Wesleyan University

A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE

Author(s): WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 49, No. 4, Theme Issue 49: History and Theory: The Next
Fifty Years (December 2010), pp. 146-166
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 146-166 © Wesleyan University 2010 ISSN: 0018-2656

A STRANGE CAREER:
THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE

WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to account for professional historians' relative neglect of the history
of economic life over the past thirty years, looking mainly at the American case. This ne-
glect seems paradoxical, considering the remarkable transformations that have taken place
in world capitalism during this same period. I trace the neglect to the capture of the once
interdisciplinary field of economic history by mathematically inclined economists and to
the roughly simultaneous turn of historians from social to cultural history. I conclude by
suggesting some topics in the history of economic life that seem both timely and exciting.
I also suggest some intellectual resources that other disciplines, particularly economic so-
ciology and economic history, could offer should historians decide to tackle the history of
economic life once again.

Keywords: economic life, economic history, social history, cultural history, economic soci-
ology, macro-dynamics of capitalism.

I do not believe it is possible to make useful predictions about the next fifty years
of historical scholarship. Instead, I attempt something far more modest: to identify
an area of inquiry that I feel has been neglected by historians in recent decades-
the study of economic life- but that I expect to figure much more centrally in
historical scholarship over the next decade or two. I try to assess the historical
causes of this neglect, which I regard as highly paradoxical, and to suggest how
it might be overcome. The history of economic life- by which I simply mean the
history of human participation in the production, exchange, and consumption of
goods- has, in my opinion, had a strange and unfortunate career in the United
States over the decades since the end of World War II.

Economic life was initially studied primarily by economic history- a new, ro-
bust, and promisingly interdisciplinary field in the middle years of the twentieth
century. The emergence of economic history as a distinct field of study was marked
by the appearance of specialized journals: the Economic History Review in Britain
in 1927; the Annates d'histoire economique et sociale in France in 1929; and the
Journal of Economic History in the United States in 1941 . In the postwar decades,
economic history thrived in America in both history and economics departments.
But over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the field came to be increasingly dom-
inated by economists. This development was over-determined: on the one hand,
mathematically inclined economic historians, based in economics departments,

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 47

developed new and intellectually powerful methods (dubbed "the new economic
history") that proved intimidating to most history-based economic historians, who
normally lacked the mathematical training either to use or to criticize them effec-
tively. Meanwhile, over the same years, social historians, who in the 1960s and
1970s had been deeply interested in economic aspects of social change, and who
were close allies of economic historians in an effort to develop more quantitative
and social-scientific forms of historical inquiry, increasingly turned to the new
cultural history in the 1980s and in the process lost interest in both quantifica-
tion and the economy. Indeed, cultural history was marked by an intense reaction
against economic determinism, against quantification, and against the positivist
epistemological outlook that had previously united social and economic histori-
ans. The result has been the development of an economic history almost entirely
dominated by the concerns of professional economists and a shrinking-back of
work on the history of economic life carried out by historians.
This has, in my opinion, left the history profession in an increasingly untenable
position. Precisely in the years since 1980, when globalization, deindustrializa-
tion, repeated financial crises, and soaring economic inequality should have made
obvious the need for a deeper historical understanding of modern capitalism's
dynamism and perversity, historians have largely abandoned the historical study
of economic life while economists turned economic history into a branch of math-
ematical development economics. My goal in this article is to understand how
this situation came about and to make some suggestions about how it might be
remedied.

I. THE RISE OF "THE NEW ECONOMIC HISTORY"

In the postwar United States, specialists in economic history could be found in

both history and economics departments. By the 1960s and 1970s, most major
PhD-producing history departments had economic historians on their faculties
there were, for example, David Landes at Berkeley and then Harvard; Jan de Vrie
at Berkeley; Robert Reynolds and Domenico Sella at Wisconsin; Rondo Cameron
at Wisconsin and then Emory; David Herlihy at Wisconsin and Harvard (later a
Brown); Shepard Clough at Columbia; Jerome Blum at Princeton; Sylvia Thrup
Jacob Price, and Albert Feuerwerker at Michigan; Robert Brenner at UCLA; A
cadius Kahan and John Coatsworth at Chicago; Frederic Lane, Louis Galambos,
and Richard Goldthwaite at Johns Hopkins; and Robert Lopez and William Parke
at Yale. For reasons mysterious to me, most prominent historians of the Unit
States economy seem to have taught in economics departments in these years
(Parker and Galambos were exceptions). This was true, for example, of Robert
Fogel at Rochester, Chicago, and Harvard; Jeffrey Williamson at Wisconsin an
then Harvard; Stanley Engerman at Rochester; Albert Fishlow at Berkeley; Pet
Temin at MIT; Lance Davis at Cal Tech; Richard Easterlin at Penn; Harold Wil-
liamson at Northwestern; Douglass North at the University of Washington and
then Washington University; Robert Gallman at North Carolina; Gavin Wright a
Michigan and then Stanford; and Paul David at Stanford. But economic historian
working on other regions of the world also taught in economics departments: f

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148 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

example, Carlo Cipolla (Europe) at Berkeley, Henry Ros

ley and then Harvard, and Donald McCloskey (Europe) a
(now Deirdre McCloskey at the University of Illinois, C
But in the early twenty-first century, economic historia
ly rare in leading PhD-producing history departments. A
history department websites, seven of the top sixteen d
the latest US News survey, currently have no specialist
only four (Yale, Michigan, UCLA, and Northwestern
specialists. UCLA, with seven, is the only history depa
two.1 Especially in light of the fact that the faculties of m
have grown substantially since the 1970s, these figures i
economic history within the history profession.2 For all
field has decamped into economics departments.
This change in the departmental location of economic h
in the nature of economic history as an intellectual field
lished in the first years of the Journal of Economic H
would not have been out of place in general historical
review's second volume, in 1942, included articles on cl
topics, such as "Early English Woodland and Waste" or "
ry in the Chilean Trade, 1817-1820." But there were also
readily be classified as social or political or intellectual h
Girard, Promoter of the Second Bank of the United St
Nationalism in the Ukraine, 1905-1917"; "Indentured
Some of America's 'First' Families"; or "Keynes and Pro
in 1952, nearly all of the nineteen articles published in
able as economic history, although there were still two
economic thought. This indicates that the Economic Hi
journal had been successful in helping to consolidate a d
But even in the early 1950s, articles in the JEH had re
scholarly apparatus. With the notable exception of an ar
laureate Simon Kuznets, few made any reference to eco
much use of statistical techniques.4 To be more exact, of
published in the JEH from 1951 through 1953, only eig
tables or graphs to present data, and in most of these c

