden-
tifying the specific problems associated with interpersonal inequal-
ity concedes that this topic is “not too popular”: As he bluntly puts
él, “Inequality studies are not particularly appreciated by the rich.”
To study poverty is admirable, even virtuous, but to study inequal-
ity is “altogether different: every mention of it raises the issue of
the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income.” Nevertheless,
paying proper attention to the apparently global trend toward
greater inequality in not only income and wealth but also educa-
ción, salud, marital stability, stress, and even obesity (in the con-
temporary version of this story, the rich tend to be the thin ones)
means developing a robust understanding of the causes and effects
10 Thomas Piketty (trans. Arthur Goldhammer), Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge,
Masa., 2014), 574. Tellingly, Lawrence Summersʼ review of the book in Democracy, XXXII
(2014), disponible en https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/33/the-inequality-puzzle/ (accedido
Agosto 13, 2019), cited its establishment of the historical facts as “a Nobel Prize-worthy contri-
bution.” A noteworthy critique of the historical data, sin embargo, is in Richard Sutch, “The One
Percent across Two Centuries: A Replication of Thomas Piketty’s Data on the Concentration of
Wealth in the United States,” Social Science History, XLI (2017), 587–613. Ver, Por ejemplo, el
special issue “Economic Growth and Inequality in Europe and South America," Diario de
Interdisciplinary History, XLIX (2018), 1–188; “The Quest for Interdisciplinary History: A
Mini-Symposium,” ibid., XLVIII (2018)—Herbert S. Klein, “The ‘Historical Turn’ in the
Social Sciences,” 295–312; Jan de Vries, “Changing the Narrative: The New History That
Was and Is to Come,” 313–324.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 557
of inequality in the past. Economic historians are uniquely posi-
tioned to address this urgent need.11
Individuals vary considerably in productivity, as well as in cir-
cumstance. How important is the one versus the other? How does
the distribution of power in society influence the formation and
distribution of opportunities, the dispersal of social benefits, o
the levying of fees, fines, and taxes? What effect does the clear in-
equality of initial endowments have across multiple metrics? Cómo
important is skill-biased technical change in producing markedly
different levels of compensation in the labor market? Is technical
change always skill-biased, and if not, why should it be more so in
one historical context than in another? Does the rate of growth
itself affect the distribution, or the seeming distribution, of that
growth? Does it matter if growth is primarily extensive, resulting
from increases in the working population, or intensive, resulting
from more output per person? Is Piketty correct that a rate of re-
turn that exceeds the rate of growth is “a powerful force of diver-
gence?” A first problem for economic historians is to find a way to
test the relative strength of each factor across multiple times and
lugares.
In our rush to do this important work, we must not overlook a
set of even more fundamental questions about inequality that have
so far eluded academic discourse far more than have questions of
measurement and causal explanation. Should scholars, or society
at large, be interested in inequality for the same reasons that many
individuals care about it? One reason to make note of someone
else’s wealth (or beauty, salud, social status, etc.) is jealousy—hardly
a solid foundation on which to base serious historical inquiry or
public policy. What would constitute a more objective, intellectual
grounding of a case against inequality? Ancient philosophers often
denounced inequality (despite or because of their deeply unequal
societies) largely on the grounds of justice and the well-being of
the state. On a slightly different logic, indirectly tending toward
greater equality, ancient Hebrew law forbade that anyone lose
11 Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots (Nueva York, 2011), 84; Klein, “The ‘His-
torical Turn’," 299. For two recent examples of work on the relationship between inequality
and health, see Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality
Makes Societies Stronger (Nueva York, 2011); Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity
and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,"
PNAS, CXII (2015), 15078–15083.
