John Lyons, Miami University
Lou Cain, Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University
Sam Williamson, Miami University
Introduction
In the 1950s a small group of North American scholars adopted a revolutionary approach to investigating the economic past that soon spread to Great Britain and Ireland, the European mainland, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. What was first called “The New Economic History,” then “Cliometrics,” was impelled by the promise of significant achievement, by the novelties of the recent (mathematical) formalization of economic theory, by the rapid spread of econometric methods, and by the introduction of computers into academia. Cliometrics has three obvious elements: use of quantifiable evidence, use of theoretical concepts and models, and use of statistical methods of estimation and inference, and an important fourth element, employment of the historian’s skills in judging provenance and quality of sources, in placing an investigation in institutional and social context, and in choosing subject matter of significance to history as well as economics. Although the term cliometrics is used to describe work in a variety of historical social and behavioral sciences, the discussion here focuses on economic history.
A quantitative-analytical approach to economic history developed in the interwar years through the work of such scholars as Simon Kuznets in the U.S. and Colin Clark in Britain. Characteristic elements of cliometrics were stimulated by events, by changes in economics, and by an intensification of what might be called the statistical impulse.
First, depression, war, the dissolution of empires, a renewal of widespread and more rapid growth in the Western world, and the challenge of Soviet-style economic planning combined to focus attention on the sources and mechanisms of economic growth and development.
Second, new intellectual currents in economics, spurred in part by contemporary economic problems, arose and came to dominate the profession. In the 1930s, and especially during the war, theoretical approaches to the aggregate economy and its capabilities grew out of the new Keynesian macroeconomics and the development of national income accounting. Explicit techniques for analyzing resource allocation in detail were introduced and employed in wartime planning. Econometrics, the statistical analysis of economic data, continued to grow apace.
Third, the gathering of facts – with an emphasis on systematic arrays of quantitative facts – became more important. By the nineteenth century governments, citizens and scholars had become preoccupied with fact-gathering, but their collations were ordinarily ad hoc and unsystematic. Thoroughness and system became the desideratum of scholarly fact-gathering in the twentieth century.
All these forces had an impact on the birth of a more rigorous way of examining our economic past.
The New Economic History in North America
Cliometrics was unveiled formally in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1957 at an unusual four-day gathering sponsored by the Economic History Association and the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Most of the program was designed to showcase recent work by economists who had ventured into history.
Young scholars in the Income and Wealth group presented their contributions to the historical national accounts of the United States and Canada, spearheaded by Robert Gallman’s estimates of U.S. commodity output, 1839-1899. A pair of headline sessions dealt with method; the one on economic theory and economic history was headed by Walt Rostow, who recalled his undergraduate years in the 1930s at Yale, where he had been led to ask himself “why not see what happened if the machinery of economic theory was brought to bear on modern economic history?” He asserted “economic history is a less interesting field than it could be, because we do not remain sufficiently loyal to the problem approach, which in fact underlies and directs our efforts.”
Newcomers John R. Meyer and Alfred H. Conrad presented two papers. The first was “Economic Theory, Statistical Inference, and Economic History” (1957), a manifesto for using formal theory and econometric methods to examine historical questions. They argued that particular historical circumstances are instances of more general phenomena, suitable for theoretical analysis, and that that quantitative historical evidence, although relatively scarce, is much more abundant than many historians believed and can be analyzed using formal statistical methods. At another session Conrad and Meyer presented “The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which incorporated their methodological views to refute a long-standing proposition that the slave system in the southern United States had become moribund by the 1850s and would have died out had there been no Civil War. Conrad and Meyer buttressed the point by showing that slaveholding, viewed as a business activity, had been at least as remunerative as other uses of financial and physical capital. More broadly they illustrated “the ways in which economic theory might be used in ordering and organizing historical facts.”
Two decades later Robert Gallman recalled that the Williamstown “conference did more than put the ball in motion … It also set the tone and style of the new economic history and even forecast the chief methodological and substantive interests that were to occupy cliometricians for the next twenty-one years.” What began in the late 1950s as a trickle of work in the new style grew to a freshet and then a flood, incorporating new methods, examining bodies of data previously too difficult to analyze without the aid of computers, and investigating a variety of questions of traditional importance, mostly in American economic history. The watershed was continent-wide, collecting the work of small clusters of scholars bound together in a ramifying intellectual and social network.
