Introduction[24]
Economics and economic history in Britain came into being together, intertwined in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). Towards the end of the nineteenth century they began to diverge.
Jevons, Marshall and Edgeworth reached for a “Great Theory”, worked up from first principles, ‘complete and self-sufficient, able, on its own terms, to answer all questions which those terms allowed' (Shackle 1967: 4). In contrast, economic history is a part of “the other canon” of inductive, evidence-based economic investigation (Reinert and Daastol 2004). Its central subject is “the wealth of nations”— modern economic growth, how it came about, how it kept going, and how it affected people at every level. For earlier times and other places, the discipline imposes the questions and concepts of political economy. Unlike economics, however, economic history is discovered, not created. If it sometimes takes an ideological inflection, evidence usually wins out.1This chapter is derived from biographical sources, the archive of All Souls College, Oxford, University Lecture Lists and examination decrees, postholder publications, Google Scholar citations (tabulated with Harzing's Publish or Perish), comments by colleagues, critical readings by friends and my own experience. Thanks to Cormac O'Grada for a line from Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, to Jane Humphries for an apt quotation from Toynbee and to Urvi Khaitan for skilful research.
It comes as a surprise to find that its most persistent theme is how the economy affects the household. This is not motivated by middle-class guilt (as per Coleman 1987: 65), but by an intuition that what the economy produces holds out the incentives for the next round of production: ‘Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production' (Smith 1776, 2: 159). Productivity and welfare interact with each other, and this interaction gives the discipline its hidden coherence.
It is easy to construct a kings and queens history of the discipline around professors and readers, but their writ did not run far—when they led (which was not always) it was by example and suasion. Instead, the story here is of problems and preoccupations, each with a lineage of investigators. The first theme is how economic output affected the experience of ordinary life. A second one is craft, commerce and industry, production, exchange and finance, in their specific detail and local cause and effect. Agricultural organisation is a subset of the previous two in a low-density environment which antedates modern economic growth. How to measure and validate is a methodological challenge and has a lineage of its own. Coming out of Victorian laissez-faire, the discipline implicitly assumes the primacy of getting and spending, self-interest and market exchange. This epistemological legacy, the history of economic thought, forms another lineage. Government and the State appear to the discipline mostly as agents of taxation and war; social policy has been outsourced (especially in Oxford) to other kinds of historians. The final lineage is what drives economic growth and what holds it back.
The University of Oxford is a federation of wealthy institutions which hire accomplished scholars and send young ones into the world. Postholders do not appoint their successors, hence there is no dynastic “Oxford School”. There is, however, a mode of production. In the enlightenment model of progress, valid knowledge is revealed by inspired individuals. Academic courses and examinations order it into a syllabus. Continuity comes from teaching, which is particularly inflexible in Oxford. Examination rubrics persist for decades, courses are examined externally (i.e. not by their teacher), and content changes only slowly. Until recent years, most designated economic history posts were University ones with reduced teaching loads. College fellows in history or economics had to cover a larger syllabus, but could focus their research.
Together, these two groups provided a rich but narrow array of undergraduate courses, focused mostly on the British experience.From the 1930s onwards, economic history had at least two or three earmarked University posts. Tenures were short: postholders arrived with reputations already made (in Oxford or elsewhere) and stayed for a decade or two, sometimes to retirement and beyond. Scholars typically published one or two landmark works over their tenure, making one or more for the discipline in every decade except the 1890s. These beacons signalled the validity of the discipline, were widely discussed, and are cited hundreds and even thousands of times. More humble publications make up for lower resonance with larger numbers. Knowledge is a web, not a race: everything connects and even an uncited publication, born to ‘waste its sweetness on the desert air', may be cherished by its author and vital to their development. Only research carried out or published in Oxford is covered here. This undervalues dowries brought over from previous posts and also the vast output of postgraduate research, most of which was published (if it was) after authors had moved elsewhere.
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