Economics and the Historian.

• Author: McCandless, Amy Thompson

Economics and the Historian "seeks to bridge the gap that separates historical researchers from the insights of economics" [p. 4] by introducing historians to the ideas and methods of economists. Thomas G. Rawski, Professor of Economics and History at the University of Pittsburgh and the organizing force behind the cooperative venture, introduces the volume's seven essays with a discussion of the ways economics can contribute to historical research. Rawski, whose own research examines economic growth in China, argues that the study of economic trends is an important part of any historical analysis of change. Thus, historians need to be familiar with definitions of basic economic terms and to understand the nature of categories such as national income and product accounts. Using tables on the estimates of Chinese rice output, he explains how to scrutinize quantitative evidence and to employ it to support assumptions derived from qualitative sources.

Jon Cohen, a Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, stresses the importance of institutions (e.g., households, farms, and firms) in economic analysis and historical development. "To the economist, institutions represent efficient ways of organizing human activity where markets alone will not suffice" [p. 60]. People turn to institutions because they find that they perform the tasks of allocating and/or distributing better than markets. Cohen contends that a knowledge of economic institutions can help explain such historical questions as why sharecropping and not wage labor-contracts characterized the economy of the U.S. South after the Civil War and why nineteenth-century French peasants preferred small family farms to larger, agribusinesses. Agrarian institutions "which many dismiss as economically inefficient or irrational, may represent perfectly rational attempts by farm folk to resolve problems that markets cannot" [p. 71]. In other words, there are often very good economic reasons to explain historical patterns of behavior.

Using the form of a dialogue between Clio, the muse of history, and Hades, the Greek god of the underworld and dispenser of "earthly riches" [p. 85n], Susan B. Carter, Professor of Economics, and Stephen Cullenberg, Associate Professor of Economics, both at the University of California, Riverside, discuss the relative merits of historical and economic approaches to the labor market. Although their dialogue is rather strained (it is hard to imagine this...