1. These figures are based on my survey of information on the

departments with no specialists in economic history were Princeton,
North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Cornell, and Wisconsin. There is only
Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and Duke.
2. Among the top sixteen departments, only Johns Hopkins, Northw
of less than forty full-time tenure-track historians. Yale, Michigan
cidentally three of the four departments with two or more economic
seventy or more.
3. The authors and page numbers of these articles are, in order: H. N
Goebel, 190-202; Kenneth L. Brown, 125-148; H. R. Weinstein, 24-35
53; and Dudley Dillard, 63-76.
4. Kuznets* s article, "National Income Estimates for the United State
ed that the estimates of U.S. national income for the first seven decade
had previously been used by most economists were statistically incohe
valueless. JEH 12 (1952), 1 15-130.

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 49

gave only descriptive statistics rather than engaging in statistical manipulation of

the data. With the exception of Kuznets, the authors never went beyond indexing
prices or stating quantities as percentages. Typical was an article by Robert T. Pat-
terson, whose only table indicated the absolute dollar value of bonds authorized
and sold at the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War.5 Many of the articles published in
this period made quantitative claims of some sort, but these were rarely based on
rigorous statistical methods or mathematical economic reasoning.
One might say that the epistemological object for a majority of economic his-
torians in the 1950s was not "the economy" but what one might call "forms of
economic life." Hence there were many articles in the early years of economic
history journals on particular firms, industries, entrepreneurs, policies, or institu-
tions. Often such studies asked, at least in passing, what the firms or institutions
had to do with the growth or stagnation of the national economies of which they
were a part, but the question of growth was usually not the central concern. Eco-
nomic life had its particular features- pursuit of profit, regulation of markets,
hedging against risk, sustaining adequate consumption levels, organizing work
effectively, and so on. But the history of economic life was regarded by most of its
practitioners as but one aspect of the overall history of the human adventure. The
great French medieval economic historian Marc Bloch put this point trenchantly
in 1929 in the first volume of the Annates d* histoire economique et sociale. In a
critical review of studies of medieval economic history, he stressed that "intimate
links united economic activity to other forms of human life. To deny or to silence
them under the pretext of specialization in research would be to falsify, by means
of an unacceptable abstraction, the entire tableau of the past."6 In the hands of a
great historian like Bloch, the history of economic life opened out striking vis-
tas onto the larger social and cultural structures of society.7 But, as Bloch would
have been the first to admit, economic history as the study of forms of life also
underwrote many banal or merely competent works as well, including most of
those published in the Journal of Economic History. Indeed, economic history as
the history of economic life tended to be relatively vague about causal relations:
a thorough description of the situation faced by the entrepreneur, the industry, or
the policy-maker and of the actions to which this situation gave rise was the goal
of most J EH articles in this period.
The "New Economic History" or "Cliometrics" took aim precisely at the lack
of explanatory rigor in earlier forms of economic history. The young scholars who
formed this movement had been trained in economics departments that were in-
creasingly stressing mathematical forms of theory, statistical methods, and econo-
metrics. The overriding, one might say all-consuming, issue for the new economic
historians was the explanation of economic growth, conceptualized quite specifi-
cally as a rise in national income per capita. This field had been pioneered in

5. Robert T. Patterson, "Government Finance on the Eve of the Civil War," JEH 12 (1952), 30-44.
6. Marc Bloch, "Classification et choix des faits en histoire Economique: Reflexions de methode a
propos de quelques ouvrages recents," Annates d' histoire economique et sociale 1 (1929), 257.
7. See, among other works, Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics,
foreword by Bryce Lyon, transl. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1926),
and Feudal Society, transl. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

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1 50 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

the 1940s by Simon Kuznets, who developed detailed econ

national income accounting, which he applied initially to t
question of economic growth also came to the fore at this t
war efforts to spur industrialization in the colonial and p
Asia, Africa, and Latin America.9 In the work of the new
economic growth rather than forms of economic life becam
thy of historical research- one is tempted to say the onl
rather than economic institutions and economic actors, the
known as "the national economy" became the key unit of
The research that launched the new economic history e
tion of railroads to American economic development. Robe
initial findings on this question in the J EH in 1962, and in
roads and American Economic Growth.™ In the followin
published his own book on the topic, which disputed som
ings.11 In his book, Fogel, who signaled his positivist epi
ments by beginning the first chapter with an epigraph fr
that contrary to the claims of previous economic historian
means indispensable to the rapid economic development o
the nineteenth century.12 He constructed an ingenious "co
of how much economic growth would have been lost had n
Canal expansion, he showed, would have made up much o
told, the advantage of railroads over canals and wagons w
to less than 5% of the actual U.S. gross national product
whose study measured indirect effects of railroads that F
as stimulation of other industries) concluded that railroad
than Fogel had claimed, but still put their contribution at
ten percent of GNP.14
What was most significant, however, was not who had th
the terms in which the debate was carried out. Methodol
logically, Fishlow and Fogel were in essential agreement.
a key article in the 1971 issue of the J EH that celebrated

8. For example, Simon Kuznets, National Income and Its Composi

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1941); National Income: A S
York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946); National Prod
Lillian Epstein and Elizabeth Jenks (New York: National Bureau of Eco
9. Kuznets himself contributed to this interest in development of what
developed" countries. See Economic Growth: Brazil, India , and Japan ,
E. Moore, and Joseph E. Spengler (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres
10. Robert W. Fogel, "A Quantitative Approach to the Study of Railroa
Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary Findings," JEH 22 (1962),
American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimor
Press, 1964).
11. Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
12. The epigraph begins with this statement: "In history as anywhe
the explanation of a phenomenon consists in subsuming it under general
Railroads, 1.
13. Ibid., 223.
14. Fishlow, American Railroads, 61 .

