Abstract
When Edward Gibbon, with magisterial authority, summed up his great work with some ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’, he wrote:
The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition, of the most enlightened nations, represent the human savage, naked both in mind and body, destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet this experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions; we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection, but it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.
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Notes
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XXXVIII (London: Straham and Cadell, 1782).
See: J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: Macmillan, 1921) and R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
The trend may be changing, but see, for example, the hostile reception by professional historians of A. J. Toynbee’s A Study of History (10 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1934–1961). Part of the reaction to the great systematisers was a reasonable reaction against historicism; see, for example, K. R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). If great trends are out of favour, great discontinuities are not. No event in modern history has commanded a larger literature, for example, than the industrial revolution of England.
University trained historians are ‘specialists’, concentrating in function and in period, and seldom accounting for more than a century. Teaching and research clearly demarcate the historian as ‘economic’, ‘political’, ‘social’, etc.; as ‘modern’, ‘early modern’, ‘medieval’, etc.; as ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘American’, etc.; and even within functional categories, as ‘industrial’, ‘labour’, ‘demographic’, etc. within economic history. The idea of training an historian to look at the whole of history would be looked on by most historians as both absurd and dangerous, and, in any case, impossible. Occasionally some adventurous historian does attempt to portray the economic history of man from its beginnings; e.g., Carlo Cipolla’s The Economic History of World Population (London: Penguin, 1965).
Except the writers of text-books for those ‘survey’ courses which introduce students to history but which are not taken seriously as ‘contributions’ to scholarship. Yet see the importance of the survey course of an earlier generation of historians, M. Weber’s General Economic History (translation by F. H. Knight, London: Allen and Unwin, 1928).
Obviously an exact chronology is also useful, and often essential, in establishing cause in historical sequences. See J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (Oxford University Press, 1974).
See, for example, F. H. Knight, ‘Costs of Production Price over Long and Short Periods’, in The Ethics of Competition (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935). For a conventional text-book approach see: R. G. Lipsey and P. O. Steiner, Economics (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
I use the word structure in the way in which the French use it, to describe ‘the parts of an economic whole which, over a period of time appear relatively stable alongside the others’. See A. Marchai, ‘De la dynamique des structures à la dynamique des systèmes’ (Revue économique, Paris, 1955); quoted in, R. Doehaerd, The Early Middle Ages in the West (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1978). p. v.
The outstanding chronicler of dissimilarity, in statistical terms, is S. Kuznets who has spent his life in compiling statistics which reveal the differences between nations. See, for example, Modern Economic Growth (Yale University Press, 1966).
Growth as a subject of study by economists has become inextricably confused with policy for growth as a desirable objective of politics. Most writing on growth hovers uncertainly between theory and policy, the degree of policy involvement usually being directly related to the degree of political commitment of the growth theorist.
Governments always have economic advisers but never historical advisers. The logic of the choice of economists over historians to advise on growth is, at least on grounds of realism, difficult to follow.
On quantitative measures to prove this see: P. Studenski, The Income of Nations (New York University Press, 1958). On qualitative measures, for example, see the volumes for the centuries before 1800 of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. See also: CM. Cippola, Before the Industrial Revolution. European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (New York: Norton, 1976).
There is another theory which argues that the rest of the world is poor because Europe is rich, that national wealth and national poverty are fundamentally related. The thesis is unproven.
The exception is Japan, but Japan excepted, no non-European society has yet achieved growth comparable to that achieved by Europeans, either in Europe or abroad. The fact that Europeans abroad (in Australia, for example) have achieved growth underlines the specificity of European culture for growth.
Europe was the last great civilisation to develop, at the frontier of the ancient civilisations of the Middle East.
G. Clark, Aspects of Prehistory (University of California Press, 1970).
The decline of Europe has also been confidently predicted by many writers. See, for example perhaps the most famous prophecy of western decline: O. Spengler, The Decline of the West (translated by C. F. Atkinson, New York: Knopf, 1926).
The period of history since the birth of Christ consists of about one five-hundredth (i.e., 0.2 per cent) of history; the period since the beginning of the industrial revolution comprises only one over two thousand five hundredths of history.
See Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population op. cit., for an explicit long-term history of man in terms of those revolutions. See, also: R. M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London: Methuen, 1971).
The theory that progress is cumulative has been used effectively by C. E. Ayres to explain technological progress; see, C. E. Ayres, The Theory of Economic Progress (University of North Carolina Press, 1944). More generally the growth of knowledge has been explained as a cumulative process by K. R. Popper; see, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 129.
See Sir Henry Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (London: Murray, 1876).
As E. L. Jones and S.J. Woolf have written: ‘One of the less palatable lessons of history is that technically advanced and physically productive agriculture does not inevitably bring about a sustained growth of per capita income, much less promotes industrialization’. E. L. Jones and S.J. Woolf, (eds), Agrarian Change and Economic Development (London: Methuen, 1969) p. 1.
Gibbon, op. cit., Chap. XXXVIII.
F. Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) p. 7.
Quoted by D. Birdsall and CM. Cipolla, The Technology of Man: A Visual History (England: Penshurst Press, 1979), p. 17.
See G. Clark, Aspects of Prehistory (University of California Press, 1970) for an excellent account of man’s varying response to environmental difficulties, and for a nondeterminist account of cultural differentiation.
C. E. Ayres argued that technology was progressive because of ‘the tool-combination principle’. ‘Granted that tools are always tools of men who have the capacity to use tools and therefore the capacity to use them together, combinations are bound to occur. Furthermore it follows that the more tools there are, the greater is the number of potential combinations.’ The Theory of Economic Progress (University of North Carolina Press, 1944) p. 119.
See E. L. Jones’ forthcoming The European Miracle. The manuscript of this book was seen only as this article was being concluded; it is concerned with very long-term growth in terms of varying civilisations’ divergent responses to natural disasters. It is a brilliant addition to the now growing literature on very long-term development.
Only a reasonably large-scale society can provide most of the goods and services generally associated with ‘civilization’. The ‘golden age’ myth of rural life plays no role in serious consideration of civilised living.
See G. Childe for a persuasive account of ‘the urban revolution’ as a consequence of ‘the neolithic revolution’, especially What Happened in History (London: Penguin, 1942).
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library Edition, edited by E. Cannan, New York: Random House, 1937) pp. lix, 651, 862, 71.
Most accounts of the decline of Rome are in this vein; for example, R. Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961).
See, for a summary of recent discussions on ‘History of Climate’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. X, no. 4, Spring 1980.
See C. Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), p. 129. To Oswald Spengler, also, the ‘culture’ of earlier stages of civilisation gave way to the ‘civilization’ of the later stages in which character and energy were both weakened. Ibid., p. 130.
W. M. Flinders-Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization (New York: Harper, 1911), pp. 123–5: ‘The maximum of wealth must inevitably lead to the downfall.’
A point made long ago by C. E. Ayres (in The Theory of Economic Progress) and more recently by E. L. Jones (in The European Miracle).
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© 1982 Charles P. Kindleberger and Guido di Tella
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Hartwell, R.M. (1982). Progress and Dissimilarity in Historical Perspective. In: Kindleberger, C.P., di Tella, G. (eds) Economics in the Long View. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06287-4_6
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