Welfare

Thorold Rogers was outraged by the pre-industrial degradation of labourers, which he attributed not to market conditions but to policies ‘which were designed or adopted with the express purpose of compelling the labourer to work at the lowest rates of wages possible' (Rogers 1884: 7).

The main polemical thrust of Rogers' work was that ‘It is vain to rejoice over the aggregate of our prosperity, and to forget that the great part of the nation has no share in its benefits' (Rogers 1866-1902, 1: viii). In two articles published in 1949 and 1957, Eric Hobsbawm reopened the long-standing distinction (coined as such by T.S. Ashton) between “optimists”, who cele­brated the benefits of economic development and “pessimists”, who lamented its cost. In response to Hobsbawm, the case for optimism was taken up by Max Hartwell (Reader in Recent Social and Economic History, 1956-1977). He revisited the initial controversy that took place in the early nineteenth century, with its discordant voices of suffering and celebration. How was it possible to reconcile such different narratives from similar evidence? Hartwell calculated that the commodity standard of living was rising. The protagonists, who remained civil throughout, faced each other from opposite corners. Hobsbawm was an unrepentant member of the Communist Party, Hartwell a follower of Friedrich Hayek, a member of his neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society and later its President.

The standard of living debate became a proxy for the stand-off between two visions of society, social democracy and market liberalism, against the back­drop of the Cold War. Neither Hobsbawm nor Hartwell were expert quanti­fiers, but the discipline came to think that the optimists had the numbers on their side. In response, the pessimists reached for a broader conception of well-being. E.P Thompson, the most charismatic of them, set it out in his great article “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (1967). Budgets and commodities were only instrumental to ends, namely mental stimulation and existential meaning. Smith and Marx had already described how factory discipline diminished and debased the mental lives of its workers. Thompson was in tune with some critical voices in economics, notably John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958), William Nordhaus and James Tobin's “Is Growth Obsolete?” (1972) and Richard Easterlin's “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” (1974). He anticipated subsequent devel­opments by decades. In “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1971), Thompson interpreted a transition from pater­nalism to impersonal markets in terms of a dishonoured contract between the elites and the people (there is a similar argument in Rogers). The issues have never gone away. Thompson was hugely influential: The 1967 and 1971 arti­cles were cited twenty and nineteen more times respectively than Hartwell's best, and endure as staples of the syllabus. These are academic votes—the popular vote for Thompson would have been larger still. Hartwell is remem­bered fondly in Oxford as an impartial teacher and supervisor, for his Australian wit and convivial presence.

Thompson’s disciple and New Left comrade Raphael Samuel, charismatic in his own way and also a graduate of Balliol, taught at Ruskin from 1962. Like Thompson, he left the Communist Party in 1956, and applied a similar holistic approach, economic, social and cultural, to the experience of working­class lives in the Victorian period.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Cold War erupted violently in South East Asia. Young people engaged with the counterculture, the New Left, and the student rebellions, which affected Oxford as well. At the same time, Western societies began their slow swerve towards market liberalism. Economic history seemed to be relevant: its popularity peaked in the early 1970s (see Coleman 1987: 96-98).

In the 1960s, the best left-wing scholars (Thompson, Hobsbawm, Sidney Pollard) were kept out of the top professorships. Oxford did its bit when Hobsbawm applied in 1967. Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History, dominated the selection committee. After its meeting, the Oxford historian Keith Thomas heard Trevor-Roper boast ‘that he had that day suc­ceeded in keeping Eric out of the Chichele Chair of Economic History’ (Thomas quoted in Evans 2019: 429). Peter Mathias, the successful candidate (Chichele Professor, 1969-1987) was suitably accomplished: the author of excellent histories of brewing and of a grocery chain (the latter commis­sioned), he arrived in Oxford with a judiciously meliorist and very successful textbook on The First Industrial Nation (1969a). He was last in the line of Oxford institutional economic historians, a descendant of the free-trade lin­eage of John Clapham and Charles Wilson in Cambridge, a dignified pres­ence, a reliable doctoral supervisor, co-editor of two volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (1978, 1989), President of the International Economic History Association, and Master of Downing College, Cambridge, after early retirement in 1987.

