Jones, Geoffrey - Future of Economic, Business, And Social History

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The future of economic, business, and

social historyGeoffrey Jones

a, Marco H.D. van Leeuwen

b& Stephen

Broadberryc

a

Isidor Straus Professor of Business History , Harvard BusinessSchool , Boston , MA , USAbFaculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences , Utrecht University ,

Utrecht , the NetherlandscDepartment of Economic History , London School of Economics

and CAGE , London , UK

Published online: 07 Nov 2012.

To cite this article:Geoffrey Jones , Marco H.D. van Leeuwen & Stephen Broadberry (2012) The

future of economic, business, and social history, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 60:3,225-253, DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2012.727766

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The future of economic, business, and social history

Geoffrey Jonesa, Marco H.D. van Leeuwenb and Stephen Broadberryc

aIsidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA;bFaculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands;cDepartment of Economic History, London School of Economics and CAGE, London, UK

Introduction (by the editors of SEHR, Alfred Reckendrees and Jacob Weisdorf)

On 25 May 2012, the Scandinavian Society of Economic and Social Historycelebrated the 60th anniversary of its international journal, Scandinavian Economic

History Review, at Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen with a conference on The

Future of Economic, Social and Business History. The editors of this journal invited

three distinguished scholars in the fields of economic, business and social history,

Stephen Broadberry, Geoffrey Jones and Marco van Leeuwen, to present their

personal views and ideas about the future of their respective disciplines. Their talks

led to inspiring and engaged discussions and we asked the three speakers to jointly

publish their talks in SEHR. The future, however, is not a research field for any kind

of historian and not a topic for an academic journal in the field of economic history;

and thus, they hesitated. Yet, we are all curious about the future and we discuss alsoeconomic and social perspectives when we discuss our own historical research. This

makes our subjects interesting and relevant, even though we may not be able to

predict anything that others could not predict as well. We appreciate and respect that

Geoffrey Jones, Marco van Leeuwen and Stephen Broadberry have agreed to present

their personal views, opinions and reflections about their research fields to the

broader audience of this journal. We hope that the three viewpoints encourage more

of us to engage in a deeper discussion about the present challenges and future

potential of economic, business and social history.

1. The future of business history (by Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School)

This short essay offers a personal view by the author on three broad, but related,

topics. First, it offers an assessment of the current situation of the subject. Second, it

outlines some problems faced by the subject. Finally, it discusses alternative futures

for the subject to resolve these problems.

1.1. The current situation

Business history was born as a discipline at the Harvard Business School. In 1927,

the schools dean established the first chair in business history. The first Isidor

*Corresponding address. Email: [email protected]

Scandinavian Economic History Review

Vol. 60, No. 3, November 2012, 225253

ISSN 0358-5522 print/ISSN 1750-2837 online

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Straus Professor was N. S. B. Gras, who also founded a business history society.

Over the following decades the new subject made important intellectual contribu-

tions, which in all but one case are now largely forgotten by those outside the

field.

The first major contribution of the new discipline was its insistence on firmheterogeneity, and its explanation that this heterogeneity arose in an evolutionary

fashion. Gras advocated for the production of massively detailed monographs on

individual firms, and the generation of such company history was, and remained, a

strong feature of the discipline. This emphasis on firms was pursued at a time

when most economists believed that the firm, as such, was not interesting to

study, as neoclassical economic theory taught that it was merely a profit-

maximising entity that responded to the forces of demand and supply. Business

historians began maintaining that firms differed, and those differences mattered,

six decades before the prominent article by Richard Nelson asserted this

argument.1

Second, business historians were prominent as pioneers in the study ofentrepreneurship. Also at Harvard, the new field benefited enormously from the

formation of Research Center in Entrepreneurial History (19481958), which

was led by Arthur Cole at the Harvard Business School, and was supported by a

large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of their drive to encourage

the study of economic history. The Centre brought together a multidisciplinary

group that included sociologists, economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, and

other business historians including Thomas Cochran, David Landes and the

young Alfred D. Chandler. The Centre was distinguished by its willingness to

address big issues related to explaining apparent spatial variations in the

entrepreneurship.Third, business historians were early movers in the study of the multinational

firm. The very wordmultinationalwas only coined in 1960, and the first theories to

explain the multinational were launched during that decade by economists such as

Ray Vernon. As early as 1964 Mira Wilkins and Frank Hill published a monumental

study of the multinational growth of Ford. Wilkins subsequent two magisterial

books on the history of American business abroad, The Emergence of Multinational

Enterpriseand The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, demolished the prevailing

wisdom that the multinational enterprise was primarily a postWorld War II

phenomenon.2 Wilkins did not employ formal economic analysis in her books, but

instead used archival research to support her insights on the determinants of thegrowth of multinational firms.

Finally, there was Chandlers work on the growth of big business. Chandler

generated tremendous interest in the history of firms with three major works,

Strategy and Structure, The Visible Handand Scale and Scope.3 These books were

marked by detailed historical research, the use of comparative analysis, and by

conceptual contributionsmost importantly, Chandlers influential argument that a

companys strategy must shape its organisational structure, not the other way

around. Chandler presented a compelling analysis of the rise of large firms and

1Nelson, Why Do Firms Differ (1991).2Wilkins/Hill,American Business Abroad(1964). Wilkins, Emergence(1970),Maturing(1974).3Chandler, Strategy (1962), Visible hand(1977), Scale (1990).

226 G. Joneset al.

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offered an explanation about why these firms arose only in a handful of industries

and in specific national economies. In the process, he pioneered the concept of

strategy, and its relationship to organisational culture, and exercised an enormous

influence on the emergence of strategy among other management disciplines.

The importance of Chandlers work was widely hailed. He finally brought the

work of business history to the attention of far wider academic audiences. It made a

huge impact on the social and management sciences, if less on the discipline of

history itself. Chandler, who died in 2007, remains the most widely cited business

historian, which is due acknowledgement to the importance of his insights. However,

Chandlers pre-eminence also highlights some of the problems in the field, as it

provides a striking contrast to lack of citations and recognition of the extensive

research in business history by many other scholars other than Chandler in the last

two decades.

Indeed, business history has been transformed in the recent past. It is

characterised by ever-widening boundaries, an impressively open architecture, and

new geographies. Exclusive focus on growth of big business in capital-intensivemanufacturing has gone. So has the use of American business as the sole benchmark

of excellence, which was an implicit feature of Chandlers work. A quick survey of

business history journals and conferences identifies a whole range of new issues being

investigated, including family business, networks, business groups and governance.

There are new domains far from manufacturing, including finance, consulting,

advertising, tourism, fashion and beauty. There are wider themes than the growth of

big firms, including knowledge, identity, culture, gender, crime, ethnicity and war.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the 2010 meeting of the Business History Conference

annual conference of the discipline in the USA was the business history of

everything.This surge of research was been characterised by an impressively open

architecture to scholarship in the field. There has been, on the one hand, a

remarkable institutionalisation of the subject. Beyond the USA, where an academic

society emerged in 1954, and Japan, where a society was founded in 1966, business

historians were typically incorporated into wider groups of historians and economic

historians. In Britain, for example, there were many business historians from the

1950s onwards, and a separate journal from 1958, but there was no professional

association until 1990, when the Association of Business Historians was formed. This

event, however, proved somewhat of a catalyst. Four years later a European Business

Historian Association was formed. This has become a flourishing international

society holding annual conferences with 300 or more participants. Specialist journals

also proliferated, including the French journal Entreprises et Histoirein 1992, and a

new US journal, Enterprise & Society, in 1999.

