Douglass C. North: trailblazer.

• Author: Higgs, Robert

I met Douglass C. North more than forty-eight years ago, during the final week of 1967. The American Economic Association was holding its annual meetings in Washington, D.C., and I went to Doug's room at the Shoreham Hotel there to be interviewed for a faculty opening at the University of Washington, where he was chairman of the Department of Economics. I still recall that meeting. I knocked on the door, Doug opened it, grasped my extended hand, and nearly dragged me into the room with the words, "You're Bob Higgs, and we're very interested in hiring you." Needless to say, this reception was not the sort that a nervous, twenty-three-year-old job candidate expected as he trudged from room to room to describe his dissertation research and answer all sorts of questions posed by faculty members from the hiring institutions. But Doug did not do business in the usual way, and his capacity for venturing beyond the typical modes in conducting faculty affairs--as when he offered me the job over breakfast the next morning--or in thinking about economic history played important roles in the great success that he enjoyed during his long professional life.

Others have presented the main outlines of Doug's career--degrees earned, positions held, books and articles published, professional honors attained--and I will not duplicate those particulars here but rather offer a few remarks about a man who not only hired me for my first professional job but also mentored me (sometimes making me quite angry in the process), assisted my professional development, and worked closely with me and several other economic historians during the fifteen years (1968-83) that I spent as a faculty member at the University of Washington, a period during which its graduate program in economic history, one of the world's best, was enjoying its golden age. (Both Doug and I left the university in 1983.)

When I met Doug, I already knew a fair amount about his work in American economic history. He had established himself as a leader in the Cliometric Revolution, a development that began in the late 1950s in which economic historians trained as economists largely replaced those trained as historians, at least in departments of economics where economic history continued to be offered in courses and as a field of specialization for graduate students. Doug's leadership in this movement was not without irony, however, because the hallmarks of Cliometrics--the use of explicit, often...