What I’ve Learned about History

When I began my master’s degree in history in 2016, I knew what I wanted to study. To me, the most important event in Western history is the economic revolution that occurred in Europe beginning about 1750—the Industrial Revolution. I was steeped in knowledge about its impact from reading books like The Rise of the Western World, How the West Grew Rich, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and The Great Divergence.

Indeed, my master’s thesis concentrated on details of that revolution. But my history studies taught me much more. My academic adventure evolved into a struggle to understand why “change over time” (that’s how historians define history) occurs as it does. That is one of the reasons I created this blog: I was looking for a theory of history.

To some extent I have come up with one.

When I started school, I was a “Whig”;  that is, I saw history as progress, with the most important sign of progress being the Industrial Revolution—when inventions and trade began to change the world for the better.

But I quickly learned that history is messy. The Industrial Revolution itself was in many ways a troubling mélange: working children, crowded cities, dangerous factories, smoke pollution. Yet it made genuine improvement possible on a scale never before known—even for some of those factory children.

It turns out that most change over time  is messy. A couple of examples:

• • Because I chair a higher education think tank, I was drawn to the history of universities. In a short discussion of land-grant colleges for the American Institute for Economic Research I wrote, “I am increasingly seeing political history as . . . an unpredictable interplay of self-interested forces. What is predictable is that multiple interests will interact.” I called the schools’ history a “complicated tangle of special interests, attractive rhetoric, and, over time, strong personalities shaping their schools in the face of ambiguous laws.” The title of the article was “Laws, Sausages, and Land-grants.”
  • Later, I looked at the crisis of student loans. There I saw “a long, slow process by which politicians, government bureaucrats, and private businesses pursued their narrow interests while failing to acknowledge the logic and warnings that foretold disaster. Supporting it all was the public, ignorant of the details but eager to send their children to college.”

Most history is like that. We can predict some forces, but not others, and the interplay of all of them propels change over time.

Why History Is Messy

I also came up with economic principles to undergird my “theory of history.” (You my have read them here. )

• • Incentives matter.
  • Too often long-­term consequences and secondary effects are ignored.
  • Unless restrained by constitutional rules, ­special-interest groups will use the democratic political process to obtain government favors at the expense of others. [1]

Economics tells us that people are driven by incentives. Seeking to satisfy those incentives leads to trade that satisfies both the consumer and the producer. But the legal and political framework in which people live determines whether and how those incentives are pursued, thwarted, or distorted. Public choice economics teaches us that when people have coercive (governmental) power, they have distinctive incentives, which often lead to tragic consequences.

That encapsulates the reasons why history is “messy.”

But Let’s Not Stop There

One of the greatest disasters—also one of the most persistent disasters—is war. The above principles apply—incentives, ignorance of consequences, and special-interest involvement. But war is more complex—a special case, perhaps, even though it is an enduring part of history. I will conclude this column with a brief discussion of the causes of war (I’ve written about war in several previous posts).)

First, it is helpful to think of war as miscalculation, as discussed by Geoffrey Blainey. [2] A country goes to war because its leadership thinks it can win. But that often turns out to be a mistake. The other side fights back if its leadership thinks it can win. The war ends when it is clear who can win (i.e., has won). The American Civil War illustrates such a calculation. So does the American Revolution.

But Jeremy Black thinks war stems from an inherent enthusiasm for fighting. “[T]he will to fight is the key element, whatever the scale. . . .  Bellicosity in the shape of the will and the readiness to fight leads to war, rather than war arising because misunderstandings produce inaccurate calculations of interest and response.”[3]

As for bellicosity, William McNeil goes even farther, saying that Europeans were particularly prone to war because “[h]abits of bloodshed were deep-seated, perennially fed by the fact that Europeans raised both pigs and cattle in considerable numbers but had to slaughter all but a small breeding stock each autumn for lack of sufficient winter fodder.” The result: “readiness to shed human blood.”[4]

Some, like Phillips Payson O’Brien, think battles are unimportant; what matters is logistics—whether supplies can be obtained and distributed and casualties can be removed and replaced.[5]

Finally, there is rebellion against unjust leaders (of whom there are many). The political theorist John Locke considered rebellion a natural right. Human beings “will always have a right to preserve what they have not a Power to part with [their natural rights]; and to rid themselves of those who invade this Fundamental, Sacred, and unalterable Law of Self-Preservation, for which they enter’d into Society.” [6]

As always, I do not have time to tell it all, and, in fact,  it’s time to conclude my foray into history on this platform. I will continue to write about history, but not necessarily on this blog. [7] My effort to understand history is an adventure that you, my readers, have helped me take. Thank you for your support and especially your comments. All the best, JaneTakesonHistory.org.

Notes (comments follow notes)

[1] James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, Tawni H. Ferrarini, and Joseph P. Calhoun, Common Sense Economics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 3rd edition, 2016), 2, 106. See commonsenseeconomics.com.

[2] Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: The Free Press, [1973] 1988).

[3] Jeremy Black, A Short History of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 6.

[4] William McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 64.

[5] Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[6] John Locke, Second Treatise  of Government (1689), paragraph 149.

[7] For one example, I am directing the North Carolina History Encyclopedia (northcarolinahistory.org).