Encouragingly, however, institutionalisation has not been followed by the curse

of an inward-looking orthodoxy. There has been a remarkable persistence of

interdisciplinary openness, which has long characterised the subject. As the editors of

the recently published Oxford Handbook of Business History asserted after

surveying the field, self-identified business historians co-exist with a wider circle of

sociologists, political scientists, economic and social historians, to name just a few.4

We have seen also new geographies appearing in a literature which was long

4Jones/Zeitlin, Introduction (2008), 4.

Scandinavian Economic History Review 227

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associated with the USA, northern Europe and, from the 1960s, Japan. New archives

have opened up, notably in China and Russia. Research took off in the subject in

Italy after 1988, in Spain after 1993, and in Switzerland as the Bergier Commission

(19962002) involved practically every historian in that once-secretive country

searching in corporate archives for the involvement of Swiss companies with Nazi

Germany during the Second World War. Beyond the West, the subject has grown

especially strongly in Latin America, including Mexico, Argentina, and especially,

Colombia.

1.2. Some challenges and problems of the subject

There is, therefore, much reason to be optimistic about the current state of the

discipline of business history. However, there is also reason for concern, for it is

unclear if anyone is listening to the prolific and exciting research now being

undertaken. This is not because no one cares about history. In fact, the opposite is

the case, as other social sciences have discovered that history matters. The law andfinance literature associated with Andrei Shleifer, Rafael la Porta et al. has had an

enormous impact with its argument that the legal tradition countries inherited or

adopted in the distant past has a long-term effect on financial development.

Countries that had a common law legal system, these authors suggested, had on

average better investor protections that most civil law countries, and that French civil

law countries were worse than German or Scandinavian civil law traditions. They

suggested that this had a major effect on financial development, which in turn

impacted the nature and speed of economic development. This is classic territory of

business history, yet the authors cite no research in business history. The same could

be said broadly about the many legal scholars writing on the evolution of corporategovernance, the political scientists writing on the varieties of capitalism, and the

evolutionary economists researching corporate innovation. Meanwhile, as some

historians in the USA pull back from the excessive emphasis on culture and gender

which characterised the field for several decades, a new field studying the history of

capitalism has proliferated. However its practitioners regularly assert, at least

verbally, that it has to be distinguished from the narrowsubject of business history,

not least because individual firms are not mentioned.

These scholars from beyond business history have launched exciting debates. The

attention that they have secured for history is entirely positive. Yet, they have opted

out of using business history research, seldom citing any business historians except

Chandler, and sometimes they have even done research themselves. Business

historians have been left demonstrating that these economists and others have

limited historical knowledge. Aldo Musacchios Experiments in Financial

Democracy,5 for example, has employed a history of corporate governance in Brazil

between 1882 and 1950 to eviscerate the law and finance literature by showing that

the level of stock and bond market capitalisation before 1920 in Brazil, a civil law

country, might be higher (by some measures) than until recently. In a pattern which

broadly conforms to most research on the history of globalisation, but which utterly

challenges the legal origins literature, Musacchios research identifies corporate

governance convergence in the era of the first global economy before 1914, regardless

5Musacchio,Experiments (2009).

228 G. Joneset al.

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of common or civil law, followed by divergence as the first global economy

disintegrated during the era of the Great Depression and the two world wars.

However, although this and other business history performs an important role in

demonstrating that others need to get their historical facts right before offering bold

generalisations, the development of the disciplines own bold generalisations shouldsurely be a more ambitious goal.

The apparent neglect of business history by other scholars is not new. Indeed,

business historians have been complaining about the issue for well over half a

century. In 1947 Henrietta Larson, who built business history at the Harvard

Business School alongside Gras, and was the Schools first faculty member, observed

that another matter which needs attention is making available to students, business

men, and the general public the results of research in business history . 6 In 1958

Herman Krooss, the prominent economic and banking historian, noted, Business

history is the most vexatious, exasperating, and aggregating of all the historical

disciplines, but it has never been as important as it should be,

7

In 1987 DonaldColeman, the leading British business sand economic historian of his generation,

observed thatcompany histories are largely unread by anyone except other business

historians.8 Meanwhile the present author observed in 1999 that Many business

schools continue to neglect or marginalize business history.9

These comments might be dismissed as the angst of scholars disappointed that

they did not receive the attention they believed their work merited, yet the image of

unread work is confirmed in a more aggregate way by the impact factor

measurements whose importance has grown in recent years. In 2011, the 5-Year

Impact Factor ofBusiness History, the leading British journal, was 0.248, while the 5-

Year impact factor ofBusiness History Review, the leading US journal, was 0.684. Incontrast, the Quarterly Journal of Economics was 8.716, the Academy Management

Review was 8.211, and Strategic Management Journal was 6.708. These numbers

reflect the fact that business history is a small discipline, but they also provide

evidence that the research as presented in specialist journals is not being widely read

outside that discipline.

There are a number of potential reasons why business history research is not

more widely read. Certainly, until the late 1990s, there was a real problem that so

much business history took the form of lengthy corporate histories. Although

company history had a deservedly bad name as so many of the genre were public

relations exercises by firms, the minority of studies written by more academichistorians (and some archivists and business journalists) were often deeply

researched from corporate archives, objective in their judgements, and contained

wonderful insights on corporate decision-making and organisation. However,

corporate histories were, and are, also frequently lengthy, and as a result pose a

significant barrier to entry to scholars from other disciplines with short attention

spans. Moreover the fact that each corporate history is a unique product, with no

standard format, makes inter-firm comparisons challenging, at best.

6Larson, Business History (1947).7Krooss, Economic History (1958).8Coleman, Uses (1987).9Jones, Company (1999).


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Over the last decade and a half the proliferation of textbooks has greatly

extended access to the business history literature. Landmarks included John Wilsons

British Business Historyand Tom McCrawsCreating Modern Capitalism.10 Over the

following decade, outstanding textbooks were published on the business history of

Australia, China, France, the Netherlands and Spain, while the collaborativeCreating Nordic Capitalism set a new standard for textbooks designed for teaching

use, through its comparison of the business histories of Denmark, Finland, Norway

and Sweden.11

However, it remains evident also that the impact of much recent business history

remains somewhat subdued by self-imposed boundaries. There is still too much

knowledge trapped within the boundaries of company histories. There is also too

much literature trapped within the boundaries of the nation state. It is evident, in

that context, that the explanations of many key issues related to economic growth,

innovation and entrepreneurship are to be found in regions rather than nation states.

Explanations are to be found through examining regional institutions, geographical

endowments and cultures rather than in nation states. This is as true of small- and

medium-sized European countries such as Britain, Denmark and Germany as it is of

the more obvious cases of big countries like Brazil, China and the USA. In Europe,

integrated economic regions often crossed national borders. Far more research is

needed on such regions, as well as their counterparts elsewhere.