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 5 1

tory's contributions. "The common thread running through the New Economic
History" they said in this article, "is a commitment to the efficacy of theory in
specifying useful counterfactuals, and to quantitative methods in implementing
them." The implementation of counterfactual propositions and their comparison
to the actual facts required the generation of masses of new data. As Fishlow and
Fogel made clear, "The data categories- national income, capital stock, etc." are
inventions of the modern economist, not the concerns of past government of-
ficials, and are therefore not readily available in printed sources. The categories
of data being sought are defined by economic theory, by "economic models of
production and income determination," like those pioneered by Simon Kuznets.
As Fishlow and Fogel put it, "because such data are not directly available, it is
necessary to resort to the art of synthetic reconstruction." This synthetic recon-
struction "is in itself based upon application of theoretical relationships to limited
information."15 In other words, by mathematically manipulating the equations
used in preparing contemporary national income accounts, cliometricians were
able to generate estimates of key unstated quantities. Although such theoretically
specified quantities (for example, productivity or net capital expenditure) cannot
be measured directly, algebraic manipulation of the appropriate mathematical for-
mulae reveal what sorts of existing data (for example, figures on prices, imports
and exports, rents, insurance rates, or the quantities of different types of goods
produced) can be plugged into the equations to generate valid estimates of the
theoretically specified quantities. The procedures, in short, are based on multiple
levels of mathematical abstraction. Neither the independent nor the dependent
variables, nor, for that matter, the questions being asked about them, would exist
without specification by economic and econometric theory and by the mathemati-
cal equations and the statistical estimation techniques of modern economics.
In their joint article, Fishlow and Fogel were quite explicit about how the new
economic history was transforming the field.

Two principal factors have shaped the directions, and thereby the contributions, of the New
Economic History. The first has been an unabashedly developmental interest. Cliometri-
cians have been concerned with rates of growth rather than levels, with economic aggre-
gates rather than persons, and with production rather than distribution. This has meant an
inevitable shift of focus from earlier writing in which the description of the institutional
structure was the central objective, and in which much attention was bestowed upon distri-
butional problems reflected in the farmers' discontent, the rise of unions, business concen-
tration and government regulation. A parallel list of topics covered by the new economic
historians would read agricultural productivity, investment in human capital, industrial sup-
ply and demand responses, and government promotion of social overhead investment.16

This account makes it clear that the new economic history had a much more ab-
stract epistemological object than the old economic history: not persons, institu-
tions, and social movements, but growth rates, economic aggregates, productivity,
and investment. This was, precisely, a move from economic history as the study

15. Albert Fishlow and Robert W. Fogel, "Quantitative Economic History: An Interim Evaluation
of Past Trends and Present Tendencies," JEH 32 (1971), 15-42.
16. Ibid., 18.

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 152 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

of forms of economic life to economic history as the hist

minants of national economic growth.
The new economic historians held the intellectual high
of the 1960s and 1970s. They had more trenchant questio
ods, and highly original research strategies. Moreover, t
and evaluate mountains of new empirical data made the
quantitative history- a movement of historical research
economic history in those years. It is not hard to see why
over the field.

A look at articles published in the JEH shows that the

American discipline of economic history was astonishin
the rise of the new economic history by counting the per
JEH making use of various characteristic methodologic
graphs presenting data, theoretical diagrams (of the sort
and demand diagrams in elementary economics courses)
tions.

Table 1:
Percent of Articles in the Journal of Economic History
containing Different Methodological Apparatuses

Statistical Statistical Theoretical Mathematical No. of

Year None Tables Graphs Diagrams Equations Articles

1951-53 68% 32% 12% 0% 0% 25

1965-66 24% 72% 20% 4% 8% 25

1970-71 23% 69% 6% 4% 51% 35

1975-76 15% 76% 29% 15% 50% 34

2008 3% 90% 76% 14% 62% 29

Papers presented to the annual meetin

1960s, and 1970s, were not included i
informal presentations, their inclusio
cal apparatus.

Let us follow convention and take the publication of Fogel's and Fishlow's
books as marking the beginning point of the new economic history as a scholarly
movement. Table 1 shows that already in the mid-1960s, when these books had
just been released, research practices in the field had changed markedly since
the early 1950s. Fully three-quarters of the articles in the JEH volumes of 1965
and 1966, as against only a third in the early 1950s, used some form of quan-
titative methodological apparatus, mostly statistical tables of some description.
Thus, even before the new economic history movement got its name, economic
historians had already begun to adopt more rigorous quantitative techniques. In
1970-1971, the percentage of articles using some quantitative apparatus was ac-

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 53

tually no higher than it had been a half-decade earlier. But on closer inspection the
change over that half-decade was profound. In the mid-1960s only one article in
ten contained a mathematical equation; by the early 1970s, fully half did. It is the
use of mathematical notation that most clearly indicates acceptance of the schol-
arly norms of the new economic history. Any diligent historian could arrange her
or his findings into a tabular form, but using equations indicates a working knowl-
edge of modern, mathematically based economic theory that only rare working
historians could have mustered. To include equations in an article was a badge of
membership in the new intellectual regime.17
I read Table 1 as indicating that the new economic history was well entrenched
in the journal and the association as early as the beginning of the 1970s. The
figures for the mid-1970s show that this position was yet further strengthened. Al-
though the proportion of articles using mathematics had remained constant, only
one article in seven now lacked quantitative apparatus, and the proportions using
both statistical graphs and theoretical diagrams rose. By 2008, which I include to
indicate the shape of the field in the present, only one of the twenty-nine articles
lacked quantitative apparatus altogether, sixty-two percent used mathematics,
ninety percent used statistical tables, and three quarters- a big increase- used
graphs.18 If we take this as the portrait of a field entirely won over to economic
history as a branch of economics, we can see that most of the way had already
been traveled as early as 1970 and 1971 . It is therefore understandable that nearly
all the distinguished economic historians trained after the early 1970s were edu-
cated and made their careers in economics departments. Economic history was
by then well on its way to becoming the study of economic growth in the past by
means of methods developed and employed in economics departments.
It is indisputable that the triumph of the new economic history increased the rig-
or and intellectual power of the field of economic history. Although this increase
in power was based on mathematical abstraction from the concrete experience of
economic life in the past, economic historians were by no means uninterested in
collecting empirical data. Quite the contrary, they greatly expanded the collection
of data, often exploiting new and unsuspected sources of quantifiable evidence
with tremendous ingenuity and assiduity. But the questions they were interested
in answering ceased to be primarily about forms of economic life. Although one
might study the cotton textile industry or railroads, what was important to eco-
nomic historians about such topics was not, for example, how work experiences
or clothing fashions were changed by the advent of mechanized cotton produc-
tion, or how the development of street railroads enabled new forms of urban life,
but rather what effects technological change, rising capital investment, decreased
turnover time, and labor productivity in the cotton or railroad industry had on the
growth of GDP per capita.

