The phrase isn't as easy to define as one might have hoped....
There is an intuitive division of types of history in which a lot of us engage without questioning it much.
If you tell me, "I'm writing a political history of the United States in the late 19th century" I expect you are working on Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland, Ida B. Wells.
"I'm writing a cultural history of the United States in the late 19th century." Ah, then I would love the chance to quiz you about the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Thomas Nast's cartoons and the music of Victor Herbert. I've posted a photo of Victor Herbert here.
To get a bit closer to what I want -- suppose you are tell me you are writing a history of economics, as a field of study, in the US during this period. Delightful! Nothing like a good discussion of Henry George, Herbert Spencer, John Bates Clark and Thorstein Veblen.
But then we get back to where we began. What does an economic history of the US in the late 19th century entail? In the spirit of the above lists, we can compile a new one: explosive growth of the railroads, innovative uses of electricity, oil strikes and the creation of the Rockefeller fortune. the (contested) growth of labor unions, and so forth.
Yet such a list is not a definition. And indeed, these distinct lists may help confuse us. Economic history is not especially "what economists study". Economists concerned with the history of the late 19th century in the United States are not required to be or to feign ignorance of anything just mentioned. Not even Herbert's music. The difference between an economist and, say, a sociologist is not that they study different parts of the real human world, but that they bring very different methods to the table.
So, again, what DO we mean when we refer specifically to "economic history"? This is a typically obtuse language game -- Wittgenstein would suggest we stay out of the fly bottle. I will say nonetheless: most of the topics of such a book involve productivity.
Productivity, at any rate, is a useful key word, as is the word growth. Growth in this case is, as mathematicians would say, a derivative. Production is what grows. Its rate of growth also grows (a second derivative).
A society with growing production of valuable goods and services needs infrastructure (like the above mentioned railroads, and like in time a network of electrical wires reaching everywhere from centralized power plants). Productivity also generates a lot of issues over who gets the wealth it generates -- laborers (organized or unorganized), the owners of the machinery with which they labor (i.e. capitalists), and/or the owners of key natural resources (i.e. the landlords who wore the black hats in Georgist tales).
My lesson for today then is simply that thinking "productivity-and-its-correlates" when one sees "economic" as an adjective ... generally makes sense of the sentence except when one is talking about economics as a science.
This is a very Marxian definition of economic history on International Workers' Day! Because another way of saying what you said is, "economic history studies how the means of production and the modes of production transform over time."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure whether you mean that as critique or mere observation. I'm nobody's idea of a Marxist, but if I say something now and then that is in some ways similar to something he said -- I'm not going to fret over that.
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