An important and continuing node in this network was at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In the late 1950s a group of young historical economists assembled there, among whom the cross-pollination of historical interests and technical expertise was exceptional. In this group were Lance Davis and Jonathan Hughes and several others known primarily for their work in other fields. One was Stanley Reiter, a mathematical economist who traveled with Davis and Hughes to the meetings of the Economic History Association in September 1960 to present their paper explaining the new quantitative historical research being undertaken at Purdue – and to introduce the term “cliometrics” to the profession. The term was coined by Reiter as a whimsical combination of the words Clio, the muse of history, and metrics, from econometrics. As the years went by, the word stuck and became the name of the field.
To build on the enthusiasm aroused by that presentation, and to “consolidate Purdue’s position as the leader in this country of quantitative research in economic history,” Davis and Hughes (with Reiter’s aid) sought and received funds from Purdue for a meeting in December 1960 of about a dozen like-minded economic historians. They gave it the imposing title, “Conference on the Application of Economic Theory and Quantitative Methods to the Study of Problems of Economic History.” For obvious reasons the meetings were soon called “Clio” or the “Cliometrics Conference” by their familiars. Of the six presentations at the first meeting, none was more intriguing than Robert Fogel’s estimates of the “social saving” accruing from the expansion of the American railroad network to 1890.
Sessions were renowned from Clio’s early days as occasions for engaging in sharp debate and asking probing (and occasionally unanswerable) questions. Those who attended the first Clio conference established a tradition of rigorous and detailed analysis of the presenters’ work. In the early years at Purdue and elsewhere, cliometricians developed a research program with mutual support and encouragement and conducted an unusually large proportion of collaborative work, all the while believing in the progressiveness of their efforts.
Indeed, like Walt Rostow, other established economic historians felt that economic history was in need of renewal: Alexander Gerschenkron wrote in 1957 “Economic history is in a poor way. It is unable to attract good students, mainly because the discipline does not present any intellectual challenge …” Some cliometric young Turks were not so mild. While often relying heavily on the wealth of detail amassed in earlier research, they asserted a distinctive identity. The old economic history, it was said, was riddled with errors in economic reasoning and embodied an inadequate approach to causal explanation. The cliometricians insisted on a scientific approach to economic-historical questions, on careful specification of explicit models of the phenomena they were investigating. By implication and by declaration they said that much of conventional wisdom was based on unscientific and unsystematic historical scholarship, on occasion employing language not calculated to endear them to outsiders. The most vocal proponents declared a new order. Douglass North proclaimed that a “revolution is taking place in economic history in the United States … initiated by a new generation of economic historians” intent on reappraising “traditional interpretations of U.S. economic history.” Robert Fogel said that the “novel element in the work of the new economic historians is their approach to measurement and theory,” especially in their ability to find “methods of measuring economic phenomena that cannot be measured directly.” In 1993, these two were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for, in the words of the Nobel committee, being “pioneers in the branch of economic history that has been called the ‘new economic history,’ or cliometrics.”
The hallmark of the top rung of work done by the new economic historians was its integration of fact with theory. As Donald [Deirdre] McCloskey observed in a series of surveys, the theory was often simple. The facts, when not conveniently available, were dug up from surviving sources, whether published or not. Indeed the discipline imposed by the need to measure usually requires more data than would serve for a qualitative argument. Many new economic historians expended considerable effort in the 1960s to expand the American quantitative record. Thus, with eyebrow raised, so to speak, Albert Fishlow remarked in 1970, “It is ironic … to read that … most of the “New Economic History” only applies its ingenuity to analyzing convenient (usually published) data.'” Many cliometricians worked their magic not merely by relying on their predecessors’ compilations; as Scott Eddie comments, “one of the most significant contributions of cliometricians’ painstaking search for data has been the uncovering of vast treasure troves of useful data hitherto either unknown, unappreciated, or simply ignored.” Very early in the computer age they put such data into forms suitable for tabulation and statistical analysis.