17. One could, of course, be a card-carrying econometrician and not include an equation in one's
article. Neither Kuznets in his 1952 J EH article nor Fogel in his 1962 JEH article included equations,
but this was probably so as not to intimidate their expected readers, which, in those years, would have
included historians.

18. My guess is that the increase in the use of graphs is a consequence of the development of digital
graphing software, which makes high-quality diagrams much easier to prepare.

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 1 54 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

II. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE NEW SOCIAL HISTORY

It is important to recognize that there was both gain and loss in the transition to
the new economic history. But initially the gains were much more obvious than
the losses. This was largely because history as a whole was being transformed in
the 1960s and 1970s by the rise of what was called "the new social history" and by
the application of quantitative techniques to many fields of historical study. The
new economic history may have been unique in its extensive use of mathematics,
but in these years it was very common for historians to borrow both theory and
methods from a whole range of quantitative social sciences- especially sociol-
ogy, political science, demography, and geography- in addition to economics.
This tendency is nicely illustrated by the foundation of the Social Science His-
tory Association, which held its first annual meeting and began publishing its
journal, Social Science History , in 1976. According to the editors' foreword in the
journal's first issue, the SSHA was to bring together "historians seeking a more
rigorous and consciously theoretical orientation" and "social scientists interested
in longitudinal analysis." The journal would publish "research that attempts gen-
eralizations of some breadth verified by systematic examination of the relevant
evidence and supported by quantitative analysis when appropriate."19 Although
the SSHA carefully avoided language that might exclude historians using meth-
ods other than quantification or adhering to non-positivist epistemologies, this
statement of purpose made clear the founders' commitment to the Hempelian pro-
gram we have already encountered among the new economic historians.20
Within this vibrant and growing community of interdisciplinary historians and
social scientists, the study of economic life actually figured quite prominently,
even though economic historians had turned almost entirely to the question of
economic growth. Most of this work on economic life was actually carried out
by scholars who identified themselves as social historians. A major priority of the
new social historians was to trace out the effects of economic change on society;
studies of the social effects of industrialization were particularly prominent. But
even social histories of pre-industrial societies- of peasants, lords, merchants,
artisans, religious congregations, cities, regions, or professional groups- nearly
always paid close attention to the economic forces and economic experiences that
social historians typically saw as underlying the social structures, social institu-
tions, or social movements they were studying. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s,
social historians themselves carried out the sort of research that once would have

been published in economic history journals- about guild structures, food prices,
business practices, wage patterns, or technological innovations- often supplying
far more extensive quantitative evidence on these issues than would have been
typical in articles in the JEH in the 1940s or 1950s.

19. "Editor's Foreword," Social Science History 1 (1976), i-ii.

20. One ot the leading figures in the new economic history, Robert Fogel, served on the journal s
editorial board.

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 155

One reason for this close attention to economic life was a widespread assump-
tion that economic structures and changes determined other aspects of social life.
One certainly didn't have to be a Marxist in the 1960s and 1970s to be an eco-
nomic determinist. Few social historians would have disagreed with the British
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in 1971 when he attempted to sketch a "com-
mon working model" for social historical research:

One starts with the material and historical environment, goes on to the forces and tech-
niques of production (demography coming somewhere in between), the structure of the
consequent economy- divisions of labor, exchange, accumulation, distribution of the sur-
plus and so forth- and the social relations arising from these. These might be followed by
the institutions and the image of society and its functioning which underlie them. . . . The
practice is thus to work outwards and upwards from the process of social production in its
specific setting.21

This statement aptly sketches the working assumptions not only of the British
Marxist historians but also of French social historians of the Annales School or of
American new social historians. As long as there was a consensus that one should
work "outwards and upwards" from forces and relations of production to politics,
thought, and social institutions, social historians could be counted on to engage in
serious study of economic life.
But this interest in economic life faded out in the 1980s and 1990s as social

history was increasingly displaced by what Lynn Hunt celebrated in 1989 as

"the new cultural history."22 Because I have written about this transition at some
length elsewhere, I will be very brief here.23 Influenced especially by new work in
cultural anthropology and literary studies, historians- including historians who
had themselves been practitioners of the new social history- became increas-
ingly skeptical of the economic determinism that underlay Hobsbawm's work-
ing model. Rather than assuming that social or political movements somehow
reflected economic changes or economic interests, they began to focus on the
symbols, discourses, and rituals that specified the movements' meaning. This new
emphasis required methods very different from those championed by the new
social history. Linguistic theories and interpretive methods replaced causal analy-
sis and statistics; hermeneutics and postmodernism replaced positivism; Clifford
Geertz and Michel Foucault replaced Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. W. Rostow.
Indeed, cultural historians increasingly dismissed assumptions about the primacy
of economic forces out of hand as crude and naive. Rather than industrialization,
exploitation, class, and the pursuit of economic interests, the key issues became
the relationship between knowledge and power and the cultural construction of
difference, particularly differences in gender and race.
I was an enthusiastic participant in this cultural turn, which, in my opinion,
gave rise to much groundbreaking and powerful historical research. I think that
cultural historians were right to reject the default economic determinism of the

21. E. J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus 100 (1971), 31.
22. Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
23. William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 2. For another recent account, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked
Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005).

