New Directions in French Economic History: An Introduction

Why a forum on recent directions in French economic history?¹ Ironically, the reasons for the flagging interest in economic history are the same as those for its recent invigoration and innovation. Over the past decade or so the dominant organizing models of economic history—the Marxist, the Malthusian, and the neoclassical—have lost purchase with many practicing historians. As is well known, both the Marxist and the neoclassical paradigms privileged the economic in historical explanation while the Malthusian did so for demography. As historians increasingly eschewed essentialism or foundationalism and embraced a concept of culture in which the economic was but one aspect of experience among many, however, the place of economics—both practice and thought—was often relegated to the margins of the historian’s page, and sometimes pushed off the edge of it altogether. As these dominant models fell by the wayside in economic history, a growing dissatisfaction about their ability to guide research in ways that would square with empirical analysis created a void that generated a variety of new ways to think about and to examine the economies of the past.

Because of this vitality, because of the suspicion of sectarianism (or downright unreadability) that many historians still harbor about economic history, and because new directions in economic history intersect very clearly with interests, methods, style, and interpretations of French history that many of their colleagues share, French Historical Studies organized this forum. In the pages that follow we will see alternatives to the Marxist proclivity to search for the conditions of precapitalist economic formations or for the elusive juncture when and where the drastic transition to industrial capitalism occurred. We will not see much patience for the Malthusian postulate that, in Fernand Braudel’s famous formulation, “the weight of numbers” was the prime mover of economies. Nor will we find sympathetic accounts of neoclassical liberal economics, for widespread now is the view that that paradigm was as utopian as it was reductive, positing an unrealistic, unreal, and unhistorical model of perfect markets as the yardstick and principle of analysis of actual historical economies. What we will see is a willingness of current economic historians (in departments of economics and history), much like their colleagues in cultural history, to knock down compartmental walls and to search for causal interconnections between economics and politics, thought, and society. Indeed, one need not look far in much contemporary economic history to find assumptions that economic activity and its meaning are immersed in what other historians have come to call culture in the sense that Marshall Sahlins once defined it, as “meaningful orders of persons and things.”²

So what does French economic history look like these days? The essays that follow give only a glimpse, but a representative one, and each in its own way offers suggestions about how the better economic history is being done, what issues it grapples with, and where the field might, and perhaps even should, go. What all of these contributors agree upon, implicitly or explicitly, is that the most important work in this field is microeconomic analysis of how markets work, and how they were thought to work at various times in the past. That is not nearly as narrow a focus as it seems at first blush. Each of these scholars is keenly aware of the complexity of and difference between markets, and to explore and explain them several pay close attention to the role of what are collectively called by economists “transaction costs,” or the wide array of expenses that producers and traders incur in the process of bringing goods to market.

John V. C. Nye, an economic historian in the Department of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis, points out that French economic historians have generally lost interest in exploring the shopworn problem of the Industrial Revolution (when, why, and where it occurred), and specifically to what extent France did or did not successfully imitate Great Britain. This is a...