Response to Robert Whaples

The picture Robert Whaples has painted is certainly grim. Economic history is not just neglected, but shunned—or worse yet, despised—by most historians. Meanwhile, in economics departments, where the majority of economic historians now reside, the field is marginalized and, in the long run, doomed to extinction.

To make the picture even more depressing, Whaples (being the good economic historian that he is) backs up his assertions with solid evidence. One could easily add to it. To judge by the titles of articles in mainstream history journals (the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Modern History, Past and Present), interest in economic history is vanishing.¹ Dissertations in economic history in history departments are rare.² And citations suggest that major works of economic history can pass unnoticed by the history profession even when they address issues that once fascinated many non-economic historians.³

My personal experience, if it is worth anything, suggests much the same. Older historians I know who were trained in the 1970s may not write economic history, but they do seem willing to pay attention to it. They also seem open to borrowing from the social sciences and to the possibility of generalization—in other words, to the notion that what they have unearthed in the archives is not necessarily a special case. Younger historians, by contrast, seem suspicious of most social sciences and far more reluctant to generalize. Getting them to read economic history is a much tougher sell. Because of its subjectivity and its assumptions about evidence, much of the new cultural history may even be incompatible with economic history and other varieties of history that draw upon the social sciences.⁴

Why then should historians even bother to pay any attention at all to economic history if the field is divorced from what goes on in history departments and apparently headed toward the grave even in economics? There are several reasons why they should. Despite what Whaples says, economic history is a vibrant field. It can help historians enormously, no matter what they work on or what their political opinions happen to be. It can be particularly useful for the many historians who still admit the possibility of at least occasional generalization and who are as hard-nosed about evidence as any economist.

Although economic history may be on the margins of economics as a discipline, it is secure and thriving at Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, Stanford, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, and Yale, and in many other economics departments as well. The All-UC Group in Economic History, which supports economic history at the University of California, recently had its funding renewed despite the state's dire financial crisis and competition from scores of other programs in the humanities and social, biological, and physical sciences. And outside the United States, economic history is prospering in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe, and especially in Asia and Latin America. Some 1,300 economic historians attended the 2009 World Economic History Congress in Utrecht. That is hardly the mark of a field that is ready for hospice care.

Economic history may therefore be safe from extinction, but the typical member of a history department may still wonder why he or she should bother to pay any attention to it. "Why," he or she might ask, "should we read something that is likely boring, badly written, and divorced from anything we do?" My response: I defy anyone to read a single page of Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, Greg Clark, or Jan de Vries and maintain that economic history is poorly written. Their books and articles have a force and verve reminiscent of past masters of historical prose, such as J.H. Hexter, and while these four scholars may be exceptional, most economic historians write clearly and carefully marshall evidence to support their arguments. How much non-economic history today meets even that minimal standard?

Nor is economic history just tables and graphs—far from it. It can be packed with vivid anecdotes and pictures, as in Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode's Creating...