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1 56 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

new social history and its preference for supposedly "hard"

"soft" or "impressionistic" evidence. But these positive ch
negative effects on the historical study of economic life.
proaches to economic life could and did yield important i
historians seemed to regard economic questions as tainted
with positivism and economic determinism. ^Already mar
history, studies of economic life also dwindled in the output
mid-1980s. By the turn of the millennium, they had becom
One might, of course, argue that the history of economic
ued in the 1960s and 1970s and that the swing to cultural h
a useful correction, even if the pendulum may have swun
opinion, real historical developments in the years followin
erwise understandable pendulum swing most inopportune.
when social history was being displaced by cultural history
economy underwent a set of fundamental changes. The ext
of the 1970s brought an end to the long postwar boom, a
that emerged from this crisis in the 1980s was very differ
postwar "golden years." Overall growth rates fell sharply
fixed-exchange-rate currency regime collapsed in the early
began to float on the open market. Keynesianism, which h
dealing effectively with the "stagflation" of the 1970s, wa
ism and a revived laissez-faire. The wealthy nations exper
dustrialization as manufacturing moved increasingly to lo
Labor movements declined nearly everywhere and income
more unequal. The rise of new information technologies en
dispersion of production and the development of free-wh
nancial markets. The moderated capitalism of the postwar
aged by welfare-oriented nation-states, was replaced by an
market-driven, hyper-competitive, cost-cutting global capi
the control of any nation-state and that was loudly cham
economic ideology. In other words, at the very time whe
ing interest in studies of economic life, transformations
economy should have made it clear that economic change w
ing history in the present. 25 In retrospect, it seems astoun
economic transformations had no discernible effects on th
historians- that, indeed, historians were turning away fr
the very moment when economic realities became particula
and consequential.26

24. 1 believe that the value of cultural history of the economy was eff
such early works as Garreth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studie
History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society , 1
Cambridge University Press, 1984); and my own Work and Revolution
Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Unive
25. For a splendid discussion of this transformation, see E. J. Hobsawm
History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
26. This declining interest in the history of economic life was by no

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 57

III. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

A paucity of work on economic life is a serious weakness of the history profession

in the present, although it seems likely that the collapse of world financial institu
tions in the autumn of 2008 and the consequent "Great Recession" may be suf-
ficient to regain historians' attention. But if historians do decide once again that
economic life is passionately interesting, what issues are likely to be investigated
And what intellectual resources are currently available for such investigations?
It should go without saying that merely returning to the sort of work done
thirty years ago by new social historians is neither promising nor likely. Curren
economic life and the politics that surrounds it suggest a different set of question
from those that inspired historians in the 1960s and 1970s. As organized labor
declines and industrial jobs dwindle in the advanced capitalist countries under the
joint force of automation and the migration of production to low- wage countries,
studies of the industrial working class have lost much of their political appeal. Th
worldwide advance of industrialized agriculture has had much the same effect on
peasant studies. Although oppression and grinding poverty still afflict producers
of agricultural and industrial goods the world over, the apparent political weaknes
of farm and factory workers in the contemporary world- by comparison with th
much more insurrectionary period stretching from 1917 to the 1970s- seems to
have limited historians' interest in the experiences of the exploited, which was on
of the most important topics of the new social history. Although I regret the wan
ing of historians' interests in the struggles of the exploited, I can understand why
current economic and political trends suggest a very different portfolio of topics
Meanwhile, other social-science disciplines have been much more responsive
to the challenges posed by recent economic transformations. The most obvious
case is the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of economic sociology or socioeco-
nomics, which has developed mainly in departments of sociology and political
science. This work tends to be highly critical of the neoliberal economic assump-
tions that have become dominant both in politics and in the economics profession
since the 1970s. The economic sociologists insist on what, borrowing from Karl
Polanyi, they call the "socially embedded" character of firms and markets.27 So-
cioeconomics strives to demonstrate that the working of actual markets and firm
cannot be explained by the purely self-interested actions of rational economic
actors of the sort assumed by neoclassical economics. Rather, it shows that firms
and the markets in which they participate are actually governed as much by socia
ties, cultural assumptions, and political processes- what this literature typically
calls "institutions"- as by purely "rational" economic action. Although much of

phenomenon. In France the famous Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations changed its title to
Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales in 1994. A quick counting exercise seems to indicate that drop
ping of the word economie was indicative of a change in the contents of the journal. In 1975, th
Annales published fifty-three articles, of which thirty-nine, or 74%, concerned some aspect of eco-
nomic life. In 2004, only four of the thirty-six articles, or 11%, were on aspects of economic life.
27. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944] (New York: Octagon Books, 1975).

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1 58 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

the work in this vein amounts to a form of social, political,

modern economic life, it has been written by sociologists a
rather than by historians. It is therefore hardly surprising
ciology focuses on the relatively recent past, particularly t
War II; it is, however, admirably international and compa
curious that historians have been essentially unaware of th
movement; one would expect historians to be highly sympa
social and cultural history of the economic institutions- s
markets, and regulatory agencies- that so dominate modern
ans might profitably extend the range of such studies back in
to the twentieth.29

A second source of new thinking about the history of e

ironically, from economic historians. In the years since th
economic history the field has made something of a turn b
study of economic life, but in new ways backed by econo
ematical reasoning. Articles published in the economic his
written almost exclusively by economists, and most of the
tribution of some historical development to economic gro
range of developments regarded as capable of having a majo
growth has grown considerably since the triumph of the n

28. This literature is vast and is growing rapidly, so my citations here

nent examples. For a good introduction to the field, see Frank Dobbin, Th
A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Influential work
A. Hall and David Soskis, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Fou
Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter B. Evans, E
and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skill in Germany , Brit
Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); William R
Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princet
The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparis
and Kozo Yamamura (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Com
Capitalism , ed. Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz (Westport, CT
The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations , e
Princeton University Press, 1989). Representative theoretical statements i
"Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedn
Sociology 91 (1985), 481-510; Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities
Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Neil Flig
A Political-Cultural Approach to Market Institutions," American Sociolo
673. A quick way to get a sense of current work in this subfield is to bro
Socio-Economic Review. For a lively discussion of economic sociology'
ness," see "Polanyi Symposium: A Conversation on Embeddedness,"
(2004), 109-135.
29. There has, however, been some exemplary work on earlier centuries
example, Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States,
Railway Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and
Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princ
Press, 1996).
30. The ninety-seven authors of the forty-six articles published in t
include only one who taught in a history department, along with two
statistics, and one each in law, sociology, international studies, and o
taught in economics departments (fifty), business schools (thirteen), depar
(twelve, all Europeans), or were economists employed in the research de
or academic research institutes (six).