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control of his personhood (or of his family) for longer than one
lifetime, which they measured as fifty years. At the half-century
jubilee, anyone who had been enslaved for failure to pay a debt
could return to his family of origin, regardless of any debts that
might remain outstanding. The express purpose of this regulation
was to vouchsafe the moral health of society.12
Social scientists not similarly motivated might instead raise objec-
tions to gross inequality on other grounds, decir, efficiency, efficacy, o
practicality. An argument from efficiency is that resources would go
to their best use if control over them is spread more widely; de
efficacy, that public disamenities, particularly those associated with
ill-health and squalor, would be held in check; and from practicality,
that distributions considered fair by most people would require less
policing or arbitration than less equitable ones. Enforcing grossly un-
equal allocations of goods or opportunities imposes high transaction
costs that function as a tax on the economy for everyone. Otro
argumento, controversial as it may be, is that greater equality is con-
ducive to higher rates of economic growth.13
Concepts such as justice and fairness are not usually high on
the list of priorities for academic economists. Yet they are at the
very core of what historians have at least professed to espouse for as
long as history has been written. Piketty is not wrong to claim that
“the history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social,
and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by
the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that
result.” Hence, inequality as an ethical problem offers a perfect op-
portunity to implement Lamoreaux’s call for a middle ground be-
tween the disciplinary inclinations and insights of historians and
economists (a theme that will return at the close of this article).
12 For a classic treatment of the Aristotelian concern about justice and well-being, see Martha
nussbaum, “Nature, Function and Capacity: Aristotle on Political Distribution,” in Julia Annas and
Robert H. Grimm (editores.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (Nueva York, 1988), 145–184; for a
more recent treatment of inequality in the Hellenistic world, Georgios Anagnostopoulos and
Gerasimos Santas (editores.), Democracia, Justicia, and Equality in Ancient Greece (Nueva York, 2018). Plato
warned that robust citizenship depended on curbing gross inequalities—for example, Book IV of
The Republic. For the Hebrew law, see Leviticus 25: 10–14.
13 Frederico Cingano, “Trends in Income Inequality and Its Impact on Economic Growth,"
OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 163 (París, 2014), available at
https://doi.org/10.1787/5jxrjncwxv6j-en. For the contrary view, see Livio Di Matteo, “Does
Egalitarianism Come at a Price? Inequality and Economic Performance in Late-Nineteenth-
Century Ontario,” Social Science History, XLI (2017), 615–644.
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| 559
E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
It dovetails with a phenomenon that we might call sociability—
the capacity to live a fulfilling social life in community with neigh-
bors and peers.14
The Impact of Inequality on Sociability One particularly fruitful
window into the complexities of social and economic inequality is
the study of consumption behavior, because it speaks to how well
people can meet their so-called basic needs but also because it re-
veals their preferences in the context of the constraints on their
Toma de decisiones. Yet because our perspective on current con-
sumer practices is often deeply colored by prejudices about what
constitutes an appropriate desire for, and use of, material goods,
turning to an earlier period with different social norms to see
how people negotiated the potential social disabilities imposed
by inequality can be helpful.
Adam Smith, who had at least as much to say about morals as
he did about markets, provides an apt framework for this subject.
His understanding of the problematical link between inequality
and dignity is clear in his definition of necessities from The Wealth
of Nations: “By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities
which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what-
ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable
gente, even of the lowest order, to be without.”15
Smith’s claim is vastly different from that made in 2017 por
Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who argued that poor people would
be able to afford health insurance if they had the discipline to forgo
buying an iPhone. Even if the congressman’s accounting had been
correcto, as it most assuredly was not, he failed entirely to appreciate
that in 2017, A NOSOTROS. citizens needed a cell phone if they expected to
find or keep a job; locate their children; connect with social, polit-
ical, civic, and religious organizations; conduct bank transactions; en-
teract with the government for services and obligations; y entonces
much more. Only self-sufficent eccentrics or the devastatingly poor
or ill can live without a cell phone. Rep. Chaffetz’s remarks reveal
an all-too-common moral blindspot—the ease of casting aspersions
on people who inhabit a wholly different context than your own.16
14 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 20.
15 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Part II, Article IV.
16 This episode generated a flurry of media coverage. Ver, Por ejemplo, Christopher Ingraham,
“If Jason Chaffetz Wants to Compare Health Care to iPhones, Let’s Do It the Right Way,"
Washington Post, 7 Marzo 2017.