An underlying issue in business history, which has circumscribed its impact, has

been a disregard for methodology. This is an old complaint. In 1970 Ralph Hidy, the

prominent US business historian and co-author of a pioneering history of Standard

Oil, reflected in a survey article on business history that we need to improve our

tools and borrow much more extensively the applicable concepts and analytical

techniques from the social sciences.12 Some care is needed in making an argumentthat business history is methodology-light. After all, among other methodological

innovations, business historians pioneered the innovative use of oral history in

scholarly history.13 Business history has also been quite influenced by theory.

Sociologists like Weber and Parsons, and transactions costs and institutional

economists like Williamson and North, have helped shape research in discipline.

Yet, and again with significant individual exceptions, business historians have not

made a habit of explicit hypothesis testing or the use of standardised social science

methodology. Nor have business historians been at the forefront of the application of

constructionist and post-modern methodologies seen in History, although again with

conspicuous exceptions. The under-investment in methodology has increasinglymeant that other scholars accustomed to more formal approaches have been unable

to identify business history research as being of high scholarly quality.

This issue is not unrelated to a perennial identity crisis in the subject. Born in a

business school, the subject has never fitted comfortably in the discipline of History.

As management studies embraced social science methodology during the post-war

decades, business history was also orphaned in its original home. In successive

generations, leading figures have disagreed whether the subject was a separate

10Wilson, Business History (1995). McCraw, Creating Modern Capitalism (1997).11Fellmann et al., Creating Nordic Capitalism (2008).12Hidy, Business History (1970).13Fridenson, Business History (2008), 10.

230 G. Joneset al.

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discipline, a sub-discipline of economic history, or part of business administration.

At interwar Harvard, the birthplace of both economic history and business history,

the uncomfortable relationship between business history and economic history was

already evident in the disagreements between N.S. B Gras and Edwin Gay, the

economic historian who became the first Dean of the Harvard Business School.

Economic and business history, Gras asserted in 1934,are different in content and

objective. Any yet let us hasten to add that they are clearly twins, though not

identical twins.14 During the 1960s business and economic history split

irrevocably in the USA as the cliometric revolution took economic history towards

economics, while most business historians remained committed to archivally based

qualitative methodologies. In Japan, business and economic historians split on

ideologically grounds, the former pro-capitalist and the latter Marxist. Elsewhere,

there was no uniform pattern, and in Scandinavia for example business and

economic historians remained more or less the same communities. This international

diversity added to the uncertain identity of the discipline, which in led it towards

becoming the business history of everything.The lack of wider impact has practical consequences for business history as a

discipline. The institutionalisation of the disciple in new societies and journals has

coincided with the de-institutionalisation in many universities of the world. It has

been swept out of economics departments, and most history departments, although

many individual business history researchers hold positions which are not formally

designated for the field. It has shrunk remarkably in some European countries such

as Germany and Spain. It has shrunk in once-promising new growth areas such as

South Korea. In some countries, although not the US business schools are a growth

area. Copenhagen Business School, Harvard Business School, Henley Business

School and the Norwegian School of Business and Economics host flourishingbusiness history research and teaching groups. Indeed, in December 2011, Harvard

Business Schools Dean made Business History one of the Schools top priority

research areas, known idiosyncratically as Initiatives.15 It must be said, however,

that such large clusters of faculty are not typical. They also owe their existence to the

efforts of individual entrepreneurial faculty, past and present, as well as strong

commitment to teaching excellence.

1.3. Alternatives for the future

The third part of this essay turns to the issue of the future of the subject. Thereappear to be three alternative futures. Each one would be a plausible choice,

although each one contains significant downsides. A first option for the field would

be to continue to develop as the business history of everything. This path would

continue to see the embrace of multiple perspectives, and it would encourage

diversity in approach. It would celebrate business history as an open, non-

doctrinaire, interdisciplinary subject. The upside of this future would that, in an

increasingly unpleasant and vicious academic environment, it would keep business

history as an open-minded and pleasant subject, open and welcoming. The primary

downside would be an accelerating loss of identity and potential for impact as a

14Gras, Business History (1934), 388.15See http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory.


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discipline. It is impossible to see a rosy future for a subject that lacks basic agreement

even a central core of issues, let alone the language it uses, and the methodologies it

employs. This is the path to insignificance.

A second future path is to re-integrate with a renewed economic history. As the

companion essay by Stephen Broadberry notes, economic history has become far

more vibrant recently, after a dreary era between the 1970s and 1990s. It has been

invigorated by mega-debates, such as the nature and causes of the Great Divergence

between the West and the rest. Much of this research still pays insufficient attention

to firms and entrepreneurs, primarily perhaps because the scholars who are

interested in such institutions have isolated themselves in the separate domain of

business history. One particularly negative outcome of this isolation is that, for

unclear reasons, self-identified business historians rarely feel comfortable dealing

with periods before the nineteenth century. This chronological oddity has more or

less excluded them from contributing to debates about the origins of modern

economic growth. The de-institutionalisation of business history and re-engagement

with economic history would be of mutual benefit. It could contribute towardsreversing the fragmentation of History as a discipline and the rebuilding of common

discourses between fields such as economic, social, business, financial, transport,

environmental and legal history, which overlap, and deserve to overlap much more.

The potential downside for business history, within this much larger domain, is that

the voices declaring that firms matter might be drowned out. Business history grew

as a subject because its supporters believed that firms and entrepreneurs did matter

indeed, that they mattered more than most other actors. If anything, as governments

and the world political system hovers on irrelevance, the time seems opportune for

more, rather than less research, on firms as institutions and wealth creation.

A third path, therefore, beckons, at least to this author. This is to renew businesshistory as a discrete field, and take it to the next level. This bold strategy would be

the opposite path to the business history of everything. Although it would seek to

retain a separate identity from economic history, it would not it should be

emphasisedseek a turf war with that or other historical specialisations. Indeed, as

firms grew within and impact the global political, economic, social and cultural

system, business historians must and should seek to interact and share knowledge

with all types of historians.

The third proposed path would have two essential components. The first is to

undertake a collective endeavour to raise the methodological standards in business

history in an effort to convince other scholars that the subject is scholarly, and that

its evidence can be used. This would require journal and book series editors to

insist, consistently, that contributors raised their standards. Much of this is not, as

Hidy suggested, rocket science, but simply involves willingness to learn from what

other social scientists and historians do routinely. Business historians need to test

hypotheses, count, construct databases, and use archival sources much more

critically. They also need to experiment with new methodologies for analyzing small

sample and qualitative data. There is no need at all for a one best waymethodology.

Indeed, fields such as International Business are struggling precisely because of

slavish commitments to orthodox social science methodology, which limits the range

of issues that can be addressed.16

16Jones/Khanna Bringing History (back) (2006).

232 G. Joneset al.

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The second component of renewal is for business history to get, in the inelegant

language of business schools, an elevator speech. In other words, for the collective

community of scholars to agree what the subject is about, and what the key debates

are. Too many journal submissions still begin with words to the effect that Chandler

was wrong to suggest . . .. Chandler was probably wrong about many things, but

framing research in such a negative fashion simply highlights the lack of big issues in

the subject. Chandler was, in fact, right about one very big thing: the way for a

discipline, and its scholars, to get attention is to address big issues to which many

people want answers, to provide them with answers using the highest quality

scholarship, and to debate those answers honestly and rigorously in the quest for

knowledge. Going forward, business history needs to focus on a limited number of

broad issues, formulate hypotheses about them, and contest them rigorously.

