One of the enduring historical questions is why the Industrial Revolution started in England, rather than somewhere else. One theory—that of Robert Brenner—gives a lot of credit to England’s agricultural revolution.
Thanks to agriculture, England developed the ability to provide enough food for a growing population (famines ended completely by 1700). At the same time, the changing agriculture reduced the need for so many people on farms. The former manor tenants moved to the towns and cities and became the human engines of the industrial revolution.
For a class this fall, I read a 1976 article by Robert Brenner explaining how this agricultural revolution came about.[1] By the way, I may have earlier overstated the case when I said that historians don’t take Marxism all that seriously. Brenner was either a Marxist or a neo-Marxist, and his paper is laced with Marxist references to “class,” “class consciousness,” and “surplus-extraction.”
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. Continue reading “Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?”
I was fortunate to spend a semester studying the work of Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic pamphleteer. Beloved by libertarians, he is unequalled in his ability to defend freedom and personal responsibility.
Even Frédéric Bastiat, an insightful libertarian thinker, could not imagine communism of the twentieth-century kind.
Much can be said about Bastiat, but here I’d like to mention his discussion of communism, for two reasons. First, it illustrates the fluidity of the terms socialism and communism in the mid-nineteenth century—something historians should not forget. For another, it illustrates how brilliant people can be both unusually perceptive about what is around them, but still blind about the future.
Warning: Like most writers about Bastiat, I find it hard not to quote him at length. He says things much better than most of us can.
