Conclusion
Some of the dominant themes of classical and New Economic History concerned economic performance across time, defined in terms of growth, expansions of productive capacity through technology or organisation, rising standards of living, demographic expansion and power relations and material distributions mediated by class, race and gender.
Surveying Avner's work as an integrated whole, he has embraced these questions in his research programme, especially in his first phase of work, but he has also taken them in new directions. He has focused on the paradoxes and pathologies of modern economic growth, observing how social and military conflict, the search for security, status and identity, and the fragility of well-being, make the judgments of political economy more, not less, difficult even in a world of technological change and material plenty. But the picture is not all dark: Avner's narratives and analyses are leavened with the sense that social and individual choice can always take new courses, that goodwill, mutuality and cooperation are just as common as self-interest, rivalry and conflict, and that a prudent social democracy supporting a secure and genial citizenry is, despite all, quite possible.We may ponder how life experience, education, culture, identity and memory will shape the intellectual life of a particular scholar or writer, and how valuable it is for the reader to know something of the life of an author or creator. Avner's life and formation outside the liberal Anglo-American consensus, in the first decades of socialist Israel, is surely a large element shaping his historical and economic vision, his sense of what most needs explaining. We can leave the last word on this puzzle to Avner himself, who offered these lines to readers of his 1989 work on the First World War, at the close of the preface (Offer 1989: ix):
A decade or so spent as a farmer, soldier, public servant and student in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s prepared me to perceive the agrarian, military and mental patterns of the Edwardian Empire. Those years also exposed me to some of the faces of war.
Clouds float across my window In many towns, on many desks, then seasons, years—a decade yet?
A mound of paper binds me in the net of puzzles that research might yet unravel and memories that I am ever striving to forget.