William Parker and Robert Gallman, with their students, were pioneers in analyzing individual-level data from the United States Census manuscripts, a project arising from Parker’s earlier study of Southern plantations. From the 1860 agricultural census schedule they drew a carefully constructed sample of over 5,000 farms in the cotton counties of the American South and matched those farms with the two separate schedules for the free and slave populations. The Parker-Gallman sample was followed by Census samples for northern agriculture and for the post-bellum South.
The early practitioners of cliometrics applied their theoretical and quantitative skills to some issues well established in the more “traditional” economic historiography, none more important than asking when and how rapidly the North American economy began to experience “modern economic growth.” In the nineteenth century, economic growth in both the U.S. and Canada was punctuated by booms, recessions and financial crises, but the new work provided a better picture of the path of GNP and its components, revealing steady upward trends in aggregate output and in incomes per person and per worker. This last, it seemed clear from the work in the 1950s of Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow, must have derived significantly from the introduction of new techniques, as well as from expansion of the scale and penetration of the market. Several scholars thus established a related objective, understanding – or at least accounting for – productivity growth.
Attempting to provide sound explanations for growth, productivity change, and numerous other developments in modern economic history, especially of the U.S. and Britain, was the objective of the cliometricians’ theory and quantification. They were much criticized from without for the very use of these technical tools, and within the movement there was much methodological dispute and considerable dissent. Nonetheless, the early cliometricians spawned a sustained intellectual tradition that diffused worldwide from its North American origins.
Historical Economics in Britain
Cliometrics arrived relatively slowly among British economic historians, but it did arrive. Some was homegrown; some was imported. When Jonathan Hughes expressed doubts in 1970 that the American style of cliometrics could ever be an “export product,” he was already wrong. Admittedly, by then the new style had been employed by only a tiny minority of those writing economic history in Britain. Introduction of a more formal style, in Britain as in North America, fell to those trained as economists, initially to Alec Cairncross, Brinley Thomas and Robin Matthews. Cairncross’s book on home and foreign investment and Thomas’s on migration and growth developed, or collected into one place, a great deal of quantitative information for theoretical analysis; their method, as David Landes noted in 1955, was “in the tradition of historical economics, as opposed to economic history.” Matthews’s Study in Trade Cycle History (1954), which examines the trade cycle of 1833-42, was written, he said, in a “quantitative-historical” mode, and contains theoretical reasoning, economic models, and statistical estimates.
Systematic use of national accounting methods to study British economic development was a task undertaken by Phyllis Deane at Cambridge. Her work resulted in two early papers on British income growth and capital formation and in two books of major importance and lasting value: British Economic Growth, 1688-1959 (1962), written with W. A. Cole, and a compendium of underlying data compiled with Brian Mitchell. Despite skeptical reviews, the basics of the Deane-Cole estimates of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aggregate growth were accepted widely for two decades and provided a quantitative basis for discussing living standards and the dispersion of technical progress in the new industrial era. Also at Cambridge, Charles Feinstein estimated the composition and magnitude of British investment flows and produced detailed national income estimates for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, augmenting, refining and revising, as well as extending, the work of Deane and Cole.
All these studies belong to a decidedly British empirical tradition, despite the use of contemporary theoretical constructs, and contained nothing like the later claims of some American cliometricians about the virtues of using formal theory and statistical methods. Research in a consciously cliometric style was strongly encouraged in the 1960s at Oxford by Hrothgar Habakkuk and Max Hartwell, although neither saw himself as a cliometrician. Separately and together, they supported the movement, encouraging students to absorb both quantitative and formal analytical elements into their work.
The incursion of cliometrics into British economic history was – and has remained – neither so widespread nor so dominant as in North America, partly for reasons suggested by Hughes. Although economic history had been taught and practiced in British universities since the 1870s, after the first World War most faculty members were housed in separate departments of economic (and social) history that tended to require of their students only a modicum of economics and little of quantitative methods. With the establishment of new British universities and the rapid expansion of others, a dozen new departments of economic history were founded in the 1960s, staffed largely by people taught in history and economic history departments. The limited presence of cliometric types in Britain at the turn of the 1970s did not come from deficient demand, nor was it due to hostility or indifference. It was due to limited supply stemming from the small scale of the British academic labor market and an aversion to excessive specialization among young economists. Yet the situation was being rectified. On the demand side, British faculties of economics began to welcome more economic historians as colleagues, and, on the supply side, advanced students were being aided by post-graduate stipends and research support provided by the new Social Science Research Council.
