Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?

Years ago, as a young economics professor, my husband served on a history student’s advisory committee. At the student’s dissertation defense, the historians asked detailed questions about the paper. My husband asked, “What is the theory behind your findings?” The student stammered an answer and my husband concluded that historians don’t think much of theories.

I won’t address whether historians have theories right now, but, rather, discuss economists’ theories about how people make decisions. Some are simple: Incentives matter, so when something becomes more costly (in money, effort, or pain), people usually want less of it. Another is opportunity cost: something may have value, such as sitting on the lawn on a nice day, but its opportunity cost is high if it means missing an interview for a good job.

Economists apply their theories to all kinds of human behavior. In my historical research on primogeniture in the Middle Ages, I came across a bold and bracing paper, “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation.“[1] The economist authors tried to figure out why some regions in Europe became Protestant and why others stayed Catholic. They hypothesized that some European countries were more open to Protestantism than others: “societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth” would welcome Protestantism, while “more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth” would reject it.

To test their theory, the authors used primogeniture (inheritance by the eldest son). They believed that primogeniture, which held property in a single family over time, characterized the “more homogeneous” countries that would reject Protestantism, while those with partible inheritance (property divided among children) would be more open to a new religion.

So they divided European countries into those that became Protestant and those that did not, and looked to see whether that division correlated with the absence or presence of primogeniture. Their findings supported their theory.

What struck me was, how did the authors know which countries had primogeniture and which did not?  They didn’t tell us. “It is difficult to get accurate data on all the principalities involved,” the authors admitted, but they claimed they could answer the question for about 70 percent of the listed countries. They had some secondary references, but didn’t spell out their sources.

Are we expected to take them at their word? “Primogeniture” labels are highly complex and uncertain. Historians have done detailed studies trying to determine the prevalence and impact of primogeniture. In 1967, Lutz K. Berkner compared two German regions about 50 miles apart in Lower Saxony. He found that in the seventeenth century Calenberg had impartible inheritance (that is, property went to one heir, usually the eldest son); but in nearby Gottingen, land was partible.[2] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie found a broad range of inheritance customs in France in the late Middle Ages.[3] Paul Rosenfeld criticizes two historians of the German Duchy of Cleves for trying to summarize in a paragraph the “crucial question of the advent of primogeniture.”[4]

England, which became Protestant, has a long history of primogeniture (plots of nineteenth-century novels turned on it), but Ekelund et al. argue that primogeniture was “regularly thwarted” by “legal artifices,” so they put it in the “no” column. Their contrarian argument carries some weight, but what about research on French inheritance by Theodore Evergates and Amy Livingstone? They found that where it existed formally in France it was often thwarted there, too; but France remained Catholic. Evergates points to Mâcon, famed as an area in which primogeniture dominated. Rule of the county, “which passed to twelve heirs between 1026 and 1236, went to an eldest son only six times.”[5]

Again, Ekelund et al. are on to something, but their willingness to gloss over complicated factual issues (the bread and butter of historical writing) marks a big divide between historians and economists.

[1] Ekelund, Robert. K., Jr., Robert F. Hébert, and Robert Tollison. “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation,” Journal of Political Economy 62, no. 2 (June 2002),  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/339721.

[2] Lutz K. Berkner, “Inheritance, Land Tenure and Peasant Family Structure: A German Regional Comparison,” in Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson,” in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800, ed. by Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)71-111, at 84.

[3] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Family Structures and Inheritance Customs in Sixteenth-Century France., in Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, 37-70.

[4] Paul Rosenfeld, Review of Cleve: Ein unerfülltes Schicksal. Aufstieg, Rückzug und Verfall eines Territorialstaates, by Abraham Glezerman and Michael Harsgor. Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, Vol. 68, 2 (1990) 505-50 .

[5] Theodore Evergates, “The Feudal Imaginary of Georges Duby.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall 1997), 641-660,  http://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php?url=http://search.proquest.com.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/docview/216758679?accountid=12725. Amy Livingstone, “Kith and Kin: Kinship and Family Structure of the Nobility of Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Blois-Chartres,” French Historical Studies 20, no. 3 (1997): 419-58.