Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History

Francesco Boldizzoni, Pat Hudson, Francesco Boldizzoni, Pat Hudson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138838031
• eBook ISBN: 9781317561859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History documents and interprets the development of economic history as a global discipline from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Exploring the normative and relativistic nature of different schools and traditions of thought, this handbook not only examines current paradigmatic western approaches, but also those conceived in less open societies and in varied economic, political and cultural contexts. In doing so, this book clears the way for greater critical understanding and a more genuinely global approach to economic history.

This handbook brings together leading international contributors in order to systematically address cultural and intellectual traditions around the globe. Many of these are exposed for consideration for the first time in English. The chapters explore dominant ideas and historiographical trends, and open them up to critical transnational perspectives.

This volume is essential reading for both academics and students in economic and social history. As this field of study is very much a bridge between the social sciences and humanities, the issues examined in the book will also have relevance for those seeking to understand the evolution of other academic disciplines under the pressures of varied economic, political and cultural circumstances, on both national and global scales.

Part I Anglo-American traditions

2 Economic History in Britain The �first industrial nation�

DOI: 10.4324/9781315734736-2

Pat Hudson

This chapter considers how and why particular sorts of knowledge, and methods of enquiry, have come to the fore in economic history in Britain. There are some detailed studies already of the evolution of the subject, especially up to the 1980s (Harte 1971; Coleman 1987; Kadish 1989; Hudson 2001, 2003). Here, we bring the story up to date and provide an analysis of the political, social, cultural and economic forces that have made economic history in Britain different from that practised elsewhere. Some of these forces relate to Britain�s peculiar historical trajectory: the early rise of a centralised fiscal�military nation state; the impact of Scottish enlightenment writers; the response to early and drawn-out processes of industrialisation and urbanisation; the position and needs of the nation in global industry, trade and finance; the imperatives and attitudes of a major imperial power in rise and decline; and the influence of changing British political and economic policy priorities. To these one must add the distinctive intellectual position of economic history in Britain: how it arose from parent disciplines that have travelled different methodological roads. The degree of exposure and openness of the subject to approaches and ideas from outside Britain is also important. The geographical, imperial and political position of Britain in the past century and a half has made the country particularly accessible to intellectual exchanges. However, as we shall see, external ideas can be rejected or misunderstood and their reception is affected by the absence of translation, or translation bias. They are also adapted to and moulded by, as well as combined with, existing traditions to produce particular hybrids. Finally, our analysis includes more serendipitous factors such as the zeal, career development, rivalries and early deaths of particular individuals.

The influence of early statistical thinking

Britain was early in establishing a quantitatively oriented approach to understanding and to attempting to control the economy and society. This was provoked by the evolution of the nation state and by Britain�s rise to economic pre-eminence during the two centuries following the Restoration of the Monarchy (1660�88). Her manufacturing development, demographic growth, urbanisation, international trading rivalries, and the need to support, control and exploit imperial expansion were important in placing Britain, alongside France, at the forefront of the development of economic and social data collection and of statistical thinking during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cullen 1975; Porter 1988; Cook and O�Hara 2011). The growth of state power internally as well as externally, and the expanding state bureaucracy, increased the need for accurate estimates of wealth and taxable revenues. This not only influenced the nature of early work in what was later to be defined as economic history, but also bequeathed a plethora of early data (of mixed reliability) for later historians to use.

One can identify influential antecedents of economic history in the writings of John Graunt and William Petty in the 1660s and 1670s. Petty saw the collection of statistical data and its analysis as an indispensable preliminary to a scientific understanding of the functioning of society and to the achievement of social and political control and reform (Petty 1664, 1676). Graunt worked on some of the earliest historical demography. He analysed the London Bills of Mortality to consider urban and rural death rates, infant mortality rates, the excess of female births over deaths and the formation of life tables (Graunt 1662).¹ Petty and Graunt were not alone amongst eighteenth-century writers in extolling the virtues of �statistics� (meaning at this point ordered facts about the state, non-numerical as well as numerical), not just actuarially but also in areas of public finance, including war finance, customs and excise, imports and exports (Hoppit 1996; Ashworth 2003). There were fifteen different estimates of national income between Petty�s research and that of Patrick Colquhoun in the 1790s and the estimations did not stop with the United Kingdom. The Board of Trade surveyed the population and trade of the Empire as early as 1721 and Ireland was a particular focus, as well as Scotland (Petty 1687; Sinclair 1791�8; Hoppit 1996, 2002, 2006). All of these developments and the data generated can be seen to have influenced the nature and approaches of a central strand of British economic history a century, and even two centuries, later.