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 59

in the 1970s. In the ensuing years, important economic theorists and econometri-
cians, including a number of Nobel laureates, have, for example, explored the role
of human capital formation, of nutrition and health, and of a variety of institutions
in fostering economic growth.31
The influence of the economics of institutions is a particularly telling case. Oli-
ver Williamson and Douglass North, who were major figures in the development
of contemporary institutional economics, were both concerned- one might even
say obsessed- to work out how institutions such as private property rights, capital
markets, contract law, insurance, or the corporate form of enterprise increased
economic efficiency by lowering transaction costs. But the analytical framework
they developed could also be applied to explain why institutions failed to develop
efficient forms- otherwise, how could one explain the differences between ef-
ficiency-enhancing and efficiency-blocking institutions? The analytical apparatus
of institutional economics therefore gave economic historians certified theoreti-
cal and methodological tools that they could use to study the history of institu-
tions of all kinds- and they have proceeded to do so.32 Meanwhile Gary Becker's
theory of family consumption and labor-allocation decisions was not focused on
the contribution of family organization to rates of economic growth; his goal was
to expand the economist's approach to decision making to human organizations
of all sorts.33 At the same time, new means of gauging the nutritional status of past
populations gave economists surprising insights into the history of human well-
being.34 And economic theories about human capital formation made it possible
for innovative studies of the history of education, and for clever attempts to esti-
mate premodern numeracy, to count as legitimate pieces of economic research.35

31. To mention only the work of Nobel laureates, on human capital, see Gary S. Becker, Human
Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Emphasis on Education (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1975). On nutrition, see Robert William Fogel, The Escape from Hunger
and Premature Death, 1700-2100 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the
economics of institutions, see the pioneering article by Ronald Coase, "The Problem of Social
Cost," Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960), 1-44; Douglass North, Structure and Change in
Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981), and Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic
Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Oliver Williamson, Markets and
Hierarchies, Analysis and Antitrust Implications: A Study of the Economics of Internal Organization
(New York: New York University Press, 1975); and, for a different style of institutional economics,
Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
32. Thus one finds in recent numbers of the JEH studies of peonage on haciendas, of the dynam-
ics of convict migration to the American colonies from Britain, or of Louis XIV' s use of corporate
bodies to finance royal debts, all of which are more concerned to set forth the logics of the institu-
tions than to gauge their contributions to economic growth. Lee J. Alston, Shannan Mattiace, and
Tomas Nonnemacher, "Coercion, Culture, and Contracts: Labor and Debt on Henequen Haciendas in
Yucatan, Mexico, 1870-1915," JEH 69 (2009), 104-137; Farley Grub, "The Transatlantic Market for
Convict Labor," JEH 60 (2000), 94-122; Mark Potter, "Good Offices: Intermediation by Corporate
Bodies in Early Modern French Public Finance," JEH 60 (2000), 599-626.
33. For a fascinating application of Becker's household allocation equations, see Joel Mokyr,
"Why 'More Work for Mother?' Knowledge and Household Behavior, 1870-1945," JEH 60 (1960),
1-41.

34. Trevan D. Logan, "The Transformation of Hunger: The Demand for Calories Past and Present,"
JEH 69 (2009), 388-408; Alexander Moradi, "Towards an Objective Account of Nutrition and Health
in Colonial Kenya: A Study of Stature in African Army Recruits and Civilians, 1880-1980," JEH
69 (2009), 719-754.
35. Christiana Stoddard, "Why Did Education Become Publicly Funded? Evidence from the
Nineteenth-Century Growth of Public Primary Schooling in the United States," JEH 69 (2009),

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 1 60 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

The consequence is that economic history journals now of

insights into, and methods for studying, the history of econ
To fully absorb what the economic historians have to offer
to brush up on their algebra and statistics. But on returnin
journals after having ceased to read them some three dec
the recent yield encouragingly rich.
There are, then, new tools on offer from adjacent discipli
recent trends in the world economy have also brought into
ics about economic life, many of which can be attacked usi
already know how to use. I will briefly discuss what seem
for historical work in the present and near future, indica
studies already accomplished, and signaling, where possib
scholars outside the history profession that might serve a
for historians.

Consumption

In the last few decades modern consumption regimes have spread all over the
world and consumption has become the chief driver of U.S. economic perfor-
mance. The issue of consumption is actually one of the few economic topics that
has been adequately studied by historians over the past few decades. In part this
is because consumption has long been a flagrantly obvious feature of modern
life, at least in America. Consumption has been studied more by historians than
other flagrantly obvious facts of economic life (for instance, the dominance of
contemporary societies by business corporations or finance) because consumption
is a profoundly symbolic and expressive form of behavior that lends itself easily
to the research agendas of cultural history. Some of the best recent work attempts
not only to read consumption as a text or to indicate its political valences but also
to show how changing consumption patterns reacted back onto production and
onto the larger structures of the economy. Maxine Berg demonstrates that the flow
of Asian commodities into early modern Britain, especially Indian calicoes and
Chinese and Japanese porcelains, not only was instrumental in the burgeoning
of new forms of consumption, but stimulated British entrepreneurs to produce
domestically manufactured substitute goods, including Manchester calicoes and
Staffordshire pottery, which eventually dwarfed the original Asian items in eco-
nomic significance.36 Jan de Vries has recently published a book that creatively
combines the "new home economics" of Gary Becker with studies of the chang-
ing culture of consumption and with quantitative studies of personal possessions
(based on inventories after death) in early modern Britain, France, Holland, and
America. He argues that consumption was a central component of what he calls
an "industrious revolution" in the long eighteenth century- a new ordering of the
family economy in which both rural and urban labor (especially that of women

172-201; Brian A'Hearn, Jorg Baten, and Dorothee Crayen, "Quantifying Quantitative Literacy: Age
Heaping and the History of Human Capital," J EH 69 (2009), 783-808.
36. Maxine Berg, From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century
Britain," Economic History Review 45 (2002), 1-30; Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth
Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 6 1

and children) was applied more intensively to the production of goods for sale in
the market in order to maximize income for the purchase of other market-supplied
goods, such as textiles, crockery, furniture, clocks, and tableware. He argues that
this largely voluntary increase of labor intensity was a crucial factor in stimulating
economic growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The de Vries
book is particularly notable for using the tools of modern professional economic
history- with its equations, diagrams, and statistical tables- in such a way that
they illuminate changing forms of economic life.37

Globalization

The prominence of talk about globalization in the contemporary public sphere

has certainly gained historians' attention. The topic of globalization has stimu-
lated a wide range of new research- including work like Berg's on European
fascination with consumer goods imported from other continents. There is also
much current work on migration from the global south to both Europe and the
United States, although most of this work focuses more on problems of cultural
identities and political responses rather than on the economic aspects of migra-
tion. Awareness of globalization in the present surely also explains the massive
contemporary development of studies of all facets of European and American
colonialism. Again, the cultural and political effects of colonialism, both in the
colonies and in the metropoles, tend to dominate this research. But some recent
studies explicitly interpret such political and cultural effects through the lens of
the worldwide expansion of capitalism that was part and parcel of colonial domi-
nation.38 Rising awareness of contemporary globalization is surely responsible
for the prominence of historical research on Asian and Indian Ocean economic
history.39 The pioneering work of historical sociologists on the history of global
economic dynamics should also be noted.40 Although much remains to be done on
the history of economic globalization, this is an area in which some high-quality
exemplars are already in place.