It borders on the absurd for senior scholars to tell others what they should do

with their time. So the suggestion of four broad issues which follows is simply meant

to be illustrative of what needs to, or could be, done. They have been chosen not

because they are novel, but because they are not. There is also much research, bymany scholars in many countries, being conducted about them. What needs to be

done is that this research is more carefully framed within wider debates, which might

be code-names as the business history equivalent of the Great Divergence.

The first broad issue is entrepreneurship, or rather explaining why and how it

differs between countries and time periods, and why and how this matters. This is a

terrain in which business historians made huge investments before the organiza-

tional synthesis focused collective attention on the growth of big firms and their

organisational structure from the 1960s. There are huge opportunities to fill a

missing gapbetween institutional and human capital explanations of global wealth

and poverty and the actual creators of wealth and innovation. Have institutions,culture or human capital factors driven the variations seen in entrepreneurial

performance around the world in different time periods? The study of entrepreneur-

ship plays to some of the fields strengths for example, individual entrepreneurial

biographies are likely to reveal much about entrepreneurial cognition, and much also

concerning how resources were assembled. Entrepreneurship remains a weak area of

management which has struggled to incorporate context in its explanations, and

focused attention obsessively on high-technology start-ups at the expense of the

broader field of entrepreneurship. It is also a subject which every MBA student and

government minister wants to know more about. A new surge of research on

entrepreneurship, properly conducted and presented, would take the world by storm.

Second, business historians have a huge opportunity to contribute to the

literature on globalisation. The study of the history of multinationals has been an

enormously successful and productive area of business history research since the

original work of Wilkins in the 1960s. Yet as economists, historians and others

discovered globalisation, they have largely ignored firms and the business historians

who wrote about their role in integrating economies. Here is a golden opportunity for

business historians to reconnect with a vibrant literature with a wider audience and

make an impact. Business historians can add their voices to the debate that is on

many minds: is globalisation a positive or a negative force? Arguably, existing

business history research suggests a less than positive picture as firms emerge as weak

transferors of knowledge and contribute to income divergence. However, manytopics from the relations between affiliates and parents in multinational firms, to the


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tensions between local and global ambitions, to, finally, the impact of the

globalisation of firms on female career employment opportunities, remain hardly

explored. The discipline of International Business, which has long been receptive to

historical approaches, and faces its own methodological roadblocks in addressing big

issues, would be a natural audience and partner in this terrain.

A third terrain is business and the natural environment. Business historians have

primarily yielded the history of the environment to environmental historians, who

until recently have at best treated business simply as one of the big exogenous

problems faced by the world. This represents a huge missed opportunity for business

historians, who have a long history on mining and other resource companies, as well

as consumer packaging and advertising, which have all had major environmental

impacts over the past two centuries. There are important debates to be conducted

on the role of business in environmental degradation, as well as the role of business in

seeking solutions to such degradation. Business historians need to re-use much of

what they already know to write on, and debate, the role of business in the natural

environment. There is a wide audience for strong empirical evidence on this terrain,for it deals with perhaps the most important issue facing humanity.

Finally, business historians have undertaken much research on the social and

political role of business which could, and should, be reframed as major

contributions to wide and vocal debates on the responsibility of business. The

relationship between business and democracy is particularly contentious. Although

many scholars have linked the growth of capitalist systems to their controls over

executive power and their respect for individual property rights, the historical

evidence raises doubts regarding a correlation between democracy and capitalism, as

is too evident in the part played by business in colonial systems, and in authoritarian

regimes like Nazi Germany, apartheid era South Africa, many Latin Americandictatorships, a variety of Asian military dictatorships, and in Communist China

since the 1980s. Conversely, however, some business leaders have sought to use their

wealth and power to foster democracy and counter economic and social injustice.

There is a huge demand in business schools, and more widely, for empirical evidence

on the broad issue of the responsibility of business. By proving empirical evidence on

what has happened in the past, and debating its meaning for the present and the

future, business historians have an opportunity not only to be heard as scholars, but

to feed to the vocal and politicised debates of today.

As with the other two paths, this path has downsides. It may not succeed. The

past legacy of marginalisation is a powerful one, and not easy to overcome. Such a

path could only succeed if there is a collective decision by many individuals to leave

their comfort zones, and pursue and present before their colleagues bold general-

isations, based on innovative methodologies. It is difficult for junior scholars seeking

to navigate often difficult career paths to take such risks, and it is even more difficult

for senior scholars to shift gears, and venture down unknown paths. Should this bold

path be followed, journal editors, as gatekeepers of the discipline, would need to be

bold in their decisions, and supportive to those who take risks.

Business history, then, has a remarkable heritage. It is a repository of unique and

rich data on firms and business systems. Yet, as Krooss observed, it has never been

as important as it should be. After Krooss had penned these words, Chandler made

the subject hot, and it flourished. In recent decades, the hotness has seriously chilled,but this has not, and is not, preventing a vibrant research culture. However, the

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current academic environment is not promising for this research being heard in a

crowded world. If the subject is to gain voice, and the faculty jobs and doctoral

students that follow, there is surely no future in being the business history of

everything. Instead, business historians need to build on their proud tradition of

deep engagement with the empirical evidence by raising the bar in methodology, and

debating big issues for which many people want answers.

2. A future for social history as global social science history (by Marco H.D.

van Leeuwen, Utrecht University)

Suddenly and unforeseen, wars break out, empires collapse, genocides take place,

banks go bust, states fail which serves to say that modesty befits me. Historians,

like sociologists and economists, are not always very good at predicting the future.

Having accepted your kind invitation, however, I will try to do so, and to sketch a

future for social history as global social science history. For this to be true, social

history has to be both global, and part of the social sciences with regard to research

domains and designs. So let me begin by discussing the topic of research domains

(and questions) before proceeding to research designs (including the nature of the

data and collaboration needed for a global social science history). I apologise if

examples I am most familiar with are emphasised, but the thrust of my argument

namely that there is a bright future for social history as global social science history

does not depend on the examples.

2.1. Research domains

It is impossible to review all the relevant social science theories here, but it is possible

to mention the three main sociological research domains: social inequality,

rationalisation, and cooperation.17 I will discuss each briefly and give an example.

2.1.1. Social inequality

Social inequality has interested sociologists from the days of de Tocqueville, Marx,

Weber and Sorokin. The key questions are: How are societies stratified from high to

low? How much social inequality is there, and how easy is to move from one social

layer to another? What explains inequality and mobility? As opinions on how fair

inequality is are influenced by the prospects of mobility (allowing the truly gifted andhard working to reap the fruits of their efforts and talents), and current articles in the

USA and European newspapers breath a sense of blocked mobility, this is a topical

issue that will continue to receive attention in the near future. This broad research

domain covers inequality and mobility between the generations, at marriage, and

over the life course. It also relates to the consequences for inequality in life chances,

17Following Ultee et al., Sociologie(2003). An alternative way of proceeding would have beento consider how interdisciplinary endeavours between the social sciences and history haveevolved up until now. For surveys, see Abbot, History (1991). Skocpol, Vision (1984).Skocpol, Social History (1987). Steckel, Social Science History (2007). or Kok/Wouters,Virtual knowledge (2013, forthcoming). See also van der Linden/Lucassen, Prolegomena(1999).