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Eighteenth-century Amsterdam—at the time a center of a
global trade network, on the leading edge of many new and
alarming (to some, anyway) consumer behaviors—affords another
perspective on the necessities of life (Mesa 1). Research on a
collection of nearly 1,000 after-death household inventories as-
sembled by the Regents of the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage
(BWH) entre 1740 y 1782 has much to say about the link
between the formation of cultural identity and the exigencies of
consumption.17
To be eligible for admittance into the Municipal Orphanage,
children had to have lost both natural parents, so long as those par-
ents had been citizens (either by inheritance or purchase) del
city for at least seven years. The BWH archives contain inventories
from a remarkably diverse collection of households, displaying
much more heterogeneity than the typical range of households
captured by notarial inventory records. Decedents whose estates
were surveyed by the orphanage included married as well as wi-
dowed men and women (the married ones were on their second
or later spouse after the death of their first). The BWH archives also
include single men and women who had been orphans themselves
and died without heirs, thus enabling the BWH to claim their estate.
Many of the households were exceedingly poor; rarely did such a
group finds it way into the documentary records of inheritance or
probate. The data sample includes both native-born Amsterdamers
and successful migrants to the city who could afford the substantial
fee to obtain citizenship status.
Historians of consumption are amazed at the surprisingly wide
diffusion of Asiatic textiles (or Asian-inspired European imitations)
and the housewares associated with colonial groceries among this
diverse population, especially as it reached into the ranks of the
poverty-stricken. Nearly 60 percent of the households (533 afuera
de 912 complete inventories) owned at least one item used to
make or serve tea or coffee; 54 por ciento (492 households) owned
delftware, although often only one or two pieces; and a remark-
capaz 38 por ciento (341 households) owned real porcelain, even if old,
chipped, or otherwise in poor condition. En este momento, Asiatic
17 For details of the data cited herein in the following paragraphs, see McCants, “Becoming
Consumers: Asiatic Goods in Migrant and Native-born Middling Households in 18th
Century Amsterdam,” in Maxine Berg (ed.), Goods from the East: Trading Eurasia 1600–1830
(Basingstoke, 2015), 197–215.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 561
Mesa 1 Amsterdam Orphanage Families’ Possession of “Asiatic” Goods by
Asset Categories, 1742–1782
HOUSEHOLD
TOTAL ASSETS
% WITH
TEA/COFFEE
% WITH
PORCELAIN
% WITH
COTTON
% WITH
SILK
% WITH
CHINTZ
Assets<15 N=446 Assets>200 N=216
8.0
70.9
90.8
4.8
42.2
65.6
2.8
27.7
39.9
0.0
20.2
53.2
0.4
11.0
38.1
textiles do not seem to have penetrated the BWH population as
fully as had exotic tableware. Sin embargo, 23 percent of house-
holds owned something made of cotton and roughly the same
number for silk (213 households for cotton and 207 for silk). Incluso
highly prized Indian chintz was present in 134 homes of BWH af-
filiates (14.6 percent of the sample). The sizable quantity of the
clothing listed in these inventories that was in poor condition
did not rate a description in any detail. Although the bookkeeper
tasked with creating the inventory would have been more likely to
report materials of exotic origin, it seems safe to presume that be-
cause of underreporting, the percentages noted herein represent
lower bounds for the presence of cotton and silk in the poor to
middling homes in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.
The factors that allow (or even encourage) individuals to pur-
chase new types of goods, acquire new tastes, and form new habits
are by no means uncontested. Historians have argued that a rapidly
increasing wealth was most likely responsible for early modern
Europeans’ ability to assume new consumer behaviors with such
enthusiasm, even though documentation of the ownership of
these goods was instrumental in the discovery of that increasing
wealth. The obvious logical problem notwithstanding, social and
cultural historians have recently argued that the ability to afford
new consumer practices, regardless of its derivation, is not enough.
Flows of information and community norms of behavior are also
necessary to facilitate the diffusion of new commodities across the
landscape, whether understood in physical, sociological, or eco-
nomic terms.