During the 1970s a British version of new historical economics began to take shape. Its practitioners expanded their informal networks into formal institutional structures and scholarly ventures. The organized British movement opened in September 1970 at an Anglo-American “Conference on the New Economic History of Britain” in Cambridge (Massachusetts), followed by two others. From these meetings grew a project to re-write British economic history in a cliometric mode, which resulted in the publication in 1981 of a path-breaking two-volume work, The Economic History of Britain since 1700, edited by Roderick Floud and Donald [Deirdre] McCloskey.
Equally path-breaking, perhaps more so, was the outcome of parallel developments in English historical demography, whose practitioners had become progressively more quantitatively and theoretically adept since the 1950s, and for whom 1981 was also a banner year. Although portions of the book had been circulating for some time, E. A. Wrigley’s and R. S. Schofield’s Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction and its striking revisions of English demographic history were now available in one massive document.
As in North America, after the first wave of “quanitifiers” invaded parts of British historiography, cliometrics was refined in the heat of scholarly debate.
Controversies
Cliometricians started or continued a series of debates about the nature and sources of economic growth and its welfare consequences that decidedly have altered our picture of modern economic history. The first was initiated by Walt Rostow, who argued that modern economic growth begins with a brief and well-defined period of “take-off,” with the necessary “preconditions” having already become the normal condition of a given national economy or society. His metaphor of a “take-off into self-sustained growth”, which first appeared in a journal article, was popularized in Rostow’s famous book, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960). Rostow asserted that “The introduction of the railroad has been historically the most powerful single initiator of take-offs.” To test this contention, Robert Fogel and Albert Fishlow both wrote Ph.D. dissertations dealing in part with Rostow’s view: Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964) and Fishlow’s American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy (1965). These books contain their estimates of the extent of resource saving that had accrued from the adoption of a new transport system, with costs lower than those of canals. Their results rejected Rostow’s view.
Until the cliometricians made a pair of disputatious incursions into its economic history, the American South was largely the province of regional historians – almost a footnote to the story of U.S. economic development. Sparked by Conrad and Meyer, for two decades cliometricians focused intently on the place of the South in the national economy and of slavery in the Southern economy. To what extent was early national economic growth driven by Southern cotton exports and how self-sufficient was the South as an economic region? Douglass North argued that the key to American economic development before 1860 was regional specialization, that Southern cotton was the economy’s staple product, and that much of Western and Northern economic growth derived from Southern demand for food and manufactures. Indeed, Conrad and Meyer had touched a nerve. Their demonstration of current profitability did not demonstrate long-run viability of the slave system; Yasukichi Yasuba was able to fill that gap by showing that slave prices were regularly more than enough to finance rearing slaves for future sale or employment. Many others tested and refined these early results. As a system of organizing production, American slavery was found to have been thriving on the eve of the Civil War; the sources of that prosperity, however, needed deeper examination.
In Time on the Cross (1974), Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman not only reaffirmed the profitability and viability of Southern slavery, but they also made claims about the superior productivity of Southern versus Midwestern agriculture and about the relatively generous material comforts afforded to the slave population. Their book sparked a long-running controversy that extended beyond academia and prompted critical examinations and rebuttals by political and social historians and, above all, by their fellow cliometricians. A major critique was Reckoning with Slavery (by Paul David and others, 1976), as much a defense of cliometric method as a catalogue of what the authors saw as the method’s improper or incomplete application in Time on the Cross. Fogel subsequently published Without Consent or Contract (1989), a defense and extension of his and Engerman’s earlier work.
The remarkable antebellum prosperity of the Southern slave economy was followed by an equally remarkable relative decline in Southern per-capita income after the war. While the remainder of the American economy grew rapidly, the South stagnated, with a distinctively low-wage, low-productivity economy and a poorly educated labor force, both black and white. The next generation of cliometricians asked “Why?” Was it the legacy of the slave system, of the virtual absence of industrial development in the antebellum South, of post-Civil War Reconstruction and backlash, of continued reliance on cotton, of Jim Crow, or of racism and discrimination? Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch investigated share-tenancy, debt peonage and labor effort in maintaining cotton cultivation, using individual level data, some derived a la Parker and Gallman, from a sample of the manuscript U.S. Censuses. Gavin Wright focused on an effective separation of the Southern from the national labor market, and Robert Margo examined the region’s low level of educational investment and its consequences.