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such as health, and for lifestyles such as tastes in music. Let me give an example

relating to intergenerational social mobility.

The immediate intellectual origins of this research domain are rooted in

modernisation theory.18 It predicts that as societiesmodernized, industrial employ-

ers increasingly recruited their personnel by reference to their individual merits or

achievements rather than to those of their parents (ascription). That leads to a

loosening of direct bonds between class of origin and destination, a process from

ascription to achievement. In addition to industrialisation, educational expansion is

often mentioned as a cause.19 The more a person, his or her parents, or the state

invest in education, the more mobility there is. But there is a competing view, social

reproduction theory, stressing that privileged groups use certain schools and other

resources at their disposal to circumvent meritocracy.20 Because it has become

increasingly difficult to place a child directly into a privileged position, an indirect

compensation strategy of social reproduction is used.21

Total mobility rates after 1950 have been shown to vary both among and within

countries, but not according to the level of industrialisation. Thus the debates shiftedto variations in relative mobility not due to changes in occupational structure

(notably the decline of the rather immobile group of farmers). Some researchers

conclude that meaningful variations in relative mobility between countries are absent

in the survey material, as are trends.22 Others, however, conclude that relative

mobility grows by 1% per year.23 A long time horizon combined with measured

variations of determinants in historical societies will better capture slow changes, and

allow us to test better for changes that are non-linear and that do not appear in all

regions at the same time. What actually drives mobility patterns is still unclear,

certainly for the pre-survey era. Failure to take historical contexts into account might

be a key explanation for the often contradictory results that have been found. Here,there is a task for long-term global social science history: to modify modernisation

theory to accommodate the historical records in different parts of the world.

2.1.2. Rationalisation

Rationalisation increasing efficiency in all parts of life the second research

domain I will discuss, is a process which Weber saw as one of the main characteristics

of Western societies since the Middle Ages. But surely it is now a global process.

Weber considered rationalisation across a wide range of human activity, such as the

arts, economy, scientific and technical progress, state formation, and bureaucracy.

18Treiman, Industrialization (1970), and Blau/Duncan, American Occupational Structure(1976).19Treiman, Industrialization (1970). Treiman et al., Educational Expansion (2003). vanLeeuwen, Social Inequality (2009). van Leeuwen/Maas, Historical Studies (2010).20Collins,Credential Society (1979). Bourdieu/Passeron, Reproduction in Education (1977).21Other confounding factors are professional organizations and trade unions. In a meritocraticview of the world, such institutions certify that a person has what skills are needed for a certainjob, but they may function as institutional hindrances to newcomers. Political regimes mightalso matter in loosening or tightening the occupational bonds between parents and children,as do family systems and inheritance laws and practices.22Erikson/Goldthorpe, Constant Flux (1992).23Ganzeboom et al., Intergenerational Class Mobility (1989); there is no consensus, Breen,Social Mobility (2004).

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Coping with risks can be seen as part of the domain of rationalisation, arguably

from the dawn of human history. While there is every reason to feel festive on the

occasion of theScandinavian Economic History Reviews jubilee, the risks that face us

seem tremendous. Banks are failing, governments are having to step in, creating even

more massive public debt, the electorate is becoming increasingly polarised, and the

end of the euro is now being discussed as if it were a distinct possibility. Political,

social, and economic risks dominate the news, momentarily driving environmental

risks from the news hour. Is it too bold a prediction to suggest that from now on

many more historical studies will be devoted to risk and risk control?

Several general social science approaches to the study of risk may be discerned.24

Familiar to historians, at least those working in the fields of economics, demography

and morbidity, is an approach that statisticians and policy-makers favour for present-

day risks. It involves the estimation of the probability distribution associated with a

certain risk, and the magnitude of the adverse effects of those risks. Geographers

have long been interested in the spatial distribution of risks, and in linking those to

variations in resources. Historical geographers can increasingly follow suit, due to therise of historical Geographical Information Systems (GISs). Social psychologists

analyse how humans estimate risks and choose a course of action when it is not

feasible to estimate, even roughly, hazard probabilities or the magnitude of losses.25

Institutions may, incidentally, serve to make life simpler by creating predictable

courses of action, as stressed by rational choice sociologists,26 and neo-institutional

economic historians.27 Another research tradition focuses on how risk assessment,

risk attribution, and risk behaviour spring from how we look at the world in terms of

norms, values and ideologies.28 A pivotal theme in this approach is that even if, by

some stroke of magic, we could estimate exactly all the losses and gains of all courses

of action in the face of risk, there would never be one single best solution, that cost-benefit analysis, for example, could single out. The best solution, in this view,

depends on the social and cultural premises we start from.29

Here, history matters too. Enlarging the time span may greatly increase the

availability of data. Long-term data may facilitate explanations as societies change,

and the long-term data thus cover many different situations with regard to potential

24Tierney, Critical Sociology (1999), 2179. Beck, Risk Society (1992). Golding, Social and

Programmatic History (1992).25In risk perception, humans act less as individuals and more as social beings who haveinternalized social pressures and delegated their decision-making processes to institutions.

They manage as well as they do, without knowing the risks they face, by following social ruleson what to ignore: institutions are their problem-simplifying devices, Douglas/Wildavsky,Risk (1982), 80. Boudon, Subjective Rationality (1989). Tversky/Kahneman, Framing ofDecisions (1981), and the essays in Kahneman et al., Judgment (1982).26E.g. Schelling, Strategy (1960), 57 and 70.27Institutions reduce uncertainty by providing a structure to everyday life, North,Institutions(1990), 3 et passim.28Douglas/Wildavsky, Risk(1982).29While this approach might ring a bell with many historians, it is not one which has yetengendered a great many studies on risks in past societies. Perhaps historical studies on thedecline of magic or on the interpretation of nature and natural disasters could be interpreted inthis fashion. See, for example, Thomas, Religion (1971), and Thomas, Man and the NaturalWorld(1983). Praying, for that matter, can be considered a way of risk management. For earlystudies suggesting this, see Febvre, Pour lhistoire dun sentiment (1956), and Delumeau,Rassurer et proteger (1989).


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causes. In this respect it does not matter whether one uses some form of multivariate

analysis or case comparisons. There has certainly been an interest in spatial

variation, for example, in historical studies trying to explain the past rise of the

West. Such studies often discuss EastWest differences in the occurrence ofnatural

risks, such as diseases, earthquakes and flooding, before turning to other explana-tions.30 Historical studies of risk are the second candidate on the shortlist of global

social science history.

2.1.3. Cooperation

Cooperation is the third central theme in sociology. The journalScienceeven places

the question How did cooperative behavior evolve? among the top 25 unresolved

key questions across all fields of science.31 Why indeed do and did humans

cooperate? Why do we not live in a situation of permanent conflict, given that we

often value our own interests most? Paraphrasing the eighteenth-century proto-sociologist Mandeville, how do private vices often lead to public virtue?32 A key

question for social science history is to explain what allowed for different degrees and

forms of human cooperation in past societies, and to document which forms were

more successful than others in certain situations? Why have collective goods been

produced more by some groups, and in some societies, in the past than in others?

Peace is an extreme example, but safety in general, welfare, health care and schooling

are others. How did such public provisions come about?