When the destitute people in the orphanage population pro-
cured and displayed “luxurious” imported textiles and the special
table goods used for serving exotic colonial groceries, they were
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not just wasting their limited resources (as Rep. Chaffetz might have
argued if they had been his contemporaries). Bastante, they were dem-
onstrating what it takes to render oneself as “decent” in Amsterdam
in the middle of the eighteenth century. The wide prevalence of old
and broken porcelain found in the inventories of the poorest house-
hold is suggestive of the tenuous hold that many people actually had
on decency. But hold on to it they did. We can honor them by
remembering their efforts as worthy of a historian’s attention.
ECONOMICS AS AN ETHICAL DISCIPLINE An issue that is especially ap-
propriate for historians (economic historians in particular) to raise is
the matter of their ethical obligations—not the ethical obligations of
individuals regarding the norms of research or publication but the
ethical considerations that pertain to the theory and practice of
the economics discipline itself. Much economics is written as if its
compass includes only “value-neutral” questions of efficiency, eso
es, the maximization of either production or consumption under
conditions of scarcity. The message, whether it be explicit or im-
plicit, is that value formation should be the province of other disci-
plines. But is this a legitimate view? Is economics well served by it?
Michael Polanyi, originally a chemist, who is best known for
his mid-twentieth century pioneering work in the philosophy of
ciencia, actively worked on economic questions in the 1930s and
1940s that speak to the heart of this issue. He believed strongly that
absent a clear understanding of the economic principles that gov-
ern the lives of all producers and consumers, the simplistic and pat-
ently false promises of both communism and fascism would lure
ordinary people to their collective doom. If people could see only
the uncertainty of everyday economic life, not the hidden logic of
the liberal economy’s contribution to a generalized prosperity, lib-
eralism would not survive. Todavía, even as a great champion of liberal
valores (unlike his brother Karl, author of The Great Transformation
[Nueva York, 1944]), Polanyi would not have been an unabashed
apologist for the neoliberal agenda that characterizes a great deal of
economic theory and practice today.18
18 Michael Polyani, Full Employment and Free Trade (Cambridge, 1948). Polyani also made a
film, entitled Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved, offering a basic ducation to the
general public about how a market economy works. The film, which premiered in 1940, es
now available to view, following the restoration work of Eduardo Beira, with the assistance of
the Michael Polanyi Society, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFm_ORFfp9U.
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E C O N O M I C H I S T O R Y AN D T H E HI S T O R I A N S
| 563
In his unpublished “Economics Education” lecture, delivered
in Manchester, Inglaterra (1937), Polyani listed the mistakes of those
whom he called “the utilitarians”:
(1) They failed to see that the just reward of the factors of
production did not lead to a just reward of the people
disposing of these factors. Their philosophy never pro-
duced an idea as to how the just reward of the various
people should be assessed.
(2) The utilitarians overestimated the idea of the free market.
They thought it to be applicable to all human relation-
ships and therefore opposed all legislation regulating la-
bour conditions and objected to free services by the
comunidad, as for example, free education. They failed
to produce an idea as to the limits to which human affairs
should be regulated by buying and selling.
(3) The utilitarian economic theory gave no reasonable ac-
count of the trade cycle. It left the unemployed in the
depression without even an intellectual consolation and
objected to any action to improve their lot.
(4) The general weakness of utilitarianism, que incluye
the above particular failures, is this: that its philosophy
makes self-seeking the supreme principle in economic
life and assumes that people are happy if seeing their
blind acquisitiveness is transformed into a maximum
efficiency.19
Extraordinariamente, with the distinct exception of point number 3,
these mistakes are all ethical failings, not economic ones, al menos
not by the standards of economics as it has come to be practiced
hoy. En 1937, Polanyi saw the critical failures of economics as the
result of misplaced values, not of faulty logic, algebraic or statistical
error, or even a misguided trust in the workings of the invisible
hand in the marketplace. En otras palabras, those failures were not
merely the “market failures” of standard economics textbooks, im-
portant as those might be as exceptions. Bastante, the failings that
worried Polanyi concerned justice, the articulation of priorities,
and the setting of reasonable limits to self-seeking behavior (no
19 A transcription of Polyani’s lecture is available at https://philpapers.org/rec/ POLOPE.
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a generalized condemnation of self-seeking). In this critique,
Polanyi aligns with Adam Smith, who celebrates the sometimes
beneficial, if unintended, consequences of self-interest (the “invisi-
ble hand” that coordinates private interests to the public benefit,
which is widely cited as a rationale for markets run amok, a position
that Smith himself never held). This critique goes straight to the
heart of economic theory—not just the unusual case when the mar-
ket mechanism stalls because of externalities, public-goods provi-
sión, asymmetric information, or some other accepted aberration.