An entirely new line of investigation derived from the research on slavery, measuring the “biological standard of living” using anthropometric data. Richard Steckel’s paper on slave height profiles led directly to the discussion of “Anthropometric Indexes of Malnutrition” in Without Consent or Contract. In a corrective to the Fogel-Engerman interpretation of the slave diet, Steckel showed how stunted (and thus how poorly fed) slave children were before they came of working age. John Komlos discovered that heights (of West Point cadets) were declining even as American per capita income was rising in the years before the Civil War, what he called the “Antebellum Puzzle.” Elsewhere, Roderick Floud led a project employing anthropometric data from records of British military recruits, while Stephen Nicholas, Deborah Oxley and Steckel analyzed records for male and female convicts transported to Australia.
Industrialization and its new technologies in the U.S. long predate the Civil War. In writing about technological progress, economic historians had, before the 1960s, tended to concentrate on single industries or economies. Yet distinctive “national” technologies emerged in the early nineteenth century (e.g., contemporary British observers distinguished “The American System of Manufactures” from their own). Amid the early ferment of quantitative economic history in the United States, Hrothgar Habakkuk published American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions, a truly comparative study. It was 1962, when, as Paul David writes, “economic historians’ interests in Anglo-American technological divergences were suddenly raised from a quiet simmer to a furious boil by the publication of … Habakkuk’s now celebrated book on the subject.” Habakkuk expanded on an idea that the apparent labor-saving bias of American manufacturing techniques was due to land so abundant that American workers were paid (relative to other factors) much more than what their British counterparts received, but he did not resolve whether the bias was due to more machines per worker, better machines, or more inventiveness.
One strand of the debate over what Peter Temin called Habakkuk’s “labor-scarcity paradox” left to one side the question of “better machines.” It fell to Nathan Rosenberg and Paul David to explore the distinctive technological trajectories of different economies. Rosenberg pointed to the emergence of “technologically convergent” production processes and to the importance of very low relative materials costs in American manufacturing. Paul David reviewed the debate, beginning to formulate a theoretical approach to explain sources of technical change (and divergence). He argued that an economy’s trajectory of technological development is conditioned, perhaps only initially, by relative factor prices, but then by opportunities for further progress based on localized learning from, or constrained by, existing techniques and their histories. David developed the concept of “path dependence,” which is “a dynamic process whose evolution is governed by its own history.”
The first systematic cliometric debate involving European economic history was over an alleged British technological and economic failure in the late nineteenth century. The slower growth of income and exports, the loss of markets even in the Empire, and an “invasion” of foreign manufactures (many American) alarmed businessmen and policymakers alike and led to opposition to a half-century of British “Free Trade.” Who was to blame for loss of competitiveness? Although some scholars attributed Britain’s “climacteric” to the maturation of the technologies underpinning her success during the Industrial Revolution, others attributed it to “entrepreneurial failure” and cited the inability or refusal of British business leaders to adopt the best available technologies. Cliometricians argued, by and large, that British businessmen made their investment and production decisions in a sensible, economically rational fashion, given the constraints they faced; they had made the best of a bad situation. Subsequent research has demonstrated the problem to be more complex, and it is yet to be resolved.
Many results of the cliometrics revolution come from the application of theory and measurement in the service of history; a converse case comes from the macro economists. Monetarists, in particular, have placed economic history in the service of theory, prominently in analyzing the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, opened a discussion that has led to widespread, but not universal, acceptance among economists of a sophisticated version of the “quantity theory of money.” Their detailed examination of several episodes in American monetary development under varying institutional regimes allowed them to use a set of “natural experiments” to assess the economic impact of exogenous changes in the stock of money. The Friedman-Schwartz enterprise sought support for the general proposition that money is not simply a veil over real transactions – that money does matter. Their demonstration of that point for the Great Depression initiated an entire scholarly literature involving not only economic historians but also monetary and macro economists. Peter Temin was among the first of the economic historians to question their argument, in Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (1976). His answer was essentially “No,” stressing declines in consumer spending and in investment in the late 1920s as initiating factors and discounting money stock reductions for the continued downturn. In a later book, Lessons from the Great Depression (1989), Temin in effect recanted his earlier position, impelled by a good deal of further research, especially on international finance. The present consensus is that what Friedman and Schwartz call “The Great Contraction, 1929-1933” may have been initiated by real factors in the late 1920s, but it was faulty public policy and adherence to the Gold Standard that played major roles in turning an economic downturn into “The Great Depression.”