Social scientists have developed insights of use for historians.33 Olson pointed out

that self-interested group members may attempt to enjoy, without contributing, the

benefits of a collective arrangement from which they cannot be excluded (because

exclusion is impossible or not feasible because of high costs). The existence of this

free-rider problem leads to fewer or less efficient collective goods than is preferable,

even for a self-interested group member. Solutions include third-party enforcement,

perhaps by the state, and selective incentives, such as praise in response to

cooperation or shaming in the case of free-riding.34 Axelrod demonstrated that in

a repeated prisoners dilemma (where one has the option of achieving a collective

solution that is superior) the most rewarding strategy is to start by cooperating and

then do what your partner does to you.35 Cooperation may come about despite its

costs if there is information on the partnerspast behaviour, and due to the shadow of

the future in other words the expected duration of the relationship. Institutional

arrangements providing such information, or such a time horizon, thus matter, as

30See Jones, European Miracle (1981). Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Diamond/Robinson, Using Comparative Methods (2010).31At place 16; it was, incidentally, the only question from the social sciences and humanitiesapart fromWill Malthus continue to be wrong?, at 25. For the list in Scienceof July 2005, seehttp://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/misc/webfeat/125th32Mandeville,Fable of The Bees (1714/1723).33The list of classic studies is, of course, longer. See, for example, Ostrom, Governing theCommons (1990). See also recent studies on cooperative breeding, the notion that forms ofhuman behaviour - such as family systems and mutual aid have evolved out of a relativelystrong innate human drive to cooperate, Sear/Coall, How much does family matter? (2011).34Olson, Logic (1977).35Axelrod,Evolution (1984).

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they do when helping to coordinate ones behaviour with that of the partner.

Interestingly, past cooperation thus fosters future cooperation; if a society has

historically progressed along the road to greater cooperation, this may stimulate

further success.

In Europe, most individuals over the past few centuries have enjoyed some

protection against hardship through mutual aid societies, philanthropic organisa-

tions, and, for more than a century now, through state social services dispensing

taxpayersmoney. How have these various forms of human cooperation come about?

And why have they taken on such different forms? To what degree, when, where, and

why has there been a transition to a predominantly tax-based system?36 From a

social science perspective, the situation before the compulsory welfare state is the

more interesting. In the current era of downsizing welfare states, documenting and

explaining philanthropy and mutual aid are likely to be pivotal themes for social

science history.

Philanthropy has a long history in most societies. Why? Why do some give to

others who are neither friends nor family? Is it because of selective incentives, such asgaining status or making connections with elite members running charities? Is it in

the hope of reaping heavenly interest? Or is it just for the warm glow that doing

good brings? Can the historical track record on philanthropy elucidate how, and

under what conditions, it can be organised in such a way as to maximise revenues,

minimise costs, and optimise the effects on society? The social sciences have

developed important insights that can usefully be tested for historical societies. A

similar set of questions applies to organised mutual aid. Why are some historical

societies better able to organise citizens into a group helping its needy members from

shared funds to which the members contribute? How is it possible to organise such

organised mutual aid, especially in view of the problems of moral hazards andadverse selection?37 Here there seems to be a self-strengthening effect: once a group is

in place, the costs of preserving it diminish, and the longer the group exists the

greater the trust that might be shown by prospective members.38

2.2. Research designs

Having sketched the future of social history as global social science history in the

three research domains of social inequality, rationalisation and cooperation, it is

time to discuss research designs, including types of data and approaches to

collaboration.If social history is seen as a branch of the social sciences, it is inspired by the

formal research designs of the social sciences. Starting from a question, on an

36See, for example, Alber,Vom armenhaus(1982). Lindert, Growing Public(2004); For my ownresearch on charity, philanthropy, and mutual aid see van Leeuwen, Trade Unions (1997).Guilds (2012). Giving in Early Modern History (2012). van Leeuwen/Wiepking, NationalCampaigns(forthcoming). For a recent summary of the findings of philanthropic studies, seeBekkers/Wiepking, Literature Review (2011).37Akerlof, Market (1970). Arrow, Uncertainty (1971). Stiglitz, Economics (1988); for adiscussion of social mechanisms to combat moral hazards, see Hechter, Principles (1987); forexamples of the historical development of mutual aid societies globally, see van der Linden,Social Security (1996).38North, Institutions (1990), 60. Weisbrod, Nonprofit Economy (1988), 101, 1567.


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intriguing topic, theories are selected that propose testable answers or hypotheses,

and these are put to a test, which allows us to prefer one theory rather than another,

to modify a theory in the light of the results, or to accept it momentarily as the best

currently available.39 Simple questions, incidentally, are often also those that can

fruitfully be posed for a wide range of historical contexts, globally so to speak. Atypical social science history research design allows for a replicable test and allows

one to judge, preferably formally, which of a set of competing theories best fits the

historical record. A plea for social science history is also a plea to proceed likewise.

In some cases it might even be possible to mimic experimental research designs in

the life sciences, using a varied historical record to compare societies where a

particular event took place with different societies, identical in other respects, where

it did not take place. The track record of history may then be seen as the laboratory

of mankind, and the discipline of history becomes in a sense experimental.40 To the

extent we can truly control for confounding influences by using an appropriate

research design, we may be able to answer such questions as what effect didNapoleonic reforms have on economic growth, or, what effect did they have on social

mobility.

It is sometimes said that the historical record can be bedded by theory only if the

bed is a Procrustesbed. You may recall the ancient villain Procrustes, who doubled

as a smith and a bandit and made his victims fit his iron bed, by either cutting off

excess limbs or pulling his victims apart until their length matched that of his bed.

Such unhealthy practices gave Procrustes, and by extension the application of social

science theory and methods to the historical record, a certain reputation.

There are, indeed, differences between the humanities and the social sciences

(and, for that matter, also among historians and among sociologists) in the

appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of using general theories. There

is one traditional disciplinary divide between history and sociology that merits

attention. The traditional historical way of proceeding is to start with a description

followed by an interpretation of the findings, whereas standard social science

research starts by selecting theories yielding predictions for answers to the research

questions. The traditional historical way of proceeding first describing and later

explaininghas its advantages, especially in exploratory research when the problem

to be posed is not yet clear; it may help to formulate an interesting question

optimally; it may also help to monitor unexpected historical findings otherwise

perhaps unseen or not fully appreciated. However, the social science approach has its

advantages too. To begin with a practical advantage, there is always a structured

story to tell. Ones expectations might be met (theory confirmed), or the historical

record might surprise us (theory rejected). Furthermore, it helps to connect ones

particular research with that of others, notably when using broader, overarching

theories that can shed light on our particular topic too. Thus it helps too to make

social history more of a cumulative science. Finally, the true test of a theory is

arguably its predictive power. The social sciences can be rather more a source of

inspiration for social historians than a Procrustes bed.

39Ultee et al., Sociologie (2003).40Acemoglu et al., Ancien Regime (2010); Diamond/Robinson, Comparative Methods(2010).

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The data one needs for social science history depend entirely on the questions

asked and the hypotheses being tested. Even the limited set of examples given above

makes it clear that the three research domains of social science history give rise to

countless questions, and thus to the need for numerous types of data. For present

purposes, it seems best to once again take a birds-eye view and discuss two generalissues: data and collaboratories.