At a time of intellectual ferment and existential dread, some of the disci­pline’s senior professors in Cambridge, London and beyond found nothing more important to do than to write corporate histories, implicit celebrations of things as they are, all the more so for being commissioned and paid for.

In the 1960s, economic historians in the United States reclaimed the disci­pline for economics by applying statistical inference and economic theory to the time-series data of the past, which they worked to expand and enrich. Economic theory provided models of cause and effect in terms of maximising behaviour, and econometric analysis estimated and ranked the causal effect of different variables. Robert Fogel deployed this method (known colloquially as “cliometrics”) to argue that modern economic growth was not driven by a single technological breakthrough, and more specifically not by the railways, by calculating a counterfactual in which railways did not exist (1964). In another landmark book (with Stanley Engerman), he argued controversially that American slavery was formidable because it was economically efficient (1974).

Cliometrics challenged teachers more than students. It replaced narrative with the toolkits of economics. Thatcher's market liberalism constructed its legitimacy with the same tools. Many British economic historians were reluc­tant to go along, partly from attachment to legacy methods, and partly because it was hard to retool. From the 1980s onwards, the discipline, with one foot in each of these two discordant approaches, has existed in a mild state of dis­sonance. As history departments turned away from politics and society towards culture and language, economic history in the United States and Britain moved out of them. In the former, the discipline found a home in economics but in Britain it was out on a limb. Its student appeal diminished and it lost much of its academic purchase, although not in Oxford, Cambridge or LSE.

Oxford opened up early to cliometrics. Three significant doctorates were written at Nuffield College in the 1960s. Several American cliometricians came over and a graduate seminar with two of them ran weekly in 1968. In Chicago, Donald McCloskey played on British anxieties by asking “Did Victorian Britain Fail?” (1970) and answered counter-intuitively that it did not because failure was impossible in a competitive neoclassical economy. However, that might not have passed muster for the subsequent Edwardian period. Nicholas Crafts (Economics Fellow at University College, 1977-1986) led British cliometrics by example, and moved on to eminence at Warwick and LSE. In Oxford, he supervised some remarkable doctorates and ran a stimulating cliometrics seminar in the 1980s. His initial book and still most highly cited publication, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (1985), did not overtly deploy the cliometric trademark technique of regression analysis.

National accounting received three Nobel Prizes in Economics (Simon Kuznets, Wassily Leontief and Richard Stone), but by the 1980s had been forsaken by economists who handed it over to central statistical offices. As an academic discipline it lives on in economic history. Charles Feinstein (Reader, then Chichele Professor 1987-1999) compiled a definitive National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom, 1855-1965 (1972) while still in Cambridge. Stephen Broadberry (Professor of Economic History at Nuffield, 2015) has continued in this line, extending the investigation all the way back to 1270 in British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 (2015, with several co-authors).

From the 1970s onwards, there was always at least one cliometrician at Oxford in the Department of Economics, and sometimes more than one. Nicholas Dimsdale (Economics Fellow at The Queen's College, 1961-2004) wrote important studies of British monetary policy and of unemployment and real wages during the inter-war years, several studies of finance and an initial volume of UK Business and Financial Cycles Since 1660 (2019, with Ryland Thomas). In the 1990s, the University Lecturer in Economic History at St Antony's College was James Foreman-Peck, whose Public and Private Ownership of British Industry, 1820-1990 (1994, with Robert Millward) showed that urban utilities owned privately were not more efficient than municipal ones. He was followed in post by Charles Knickerbocker (“Knick”) Harley (Lecturer, 2005-2011), a prolific cliometrician from Canada who detected concurrently with Crafts that growth was slow in the Industrial Revolution. He was a strong critical presence in seminars, an excellent teacher, supervisor and colleague.