A broad new approach to economic change over time has emerged from the mind of Douglass North. Confronted in the later 1960s with European economic development in its variety and antiquity, North became dissatisfied with the limited modes of analysis that he had applied fruitfully to the American case and concluded that “we couldn’t make sense out of European economic history without explicitly modeling institutions, property rights, and government.” For that matter, making sense of a wider view of American economic history was similarly difficult, as exemplified in the Lance Davis and North venture, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (1971). The core of North’s model, conceptual rather than formal, is that, when changes in underlying circumstances alter the cost-benefit calculus of existing arrangements, new institutions will arise if there is a net benefit to be realized. Although their approach arose from dissatisfaction with the static nature of economic theory in the 1960s, North and his colleagues nonetheless followed what most other economists would do in arguing that optimal institutional forms will arise dynamically from an essentially profit-maximizing response to changes in incentives. As Davis and North were quick to admit, their effort was “a first (and very primitive) attempt” at formulating a theory of institutional change and applying that theory to American institutional development. North recognized the limitations of his early work on institutional change and has endeavored to develop a more subtle and articulated approach. In Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), North stresses again that modeling institutional change is less than straightforward, and he continues to examine the persistence of “institutions that provided incentives for stagnation and decline.”
Retrospect and Prospect
In the 1960s, when the first cliometricians began to group themselves into a distinct intellectual and social movement, buoyed by their revisionist achievements, they (at least many of them) thought they could use their scientific approach to re-write history. This hope may not have been a vain one, but it is yet to be realized. The best efforts of cliometricians have merged with those in other traditions to develop a rather different understanding of the economic past from views maintained half a century ago.
As economic history has evolved, so have the environs economic historians inhabit. In the Anglophone world, economic history – and cliometrics within it – burgeoned with the growth of higher education, but it has recently suffered the effects of retrenchment in that sector. Elsewhere, a new multi-lingual generation of enthusiastic economic historians and historical economists has arisen, with English as the language of international discourse. Both history and economics have been transformed by dissatisfaction with old verities and values, by adoption of new methods and points of view, and by posing new or revived questions. Economic history has been beneficiary of and contributor to such changes.
Although this entry focuses on the development of historical economics in the United States and the United Kingdom, we note that the cliometric approach has diffused well beyond their boundaries. In France the economist’s quantitative approach was fostered when Kuznets’s historical national accounts project recruited scholars in the 1950s to amass and organize the agricultural, output and population data available, in a new histoire quantitative. Still, that movement was overshadowed by the Annales school, whose histoire totale involved much data collection but limited economic analysis. Economic history of France, produced in the cliometric mode by scholars trained there, did not arrive in force until the mid-1980s. French cliometrics was first written by economic historians from (or trained in) North America or Britain; the Gallic cliometrics revolution occurred gradually, for “peculiarly French” institutional and ideological reasons. In Germany similar institutional barriers were partially breached in the 1960s with the arrival of a “turnkey” cliometrics operation in the form of an American-trained American scholar, Richard Tilly, who went from Wisconsin to Munster. Tilly was joined later by a few central Europeans who received American degrees, and all have since taught younger German cliometricians. Leading cliometric scholars from Italy, Spain and Portugal likewise received their post-graduate educations in Britain or America. The foremost Japanese cliometrician, Yasukichi Yasuba, received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, supervised by Simon Kuznets.
If cliometrics in and of continental Europe could trace its roots to North America and Britain, by the 1980s it had developed indigenous strength and identity. At the Tenth International Economic History Congress in Leuven, Belgium (1990), a new association of analytical economic historians was founded. Rejecting the use of “cliometrics” as descriptor, the participants endorsed the nascent European Historical Economics Society. Subsequently national associations and seminars have grown up under the umbrella of the EHES – for example, French historical economists have the Association Francaise de Cliometrie and a new international journal, Cliometrica, while the Portuguese and Spaniards have sponsored a series of “Iberometrics” Conferences.