One may distinguish three levels of historical data: individual, community and

national. Individual-level data relate to an individual, and the household he or she

lives in. Such data exist in many different shapes, sometimes offering abundant

information; it is perhaps not surprising then that legislation protects living persons

against excessive gathering and use of such data.41 Here the historian sometimes has

a comparative advantage. Individual life courses in the past can be reconstructed

using certificates of birth, marriage and death, fleshed out with census and tax data,

conscription registers, land-register data, and data from a myriad of other sources.42

Important databases now exist covering various countries.43 Furthermore, attempts

are underway to make such data comparable. Some of these datasets span the globe;

most still relate to the West.

If individuals and their families form the microcosm of our research, the nations

they live in are the universe itself. Here, relevant historical data of many different

kinds have been created or are in the process of being created, on political regimes,

welfare arrangements, family systems, and much else.44 Both individual-level data

and national data are invaluable for global social historians, but their creation and

continuous dissemination sometimes present major challenges.

The main challenge at present, however, is the creation of a middle level of data,

on the communities individuals live in. Such data are in very short supply. And they

matter in a substantive and statistical sense. Substantively, since for many purposescommunities constitute a meaningful geographical area, the space historical actors

live in and are most influenced by. Statistically, it means that the units that serve as a

basis for comparison are not the over 190 countries currently in existence, but a

manifold multiple.

If, in a researchers utopia, we were to have relevant individual, community, and

national data, we would still need to standardise these data. Here too, much has been

done, is being done, and remains to be done. Vital registration data are usually fairly

uniform anyhow. Our lives are, in a demographic sense, not as unique as we might

think. We are born, named by our parents, die, and are buried, often by our family,

and in between we have relationships and possibly children. The priest, the vicar andthe civil servant duly note these events in relatively simple and uniform documents,

and have done so for centuries across large parts of the globe, certainly in the West

41Not that these data are not used today, but they are the preserve of intelligence agencies,states, banks, and other corporations, such as Facebook, and subject to privacy rules. Suchrules do not usually apply for those long dead.42Kok, Principles (2007).43See note 53, see also the survey of historical databases with longitudinal microdata byK. Mandemakers and G. Alter, accessible at http://historicaldemography.net/documents/questionaire_longitudinal_databases_balsac_version2.pdf44See notes 53 and 54. An interesting anthropological database is formed by the MurdochAtlas, http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/drwhite/worldcul/atlas.htm, and the current reworking byBolt, Long-Run Economic Development (2010).


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and its former colonies. Still, even here, classification systems have had to be created

to compare household structures.45

Important tasks for the near future include extending the available data

geographically and temporally, and harmonising these. Currently, the geographical

coverage of historical data is largely restricted to the Western world. To functionbetter as input for a historical laboratory, extensions are needed to other parts of the

globe. Most of the data we have relate to the period after 1800. An even longer time

span is necessary. Thus data reaching back to encompass the early modern period are

valuable. From a comparative point of view, historical data will be of little value if

they cannot be made comparable. Extending datasets geographically and temporally

exacerbates this problem. Thus we need to take great care to standardise and code

data in a comparable way. We need historical international standardised community

indicators.

Another task is to find and apply suitable ways to analyse data at different

geographical levels (individuals, families, communities, countries), where there is not

only regional variation, but also temporal change differing by region. Fortunately,

multilevel models now exist in the social sciences which allow one to decompose

variations over various levels and over time.46 Although historical applications of

these models are still few and far between,47 this will no doubt change fast. A

felicitous consequence is that a problem that historians have long recognised the

varying degree of historical change between various geographical levels and between

political, social, cultural, economic and demographic processes48 may be alleviated

by the use of these models.

Creating truly comparative data for global social science history is a task not

easily undertaken by individuals. It often involves a dedicated team of researchers

working over a long period. A new way to organise research globally is throughcollaboratories, with collaborators in different parts of the globe working together

through an Internet-based platform functioning as a virtual laboratory.49 Research-

ers working on a common theme share their information, discuss problems, and

document these discussions using a dedicated Internet space. Such collaboratories

are instrumental in creating social science history across the globe.50

An early example of a collaboratory is the History of Work website, underpinning

HISCO, a historical international standard coding system for occupations. What

income and wealth are to economists and economic historians, occupations are to

sociologists and social historians. Occupations form the DNA of social science

history. They determine life chances, express lifestyles, embody both economic andcultural capital and indicate social status. Nearly every adult, past or present, has

45E.g. the househould classification systems by Laslett and Hamel. The priest, the vicar andthe civil servant may note events duly but not always in a neutral way or uniform e.g. in thecase of illegitimate children, see e.g. Szreter et al., Categories (2004).46See Snijders/Bosker, Multilevel Analysis (1999).47E.g. Zijdeman, Like My Father Before Me (2009).48Braudel, La Mediterranee (1949); Braudel, Civilisation materielle (19671979).49See, for example, de Moor/van Zanden, Do ut des (2008), and Dormans/Kok, AlternativeApproach(2010). An example of a collaboratory in the domain of cooperation is http://www.collective-action.info, which is used in de Moors Common Rules project, http://www.collective-action.info/projects_ERCGrant50Which is difficult, as Buchmann/Hannum, Education (2001) concluded.

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one although the sources may be silent and they form the common coin of

comparison of social status between individuals over time and space, if only they

could be made comparable. HISCO serves that purpose, namely to silence the

Babylonian confusion of millions of occupational titles across periods, regions and

languages. It is collaborative in two senses: it builds on a contemporary global coding

scheme for contemporary societies with a proven track record, and its creation was a

collaborative effort. For more than a decade now a group of social science historians

have been collaborating to build an Internet-accessible database for historical

occupational titles coded into HISCO, incrementally expanding, and with the

opportunity to discuss problems and solutions.51 It now contains comparably coded

occupations from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Great

Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.52

Work is under way in Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Russia, the Philippines and

elsewhere.53 It is a social science history classification connecting past and present,

and allowing for comparisons. International comparative measures of continuous

social status or discrete social classes in the past are now available based on HISCO.This allows for a comparative analysis of what is arguably the single most important

variable in the social sciences: occupation. Armed with such tools, a great many

social science history questions of a comparative nature are now being tackled on

the global variety and transition of labour relations from 1500 to the present, for

example; on historical life courses; and on strikes in the past.54 Such tools help to

make social history both global history and social science history.

2.3. Conclusion

I have made a plea for the future of social history as global social science history,inspired by research domains and designs from the social sciences, sociology in

particular. As regards the research domains, the natural habitat of global social

science history is arguably formed by the three broad fields of cooperation,

inequality and rationalisation. Although most of the relevant datasets still come

from the Western world, more and more global datasets are being created. Most still

relate either to nations and similar large geographical entities or to individuals; few

relate to communities. There are noble tasks for social history here: to extend

geographical (and temporal) coverage and to gather community-level data especially.

