The Puzzling State of Economic History: The Profession

Vol.1, no. 2 March 20(K) HISTORICALLY SPEAKING ThePuzzlingState ofEconomicHistory A THE PROFESSION by PfIn A. Codants mong the insights associated with the new literature on travel is the idea that coming andgoing can clarify thingsfor the traveler. Ship voyages into the heart ofdarkness, metaphysical train rides, magical mystery tours—you know the routine. Recently, I experienced a small epiphany at O'Hare Airport, while returningfrom the annual meeting ofthe AHA. It occurredjust afew days after January 6! I had attended the meeting in Chicago because I had organized a session at the Al IA sponsored bv an affiliated society: the Economic Historv Association. The session, on changing economic behavior and consumer patterns in eighteenth-century Europe, was superb; a first-rate paper bv one of the finest scholars in the field and three excellent comments by well-known senior scholars in economics and historv. Unfortunately, we attracted a sparse crowd in a small room, in a satellite hotel. Oh, well. I thought, maybe a better time slot would have helped Al O-I fare the next day 1 bumped into one of the panelists, who was sitting and talking with some other historians in the departure lounge. 1 knew most of the people with whom he was sitting, but he did introduce me to a scholar I had never met before—the new editor of TieJournalofAmerican History, as it turned out. Wc chatted for a bit, and, during the course of the conversation, I learned that she was current Iv on a war-long fellowship at a prestigious humanities center, completing a book on the history of transscxualitv. lor some reason this immediately got me to thinking about my panel the previous day, the field of economic historv, and the state of history in general. In the spirit of the great bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson—"Don't start me to talkin'. cause I'll tell you evervthm' I know'—some thoughts on these nutters follow below. Whether it was the small crowd at the economic historv session (most of the audience was disguised as empty seats, to paraphrase the old line about the early days of the New York Titans) or the research specialization of the editor of one of the flagship journals in the field, I can't saw Taken together, though, these "data" brought home the fad that economic historv has become incrcasmglv marginal to the historical enterprise, and is today in a wry parlous state. continued on page 2 National Conference Boston University June 1-3, 2000 Conference Program and Registration Materials Inside! 2 2 - :PROFESSION continuedfnm page I This wasn't always the case, l'or a time in the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, economic historv was perhaps the most sizzling part of the hottest trend in historv: quantification. Since the mid to late 1980s, however. interest in both economic history specifically and quantification m history generally has cooled Considerably, as historians, inspired by the postmodernist project, gravitated more and more toward what Michael Lewis would call the new new thing: cultural history . As much as I'd like to. I can't blame Clifford GeertZ and assorted (sordid;) French thinkers entirely tor this situation, tor economic historians, armed with methodological muscle and theory with .1 capital T, haw helped to seal their own taies. For the first tort? or tittv wars of its existence (most scholars trace its origins Kick to late-nineteenth-century Germany and England), economic history was considered a useful, modest, and relatively straightforward branch of institutional or social historv. Most practitioners were traditionallv trained historians, who seldom employed the methods ol the mvliI sciences. much less explicit economic theorv in their work. Although accurate economic measurement—what the seventeenth-century political arithmetician Sir William Petty referred to as "Number, Weight, and McasuR*" —gradually became more important to economic historians, it was not until the 1950s and. more emphatically, the 1960s that the field began to assume its modem form. That is to say, during the 1950s Volume I, Number 2 Historically Speaking The Newsletter of The Historical Society 656 Beacon Street Mezzanine Boston, MA 02215-2010 617/358-0260 historicfibu.edu www.bu.edu/historic Editor: Kirse G...