Cliometrics has transformed itself over the past half-century, forging important links with other disciplines and continuing to broaden its compass, and interpreting “new” phenomena. They are showing, for example, that recent “globalization” has origins and manifestations going back half a millennium and, given the recent experience of the formerly Socialist “transitional” economies, they are showing that the deep historical roots of institutions, organizations, values and behavior in the developed economies cannot be duplicated by following simple formulae. Despite the presentism of contemporary society, economic history will continue to address essential questions of origins and consequences, and it seems likely that cliometricians will complement and sometimes lead their colleagues in providing the answers. Cliometrics is a well-established field of study and its practitioners continue to increase our understanding of how economies evolve.
Source Note: The bulk of this article is a condensed version of the introduction to Lyons, Cain, and Williamson, eds., Reflections on the Cliometrics Revolution: Conversations with Economic Historians (2008), copyright (c) The Cliometric Society, Inc., which receives the royalties; reproduced by permission. Readers should consult that book for a more complete presentation, notes, and a full bibliography.
Further Reading
Coats, A. W. “The Historical Context of the ‘New’ Economic History.” Journal of European Economic History 9, no. 1 (1980): 185-207.
“Cliometrics after 40 Years.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 87:2, (1997): 396-414 [commentary by Claudia Goldin, Avner Greif, James J. Heckman, John R. Meyer, and Douglass C. North].
Crafts, N. F. R. “Cliometrics, 1971-1986: A Survey.” Journal of Applied Econometrics 2, no. 3 (1987): 171-92.
Davis, Lance E., Jonathan R. T. Hughes and Duncan McDougall. American Economic History. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1961. [The first textbook of U.S. economic history to make systematic use of economic theory to organize the exposition. Second edition, 1965; third edition, 1969.]
Davis, Lance E., Jonathan R. T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter. “Aspects of Quantitative Research in Economic History.” _Journal of Economic History_ 20:4 (1960): 539-47 [in which “cliometrics” first appeared in print].
Drukker, J. W. The Revolution That Bit Its Own Tail: How Economic History Has Changed Our Ideas about Economic Growth. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2006.
Engerman, Stanley L. “Cliometrics.” In The Social Science Encyclopedia, second edition, edited by Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, 96-98. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Field, Alexander J. “The Future of Economic History.” In The Future of Economic History, edited by Alexander J. Field, 1-41. Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1987.
Fishlow, Albert, and Robert W. Fogel. “Quantitative Economic History: An Interim Evaluation. Past Trends and Present Tendencies.” Journal of Economic History 31, no. 1 (1971): 15-42.
Floud, Roderick. “Cliometrics.” In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, vol. 1, 452-54. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Goldin, Claudia. “Cliometrics and the Nobel.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 2 (1995): 191-208.
Grantham, George. “The French Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French Economic History.” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 3 (1997): 353-405.
Lamoreaux, Naomi R. “Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution.” In Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, edited by Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, 59-84. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998
Lyons, John S., Louis P Cain, and Samuel H. Williamson, eds. Reflections on the Cliometrics Revolution: Conversations with Economic Historians. New York: Routledge, 2008.
McCloskey, Donald [Deirdre] N. Econometric History. London: Macmillan, 1987
Parker, William, editor. Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960. [Volume 24 in Studies in Income and Wealth, in which many of the papers presented at the 1957 Williamstown conference appear.]
Tilly, Richard. “German Economic History and Cliometrics: A Selective Survey of Recent Tendencies.” European Review of Economic History 5, vol. 2 (2001): 151-87.
Whaples, Robert. “A Quantitative History of the Journal of Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 2 (1991): 289-301.
Williamson, Samuel H. “The History of Cliometrics.” In The Vital One: Essays in Honor of Jonathan R. T. Hughes, edited by Joel Mokyr, 15-31. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1991. [Research in Economic History, Supplement 6.]
Williamson, Samuel H., and Robert Whaples. “Cliometrics.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, vol. 1, edited by Joel Mokyr, 446-47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Wright, Gavin. “Economic History, Quantitative: United States.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 4108-14. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001.
Citation: Lyons, Cain and Williamson. “Cliometrics”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 27, 2009. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/cliometrics/