It suggests instead that the market cannot work at all without a
shared commitment to its rules or, more accurately, its values.20
Sen makes the same point explicitly in Development as Freedom:
“While capitalism is often seen as an arrangement that works only
on the basis of the greed of everyone, the efficient working of the
capitalist economy is, En realidad, dependent on powerful systems of
values and norms. . . . Successful markets operate the way they
do not just on the basis of exchanges being ‘allowed,’ but also
on the solid foundation of institutions (such as effective legal struc-
tures that support the rights ensuing from contracts) and behavioral
ethics (which makes the negotiated contracts viable without the
need for constant litigation to achieve compliance).” Moreover,
Sen stresses that reasonable social judgments about what we want
our economy to produce and for whom depend on more than just
the preference rankings of individuals maximized in the standard
utilitarian framework. We need “other relevant facts,” such as the
relative poverty or health requirements of different persons, el
differential harm that may accrue to some parties from an action,
or the freely voiced values that people in the community hold. Sen
also argues that the prevention of extreme injustice is possible
without a complete determination of what would be “most just.”
The cause of economic justice is ill-served if dictated by an analysis
aimed at “finer differences and puny infelicities. En efecto, the over-
use of the concept of justice reduces the force of the idea when
applied to the terrible deprivations and inequities that characterize
the world in which we live.”21
20 Much has been written about “Adam Smith of the Moral Sentiments,” although the moral
underpinning of Smith’s thought runs throughout The Wealth of Nations. For an especially
engaging treatment of this subject, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests:
Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1997).
21 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Nueva York, 2000), 252–254.
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| 565
The “other relevant facts” on which Sen’s analysis depends
bring us again to the work of historians, among other social voices.
Historians have had much experience in documenting deprivations
and their consequences, as well as in discovering the values that
people hold. The “informational broadening” to which Sen alludes
is precisely what historical research is supposed to accomplish.
We return again to the original question, What can history con-
tribute to economics, beyond just an appreciation of the past for its
own sake? An economics that refuses to engage with the lessons of
history or to engage in a dialog about justice and values, or ethics,
can go in any or all of three directions: (1) It can wish itself back to
a past that never existed, at least not in the way that intellectual
shortsightedness remembers it. (2) It can lose sight of the multiplic-
ity of human interactions across varied, but always interconnected,
spheres of life—political, social, aesthetic, spiritual, or communal,
among others—that affect our attempts to solve specific economic
problemas. (3) It can become ever-more clever in its ability to build
modelos, test hypotheses, and manipulate data while still remaining
confused or, even worse, small-minded about the ends to which
its analytical efforts are geared to pursue.
The project of economic history should not be confined to
only those capable of methodological sophistication in pursuit of
a self-proclaimed value-neutral theoretical apparatus. As Piketty
memorably concludes Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “All so-
cial scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the
unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens
should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts
surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail
to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely
serves the interests of the least well-off.” Discourse about econom-
ics restricted to a small group of academics talking only among
themselves is no better.22
An economics that is sensitive to the complexity of the past,
conducive to beneficial social conditions in the present, or even
just an economic history with a viable future, will depend funda-
mentally on our commitment to hold two disciplinary inclinations
in fruitful and balanced tension. We will need not only the models
22 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 577.
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and insights of generalists but also guidance from what Raff called
“salient particularlity.” Economists and historians should talk to
each other regularly, with open minds, as many already do, como
the fifty-year existence of the JIH attests. Hopefully, the conver-
sation will continue, unabated, in these pages and elsewhere, y
the broader public will find it meaningful.23
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23 Daniel Raff, presentation at the Business History Conference, “Organization Theory as
Teoría, Business History as History,” Denver, Abril 2017.