The Environment

Environmental history arose out of the dawning environmental movement of the

late 1960s and early 1970s; the journal Environmental History dates from 1976,

37. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy,
1650 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
38. Two recent books that do this for the Indian case are Manu Goswami, Producing India: From
Political Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Andrew
Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).
39. See, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settle-
ment in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); R. Bin
Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997); Kenneth Pomerantz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe , and the
Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),
40. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press,
1974-1989); Janet Abu Lughod, Before European History: The Modern World System, 1250-1350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Andr£ Gunder-Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the
Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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162 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

the year that Social Science History was founded.41 Give

posed by modern economic growth to the world's natural
continues to have a strong political and moral relevance.
serves in his excellent review article on environmental h
work on this topic deals with the politics of conservationi
toward the environment, but the work he categorizes as
history" normally has an important economic component.4
liam Cronon, Donald Worster, and Joel Tarr focuses power
of profit and public efforts to regulate or remediate its d
effects have transformed rural and urban landscapes and
there is much work still to be done, but there are some e
If good historical research into economic facets of cons
and the environment is already under way, historians hav
to understand two other problems that contemporary eco
to pose: debt and credit relations, and the macro-dynamic
if historians do take up these questions, they will be able
work by scholars in other fields.

Debt, Credit , and Finance

In 2010, in the wake of the second- worst financial crisis

capitalism (exceeded only by the Great Depression of th
credit and debt is hard to ignore. To be sure, Niall Ferguso
a popular survey of the role of finance in world history,44 a
is a longstanding topic in economic history.45 Some of this
and intended only for an audience of other economists, bu
conscientious efforts made by some historians of finance
accessible to non-specialists.46 Beyond the undoubted impo
ing, and financial institutions in the history of the econom
also the question of how debt and credit relations have af

41 . Called the Environmental Review at its founding, it became the En

from 1990 to 1995 before assuming its present title.
42. J. R. McNeill, "Observations on the Nature and the Culture of Envi
and Theory , Theme Issue 42 (December 2003), 5-43.
43. William Cronon, Nature* s Metropolis: Chicago and the Gre
Norton, 1991); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in t
University Press, 1979); Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental
Region , ed. Joel A. Tarr (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 20
44. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of th
2009).
45. See, for example, Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capital: The
the Age of Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 200
Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Cr
1978). An important book on state finance by a historian is John Brew
Money, and the English State , 1688-1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knop
46. See, for example, Philip Hoffmann, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and
"Information and Economic History: How the Credit Market in Old
Rethink the Transition to Capitalism," American Historical Review
historian with a serious interest in the French Revolution should car
lucid arguments of Thomas Sargent and Fran?ois R. Velde, "Macroeco
Revolution," Journal of Political Economy 103 (1995), 474-518.

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 63

culture of capitalist society. My experience as a teacher of graduate students at the

University of Chicago tells me that this question is beginning to find its historians.
Over the last few years I have worked with three students writing dissertations
on the cultural history of debt-credit relations: on the changing social and moral
meanings of bankruptcy in nineteenth-century France; on popular and intellectual
ideas about finance in Germany and Britain in the 1920s and 1930s; and on how
people made sense of the increasing commodification of risk in nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century America.47 Historical sociologists have also made impor-
tant contributions to the study of credit and finance, although their work tends to
focus on economic institutions per se rather than on the cultural effects of chang-
ing modes of finance. Neil Fligstein 's study of changing paradigms of corporate
management in the twentieth-century United States demonstrates that financial
ideas and tools had already come to dominate the internal governance of firms by
the mid-1960s; Greta Krippner has shown that financial activity came to account
for the lion's share of all corporate profits in the U.S. economy over the past three
decades; and Giovanni Arrighi has argued that financialization analogous to what
Fligstein and Krippner document has in fact recurred periodically over the long
course of the history of world capitalism.48

The Macro-Dynamics of Capitalism

The recent financialization of the American economy since the late 1970s is but
one aspect of a thoroughgoing, neoliberal transformation of the world capitalist
economy over the past three decades- one I have sketched out briefly above.
The neoliberal turn reversed the tendencies of a long period of increasing state
involvement in the management of the economy, one that reached back as far
as World War I and that was consolidated in the advanced industrial economies
after World War II with the development of Keynesian welfare states. Hobsbawm
has labeled this period of managed capitalism stretching from the late 1940s to
the early 1970s a "Golden Age" because it witnessed the most rapid sustained
economic growth in the history of world capitalism and because it ushered ordi-
nary European, North American, and Japanese citizens into an era of high wages,
relative material equality, economic security, high mass consumption, and seem-
ingly endless material progress 49 In retrospect, it seems clear that a form of world
capitalism that had brought great prosperity for a quarter of a century went into a

47. The first of these is by Erika Vause, the second by Mark Loeffler, and the third by Jonathan Ira
Levy. Two of these projects have resulted in publications: Jonathan Ira Levy, "Contemplating Deliv-
ery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875-1905,"
American Historical Review 111 (2006), 307-335; and Mark Loeffler, "Das 'Finanzkapital' zur
Jahrhundertwende. Der Diskurs in Deutschland und England," forthcoming in Kapitalismusdebatten
um 1900: Zur sozialdkonomischen Semantik des Jiidischen , ed. Nicolas Berg (Leipzig: Universitats-
verlag, 2010).
48. Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambndge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1990); Greta Krippner, "The Financialization of the American Economy," Socio- Economic
Review 3 (2005), 173-208; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the
Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).
49. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York:
Pantheon, 1994).