51

It is one of the collaboratories hosted by the International Institute of Social History inAmsterdam.52http://historyofwork.iisg.nl;https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hiscowith files onhttps://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documents53See, for example, for Russiahttp://occupations.asu.ru. HISCO codes are used in variouscollaborative projects to harmonize data. See, for example, the European HistoricalPopulation Samples Network (EHPS-Net), http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.html; the Mosaic project on Recovering Surviving Census Records to Reconstruct Population,Economic, and Cultural History,http://www.censusmosaic.org; the North Atlantic PopulationProject (NAPP), http://www.nappdata.org/napp; the CLIO-INFRA project, http://www.clio-infra.eu; a project at the Centre for Global Economic History at Utrecht University toreconstruct economic inequalities over the past two centuries globally, http://www.cgeh.nl54https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelations; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hsn; https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflicts


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http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/https://collab.iisg.nl/web/hiscohttps://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documentshttps://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documentshttp://occupations.asu.ru/http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://www.censusmosaic.org/http://www.nappdata.org/napphttp://www.clio-infra.eu/http://www.clio-infra.eu/http://www.cgeh.nl/https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelationshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/hsnhttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflictshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflictshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflictshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourconflictshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/hsnhttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelationshttp://www.cgeh.nl/http://www.clio-infra.eu/http://www.clio-infra.eu/http://www.nappdata.org/napphttp://www.censusmosaic.org/http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/social-sciences-scss/european-historical-population-samples-network-ehps-net.htmlhttp://occupations.asu.ru/https://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documentshttps://collab.iisg.nl/group/hisco/documentshttps://collab.iisg.nl/web/hiscohttp://historyofwork.iisg.nl/


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Collaboratories are a way to create, document, and disseminate such data, engage in

collaborative research projects, and to create the tools that are needed for this. A

social science history approach may lead to interesting questions, well-tested

theories, and well-informed, and still readable, writing on the past. A singular

advantage is that the global historical record provides a greater variety of testinggrounds for social science theories certainly with regard to slow or path-dependent

processes.

Some may be weary of my plea for a social science history. Others before me have

sung songs of praise for social science history, and I know that the optimistic

atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s has given way to a certain resignation. But I take

this as a healthy sign of growing up rather than as something undermining one s faith

in social science history. Some 30 years ago Conzen reviewed American quantitative

historical studies dealing with social mobility. She lamented the lack of context: too

often there simply has not remained sufficient time or energy to consult the literary

sources that would have added depth and local texture, and this, she remarked, hasled to a certain arid quality according to critics. She noted that much of the work

has been additive rather than cumulative. Still, she expressed hope that greater

sensitivity to limitations in evidence, and greater statistical and theoretical

sophistication may yet redeem its initial promise. Conzen concluded that:

the answer [. . .] is not less quantification, but [. . .] better quantification, more awarenessof the limitations of the data, greater willingness to move beyond descriptive statistics tomultivariate explanatory models where appropriate, and greater attention to explicittheory in posing questions and interpreting findings.55

The future of social history as global social science history does exactly that.

3. The future of economic history (by Stephen Broadberry, London School of

Economics)

One of the advantages of being an economic historian is that under normal

circumstances you are not called upon to predict the future. Sadly today I cannot

restrict myself to predicting the past. This is slightly unnerving because I recently had

to evaluate long run predictions made by economists concerning the future, and

uncovered some interesting examples of people being spectacularly wrong. Perhaps I

should not be too specific here, but some cases are very well known, such as Paul

Samuelsons claim in the 1967 edition of his textbook Economics: An Introductory

Analysis,56 that the Soviet Union would overtake the USA in terms of real GNP

between 1977 and 1995. Each subsequent edition moved the date further into the

future until the comparison was dropped in 1985. In an attempt to minimise the risk

of an equally spectacular forecast failure, I decided that I would consult with other

economic historians, and I will report on the results of this survey in due course. Let

me begin, however, with the general outlook for the subject.

55Conzen, Quantification (1983), quotes from pages 664, 672, 655 and 676.56Samuelson, Economics (1967).

244 G. Joneset al.

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3.1. General outlook

Probably like many of you, I have been present at many camp-fire talks where

economic historians say they are unloved and worried about the future of the

discipline. Recently, however, there has been a more optimistic mood. As Barry

Eichengreen said in his Presidential Address at the Economic History Associationmeetings in Boston in September 2011, This has been a good crisis for economic

history.57 But there is more to it than that. Even before the crisis, there was a

renewed interest in a number of areas, some of which I shall discuss in the next

section. So right now, I think the discipline is in better shape than it has been for as

long as I can remember. But what will it look like in 10 or 20 years time?

3.2. Topics

I indicated in the introduction that I had surveyed colleagues for their opinions on

the future of economic history, so let me now tell you what they said. The first

question I asked was What do you think will be the most important topic in ten

years time? I can now report that there was complete agreement on this, with

everybody giving exactly the same answer. Absolutely everybody said that the

most important topic will be the one on which they are currently working. Perhaps

I should not have been surprised by this. After all, people tend to work on what they

think is most interesting, and if that topic is not popular now, it must just be because

other people have not yet realised how interesting it really is. So it is just a matter of

time before they do. I will try to guard against this bias, but you have been warned

and know to apply a suitable discount factor to what I am going to say. I think there

are a number of topics which lie behind the recent resurgence of interest in economic

history and which we can expect to read more about in the next decade or so.

3.2.1. Financial crises

This is no surprise, since I have already mentioned Barry Eichengreens quip about

economic history having a good crisis. But interestingly, the Economic History Review

had a special issue on Finance, Investment and Risk in 2009, where the editors

pointed out that financial history had been a growth area even before the crisis had

broken.58 So maybe economic historians are good forecasters after all!

3.2.2. The great divergence

The debate over the Great Divergence of living standards between Europe and Asia,

started by Pomeranz,59 has had a phenomenal effect on economic history. This is

another area where the Economic History Review has had a special issue.60 However,

as well as shedding new light on European economic history, this debate has turned

the economic history of Asia into a major growth area in its own right, not just in

comparison with Europe. A new Asian Historical Economics Society was launched

57Eichengreen, Economic History (2012), 289.58Humphries/Hindle, Editors Introduction (2009), 1.59Pomeranz,Great Divergence (2000).60Broadberry/Hindle, Editors Introduction (2011).


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in Beijing in May 2010, mirroring the European Historical Economics Society

established in the early 1990s, which has done so much to assist with the emergence

of a new comparative approach to European economic history.

3.2.3. New institutional economic history

New institutional economic history has had a phenomenal impact on the discipline

in the last couple of decades, and continues to exercise a strong influence. Douglass

North winning the Nobel Prize in Economics was a tremendous boost, and there are

now many strands.61 Furthermore, this is one way in which economic history has had

a major impact on economics, balancing out the flow of ideas from economics to

economic history.

3.2.4. Anthropometric history

Anthropometric history has also been phenomenally successful and has enabledquantitative analysis of living standards in societies where previously only specula-

tion was possible, as well as providing alternative interpretations of economic history

in more established areas.62

3.2.5. Historical national accounting

Historical national accounting has begun to provide a framework for comparing

societies over a much longer time period than used to be the case. Estimates of per

capita GDP based on hard data rather than guesstimates now reach back to the

thirteenth century for some western economies, and work is in hand for a number ofAsian economies, including Japan, India and China.63

3.2.6. Environmental history

The environment has always been studied at least implicitly by agricultural

historians, but environmental history is now being treated much more seriously by

economic historians.64

You might want to apply the own topic bias discount factor to some of these

Documents

Jones, Geoffrey - Future of Economic, Business, And Social History