The close link between economic history as an emerging academic discipline from the end of the nineteenth century and the culture of statistical thinking in Britain was sealed in the Victorian period which saw the grip of quantitative investigation tighten across many aspects of society and policy, largely as a result of the economic and social problems created by industrialisation. Statistics of health, crime, education and factory employment were gathered from the 1810s but the most important developments in the use of social statistics were the establishment of the census (from 1801) and Civil Registration (from 1837) (Cullen 1975; Porter 1988; Cook and O�Hara 2011). John Rickman who was in charge of the first census collected returns from the clergy of decennial baptism and burial figures 1700�80 and yearly figures thereafter, forming the basis for much subsequent research in historical demography. Measures of demographic change and of the social, political and moral determinants of population growth had been a key focus of political economy long before Thomas Malthus�s Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 but his ideas further provoked debate about the relationship between population growth, social class and poor relief in particular. This not only lay behind attitudes and changes in Victorian social policy but his influence has continued amongst British economic historians to the present day, generating a preoccupation with the ending of the �Malthusian threat� for example (Wrigley and Souden 1986; Glass 1973; Wrigley and Schofield 1981; Wrigley, 2004; Broadberry et al. 2015).

The General Register Office was joined by the Home Office, the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Admiralty and the Poor Law Commission in generating masses of data during the nineteenth century. In addition, there developed a large number of private and voluntary reform associations such as the Statistical Society of London, the Central Society of Education, the Health of Towns Association and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Many provincial improvers promoted local investigations as a counterweight to what was seen as central government interference and attendant high taxation (Cullen 1975). Such institutions and individuals, and the data they gathered, had a strong impact upon the emergence and nature of economic history.

The evolution of the British Census, especially under William Farr at the General Registry Office from the mid-nineteenth century, had an impact upon the preoccupations and the available data for economic history in Britain from its early years, along with the centrally collected information from Parliamentary investigations of the state of trade, the health of towns and factory conditions. Farr�s preoccupation with mortality and diseases, sanitary reform and improvements in occupational health determined the structure and nature of the questions framed in the census schedules and the priorities absorbed by the enumerators, as well as driving much of the broader statistical analysis undertaken by the Office. Farr�s work from the 1840s anticipated later developments in economic history as it included �statistically controlled experiments� designed to enable him to separate out the influences of sex, location, climate and occupation upon epidemics and mortality rates. He was also interested in the age of marriage and rate of remarriage and in the production of new life tables. Because of this the late nineteenth-century British censuses have been generally of more use and interest to demographic and medical historians than to historians interested in the family economy or the nature of work and employment of men and women as the information on these is patchy and unreliable, especially for women (Cullen 1975 chapter 2; Higgs 1987; Cook and O�Hara 2011; www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/occupations).

Farr represented a much wider nineteenth-century obsession with health leading to major collections of statistical information, from the heights and weights of members of the armed forces and transported convicts to local and large-scale surveys of urban disease and living conditions. These subsequently informed the history of medicine as well as demographic research. In recent years they have furnished raw data for a number of pioneering anthropometric analyses concerning health, nutrition and living standards. A close relationship exists between some of the foundational methodological approaches of British economic history, and economics, and late nineteenth-century developments in actuarial statistics, probability theory and Eugenics. These approaches emerged as a direct result of demographic change, the need for more accurate predictability of risk in insurance and business dealings, and from the hierarchical and racialised imperatives of a bourgeois society and an imperial elite (Hacking 1990; Porter 2010). Thus economic history in Britain from its inception, in its ideology and purposes, as well as its sources, has been closely connected with the peculiarities of British socio-political and economic development, and with state formation and state policy.

The Scottish enlightenment and what followed

Other writings of a more philosophical nature were vital in providing foundational ideas for the development of economic history. The Act of Union (1707) brought the four univer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Front-Other Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Anglo-American traditions
• PART II West European roots and responses
• PART III Turning to the East
• PART IV The wider world
• PART V Challenges and ways ahead
• Index