The Future Direction of British History: Thinking about Economic Cultures

David Feldman and Jon Lawrence comment in their introduction to Structures and Transformations in Modern British History that Gareth Stedman Jones's principal interests and enthusiasms have lain in 'the interrelated history of economic structure, ideas and politics'. His abiding interest has been 'to understand the social and intellectual context that shaped radical and revolutionary responses to industrial capitalism'.¹ This concern was true of both Outcast London and An End to Poverty? It informs the approach of the Centre for History and Economics based at Cambridge, and now established at Harvard, that was started by Gareth Stedman Jones and Emma Rothschild. The Centre aims to apply economic concepts to historical problems through the history of economic and social thought or through economic history. The Centre's statement on its current research agenda concerning exchanges of economic, legal and political ideas claims that a dominant tendency in recent historiography is the transnational turn. This approach is linked with the 'new history of economic thought', with its concern for the relationship between the 'high' political thought of theorists, the 'medium' thought of officials, businessmen and commentators, and the 'low' thought of daily life and experience (a formulation that is not without its problems). The relationships between these different modes of analysis are difficult to tease out within a single country, and are still more complex across national boundaries.² The Centre's research agenda are very fertile for modern British history, and in this essay I will explore some of the themes in the recent literature on the development of capitalism and responses to it.

The method is distinctive, avoiding both the application of neo-classical economic theory as is so common in econometric history as practised in the United States, and institutional economics exemplified by the work of Douglass North. The economy is not interpreted as the allocation of resources according to marginal prices and returns, leading to price convergence within and between countries, based on the utility maximizing behaviour of rational homo economicus. Rather, the distinguishing feature of Stedman Jones's approach to industrial capitalism and to its critics comes through the application of intellectual and cultural history to the ways in which the economy was viewed and understood. It is less concerned with rates of growth and performance, levels of productivity and trade, than with the ways in which issues of distributive justice and social opportunities were viewed and debated. There is more concern to understand how the economists themselves negotiated the tensions between capitalism and other social and cultural concerns. At least to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, economists were interested in such matters as altruism and character, and abstract theory continued to work alongside a historical approach until the 1920s. Moral approaches to the economy continued to be found within economics, as well as from non-economists who were opposed to an abstract theoretical vision of homo economicus. Much debate over the economy continued in a hybrid form through various genres, from magazines and newspapers such as the Economist and Financial Times to sermons, advice literature, and novels. The individual had to negotiate the meanings of economic relationships through daily experience and behaviour.³

Recent books by Craig Muldrew and Margot Finn on credit, by Matthew Hilton on consumerism, and by Frank Trentmann on free trade provide models of how to understand social and intellectual responses to industrial capitalism. One area on which Finn and Muldrew focus is the law. Muldrew shows how the shift from personalized commercial relations based on reputation within the local community to longer distance or impersonal relations led to difficulties in assessing credit-worthiness. The result was a marked rise in litigation to secure payment for goods which led to an increase in transaction costs. In order to overcome these difficulties, the business community devised new means of assessing trustworthiness, relying less on personal or family reputation within the local community than on impeccable accounts and contractual probity. These shifts in the culture of business practice are linked with debates in political thought, especially the concern of Locke for contract.⁴ Similarly...