New Constellations
Our conclusions may be reinforced by way of a brief review of subsequent developments in English historicism. Seebohm’s English Village Community was the first in a series of publications that would utterly revise not only the orthodox picture of Anglo-Saxon history but also the conventional borders of the disciplinary constellations.
Of particular importance was F.W. Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), written very much as an attempt “to answer Mr Seebohm” (Maitland 1897: v). Maitland returned historical orthodoxy to an identification of Anglo-Saxon villages as neither Celtic nor Roman but “very purely and typically German” (Maitland 1897: 222). Nevertheless, he also insisted that Anglo-Saxon society had not been divided into clans, that the English “village community was not a gens” (Maitland 1897: 349), and that “so far back as we can see, the German village had a solid core of individualism” (Maitland 1897: 348). In other words, there could be no story told of a transformation of kinship group into contractual society of individuals, at least not on English soil. Elsewhere, Maitland went further. The attempt to trace the origins of individualism into some distant Continental past, he declared, “should be placed for our race beyond the limit of history” (Pollock and Maitland 1895: 240). What this meant in practice, at least at Maitland’s Cambridge in the early years of the twentieth century, was that study of the early history of the English henceforth passed out of the hands of historians and into those of archaeologists and anthropologists.The year 1907 also saw the publication of H.M. Chadwick’s seminal The Origin of the English Nation, the arguments of which were developed and generalised in his 1912 The Heroic Age. Significantly, both books were published within the “Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series”.
Chadwick marks the definitive rejection of the origin story accepted by, among others, Maine, Cunningham, and the early Marshall. Chadwick’s starting-point was the finding of recent archaeological research that agriculture had been practiced continuously around the North Sea and Baltic coasts since the Stone Age (1907: 343-4). The pre-conquest English were not nomadic pastoralists recently arrived from Asia, but sedentary farmers, and they had been so for time out of mind. From this it followed that the origins of English individualism were not to be sought in some organic story of settlement and cultivation of the land. Anglo-Saxon individualism, Chadwick argued, had its roots in the corruption of traditional society that began when the young men began to see a life of war and plunder as a viable alternative to following their fathers behind the plough: spurning the bonds of kin and the ties of custom, young warriors now swore loyalty to any war-leader who promised loot, pillage and newly conquered slave-worked land.Chadwick’s research fed into a bold new picture of the past emerging by way of the various lectures given under the auspices of the new Board of Anthropological Studies at Cambridge University. Another of the lecturers in these years was W.H. Rivers, just then in the process of conversion to the diffusionist theory according to which civilisation was a single package that had emerged only once and in one place - ancient Egypt. In his Growth of Civilization (1924), W.J. Perry, who had attended lectures in anthropology while studying mathematics in Edwardian Cambridge, brought together the ideas of Rivers and Chadwick. Perry’s account of prehistory, which contains more than a hint of nineteenth-century Manchester liberalism, begins with the global dissemination of a peaceful Egyptian civilisation by traders and prospectors. A mutation then occurs on the periphery, which results in the emergence of individualistic warrior societies that conquer the civilised world and proceed to govern it over several millennia as a parasitical aristocracy, the bellicose activities of which had but recently plunged the nations of the globe into a world war.
What has all this to do with economics and historical economics? The short answer is: nothing. And this is precisely the point. It is evident that the discrediting of Maine’s historicist model by no means spelled the end of historicist thought in England. Indeed, the two decades after 1890 witnessed the construction of a completely new model of the emergence of modern civilisation, but neither economists nor economic historians had anything to do with these developments. This absence can be lamented from the point of view of a paucity of economic acumen in the work of these Cambridge anthropologists (and note that when this deficiency was rectified by archaeologists it was by way of a drawing upon the Marxist tradition, and not any indigenous tradition of English historical economics). Be that as it may, our present purposes are met by the observation that after around 1890 it was not historicist thought that in England was ossified and moribund, but merely the idea of founding an alternative inductive school of economics upon it.
Simon Cooκ and Keith Tribe
See also:
Institutionalism (II); Alfred Marshall (I).