By the time Harley retired, cliometrics was taking a new direction, intro­duced in Oxford by his successor, James Fenske (Associate Professor, St Antony's 2011-2016). His focus was on African economic history, investigat­ing inter alia the pre-colonial determinants of African development and retar­dation. An empirical turn was taking place in economics, which set economic theory aside. The method was to construct a laboratory or field experiment in two comparable settings and to determine local causation by applying an intervention to one but not to the other. Fenske applied this counterfactual method sequentially to determine whether antecedent conditions could explain later outcomes. His successor, Eric Chaney (St Antony's, since 2018) specialises in the Islamic world before the modern period. Two other cliome- tricians in the most recent decade were Rui Esteves (Fellow in Economics at Brasenose, with a specialisation in international finance in the nineteenth century) and Brian A'Hearn at Pembroke, who writes mostly on Italy. A'Hearn is also known for applying (with co-authors, and not for the first time) a numeracy test to populations all the way back to the Middle Ages by identify­ing whether people could specify their year of birth (suggesting competence) or whether they rounded it up or down (“heaping”).

The impulses that drove the standard of living debate appeared to be spent by the 1990s. A premature sense of closure was provided by Feinstein. In response to a particular outburst of standard of living optimism, his Tawney Lecture of 1997 was a compelling re-estimation of the commodity standard of living. Maximising economic growth is taken in economics to be the mea­sure of policy success. Did growth improve the lives of those who enabled it? Reaching for the essence, Feinstein wrote (in words that echoed those of Rogers) that the majority of workers ‘had to endure almost a century of hard toil with little or no advance from a low base before they really began to share in any of the benefits of the economic transformation they had helped to cre­ate' (Feinstein 1998: 652).

The issue lives on, I have argued, because distribution affects not only equity, but also efficiency. Jane Humphries (Reader and Professor of Economic History, 1998-2013), a Cambridge graduate in economics, initially made her mark as an early feminist economist in North America before returning to Cambridge. Ever since Rogers, welfare was approached through a masculine lens. The long time series used to study it were almost entirely of male wages. Humphries transformed a male breadwinner story into a family one: ‘[T]he standard of living', she wrote, ‘is determined by the household's access to all resources—including the contributions of other family members and welfare subsidies' (Horrell and Humphries 1992: 850). At Oxford, she studied the experience of women, children and households during the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth century, using both numbers and archives to endorse a pessimistic view. In recent years, she has revisited family standards of living all the way from the Middle Ages to the 1850s. In addition to house­hold work, consumption and incomes, Humphries opened up the mental experience of adolescence by means of working people's autobiographies in Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010). Rogers had already written that conventional accounts exaggerated welfare by assum­ing full-time working (see Rogers 1884, 2: 481). Humphries incorporated the wage and household work of women and children to suggest that family stan­dards of living had been exaggerated. This has been amplified recently from other sources by Judy Stephenson, a Junior Research Fellow at Wadham. Further doubt on the optimist case had been cast by the decline of adult heights (an objective indicator of well-being) during the 1830s and 1840s. Deborah Oxley (Lecturer and then Professor of Social History, since 2008) has been collecting body measurements of nineteenth-century convicts. She highlights the large gap between men and women—some of whom actually gained weight in prison—as an indication of how hard their lot had been outside. Humphries and Oxley have both studied welfare (diets, children, poor relief) as well as human capital formation (health, apprenticeship, schooling).

Since the 1990s, an expanding body of work has shown that well-being can diverge from income and expenditure in both material and cognitive terms. Avner Offer (Reader, 1992-2000; Chichele Professor, 2000-2011) scruti­nised the welfare impact of capitalism in more recent times. His most-cited work, The Challenge of Affluence (2006) shows how myopic bias in consumers (under the influence of marketing) has diminished welfare in both American and British consumer societies since the 1950s, and the extent to which qual­ity of life is partly a matter of active choice. Cognitive biases undermine the economics of self-interest, giving rise to choices that consumers might come to regret, for example, the overeating that gives rise to obesity. Following Smith, Rogers and Thompson, he reaffirmed the role of non-market recipro­cal exchange as a driver of individual choice.

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