Abstract
The history of a region or people encompasses a multitude of aspects of social life: culture, religion, political institutions, social movements, environmental change, technology, population—and the circumstances and processes of economic change that the region undergoes. One does not need to be a reductionist in order to observe that the economic circumstances a society experiences, and the processes of change that these circumstances undergo, have a profound influence on other aspects of social and cultural change. Improved agricultural productivity can support population growth; it can enhance the coercive power of state institutions; and it can make possible the flourishing of intricate institutions of religion and education. Likewise, the constraints created by slow or negative economic productivity growth in a region can stifle the development of other important social processes. So economic history, as a discipline within history more broadly, is a crucially important field of historical inquiry.
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Notes
- 1.
The distinction between paradigm shifts and normal science is the core of the history of science developed by Thomas Kuhn (1970b). The distinction is developed primarily on the basis of study of the physical sciences, but it seems relevant in this area of historiographic disagreement as well.
- 2.
Cliometrics, the school of thought that gave almost exclusive priority to economic modeling as a tool for economic history, has been convincingly criticized for its disregard of other historically important factors; Schabas (1995). Less single-minded economic historians from an earlier generation, such as Hicks (1969), Jones (1988), and Schumpeter (1947) offer examples of full historians who treat the history of economies in ways that give appropriate attention to the broad context of economic institutions and behavior. See Rawski (1996) for good recent discussions of the role of theory in economic history.
- 3.
The logic of comparative historical analysis has been a central topic of debate in the past decade. Particularly important are Adams et al. (2005), Kiser and Hechter (1991), Lichbach and Zuckerman (1997), Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003), McAdam et al. (1996), Ragin (1987), and McDonald (1996).
- 4.
The proto-industrialization literature has provided a powerful stimulus to recent research on the early character of economic transformation in Europe. Franklin Mendels describes this concept in these terms: “ ‘Proto-industrialization’—a period of rural industrialization with simultaneous bifurcation between areas of subsistence farming with cottage industry and areas of commercial farming without it” (Mendels, 1981, p. 176).
- 5.
Paul Cohen argued effectively along these lines in his call for a “China-centered” history of China in Discovering History in China (Cohen, 1984).
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Little, D. (2010). Economic History. In: New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Methodos Series, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_7
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