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 164 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

terminal crisis in the 1970s, a crisis marked by stagflatio

general uncertainty about the appropriate direction of e
The capitalism that replaced this state-managed form
worked by very different rules. Industries were increasi
meant that the fates of all firms were increasingly dete
pecially equity and bond markets; states privatized the
enterprises they had previously run; financial markets
shore," thereby largely escaping state controls; firms in
vantage of advancing information and communications
the various stages of production to different areas of the
found it ever more difficult to regulate far-flung corpo
themselves increasingly subjected to market forces by c
Keynesian welfare state was increasingly replaced by wh
a Schumpeterian workfare state- one characterized by t
an attack on labor unions, and an ideology that promote
entrepreneurialism.50 In the 1980s and 1990s, the ideol
liberalism were spread to the rest of the world by the
Fund and the World Bank, which became what Joseph S
fundamentalist" institutions. They used their financial l
countries in the global south to dismantle developmental
selves up to international capital; they also subjected po
of eastern Europe to what was called "shock therapy"-
imposition of "free" markets rather than a managed tra
capitalist economic forms.51
This dramatic and difficult transition from one framew
to another poses important issues for historical reflecti
economic sociology has, to be sure, responded to one asp
challenging the revived claims of neoclassical economic
of "social embeddedness." But work on social embeddedness fails to address the

dynamics of the overall world capitalist system. Economic sociology's conceptual

apparatus is organized around comparing responses to economic stimuli that, ac-
cording to neoclassical theory, should lead to strongly converging behavior on the
part of different firms, markets, or industries, but that often fails to do so because
these firms, markets, and industries are embedded in different social settings. But
a comparative method of this sort cannot easily grasp changes in the world capi-
talist system as a whole. To put it provocatively, if markets and firms are embed-
ded in state and society, society and the state themselves appear to be embedded
in the macro-structures and the unpredictable rhythms of world capitalism. This
implies that an adequate historical sociology- or history- of economic life must
also find some way of making sense of the historical dynamics of world capital-
ism itself.

This way of putting the issue rests on assumptions that are certainly not shared
by all who work on the history of economic life. Most basically, it assumes that

50. Bob Jessup, "Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist
Political Economy," Studies in Political Economy 40 (1993), 7-40.
51. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

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 A STRANGE CAREER: THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ECONOMIC LIFE 1 65

world capitalism can be spoken of as a specific historical object. Economic histo-

rians generally do not use the term "capitalism," or they use it as a synonym for an
economic system based on free-market exchange. They certainly do not see capi-
talism as a specific historical formation with any particular dynamic- beyond, at
best, a tendency to produce periodic business cycles. Analytically, they treat the
kinds of developments that produce welfare-Keynesianism and then neoliberalism
as exogenous to their object of study- what they regard as the economy proper.
The notion of capitalism as an evolving totality with its own dynamics arises
above all from the Marxist tradition. Marx, writing relatively early in the capitalist
era, was interested principally in what he saw as a dynamic that would lead, via
increasingly violent economic crises, to the inevitable overthrow of capitalism by
a proletarian revolution. Later Marxists, such as Rudolph Hilferding or Vladimir
Lenin, distinguished new phases within the capitalist era- finance capitalism or
imperialism- subsequent to the liberal phase that Marx had known. More recent
Marxists, less convinced of the imminent transcendence of capitalism by social-
ism than Marx or Lenin, but also less convinced than the intervening generation of
critical theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse that capitalism is perma-
nently frozen in a bureaucratic-technological form, have come to see capitalism
as a self-transforming system characterized by a whole succession of macro-in-
stitutional forms. World-system theorists, beginning with Immanuel Wallerstein,
have proposed long cycles or long centuries of capitalist history punctuated by
a succession of international political-economic hegemonies over the capitalist
world economy- from Spanish, to Dutch, to British, to American, to, perhaps,
in the not-too-distant future, Chinese. They regard great power rivalries, warfare,
and political upheavals as part and parcel of the development of the capitalist
world-system, both as causes and as effects.52 Others- those in the "French regu-
lation school," as well as David Harvey, Bob Jessop, Fredric Jameson, and Rob-
ert Brenner- have limited their compass more strictly to the transition from the
state-centered political economy of the "Golden Age" to the neoliberal political
economy of the past thirty years.53

52. See, especially, Wallerstein, Modern World-System ; Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century and
Adam Smith in Beijing: The Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007); and
Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
53. The form of capitalism characteristic of the "Golden Age" was dubbed "Fordist" by neo-Marx-
ist economists of the French "regulationist" school whose analyses of the then-dying form were pub-
lished between the late 1970s and mid-1980s. See Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation:
The US Experience (London: New Left Books, 1979); Robert Boyer, La theorie de la regulation: Une
analyse critique (Paris: La Decouverte 1986); and Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis in
Global Fordism , transl. David Macey (London: Verso, 1987). See also David Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bob Jessop, Beyond
the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place (Cheltenham, UK: Edward
Elgar, 2006); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism , or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World
Economy (London: Verso, 2002) and The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capital-
ist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (London: Verso, 2006). It is notable
that although the questions pursued by all these authors are eminently historical, only Brenner is a
historian by training.

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1 66 WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

Working on the macro-dynamics of capitalism, of cours

difficult challenges for historians. Much of the work that
treats only the period since World War II, which might mak
evant to the large majority of historians who work on earl
litical-economic transition of recent decades also poses mu
-about the historical genesis and transformation of differ
governance, about the relations between world politics and
er, about the relationship between economic doctrines and
the capitalist economy, about the specific historical tempo
a system, about the origins and evolution of world capitali
cal object capable of having a history. Both Immanuel Wa
Arrighi- by training a sociologist and an economist- have
tions about the evolution of capitalism that reach back to the
earlier. It is paradoxical that the wrenching changes of the pas
have largely failed to generate research by historians on th
To undertake historical work on the macro-dynamics of
course, require us to abandon the current taboo in historica
that might be construed as economic determinism. As I h
I regarded and still regard as a positive step the rejection o
ground assumption of economic determinism that was once
history. But rather than asking precisely what sort of dete
or opportunities economic developments, configurations, o
placed on historical actors in different circumstances, cultu
fectively made the citing of any economic causalities tabo
and unthinkable. Recent history should have demonstrate
economic determinations and constraints is counter-produc
tions of economic life are indeed having powerful, in some
effects on our own contemporary history, and hence that
tions might well have had such effects in the past as well.
historians can construct a more powerful and meaningful h
the study of economic life. Among other things, we should
tools- including notably those of cultural history- to inves
the compulsions, the enablements, and the long-term dynam
uted to the shaping of capitalist societies for the past four

University of Chicago

54. See note 51.

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