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Economics
Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, 5 Volume Set edited by Joel
Mokyr
(Oxford University Press) (Vol.
1,
2,
3,
4,
5) This accessible thorough reference work offers a good survey of the
history of human material culture, especially as organized labor and industry.
The reference is primarily oriented toward world history of economic activities.
It does not offer a history of economics as such nor does it encroach upon
social and natural history. For instance the impact of natural environments is
recognized but not from a ecological view of interdependence and change. What
were the economic roots of modern industrialism? Were labor unions ever
effective in raising workers' living standards? Did high levels of taxation in
the past normally lead to economic decline? These and similar questions
profoundly inform a wide range of intertwined social issues whose complexity,
scope, and depth become fully evident in the Encyclopedia. Due to the
interdisciplinary nature of the field, the Encyclopedia is divided not only by
chronological and geographic boundaries, but also by related subfields such as
agricultural history, demographic history, business history, and the histories
of technology, migration, and transportation. The articles, all written and
signed by international contributors, include scholars from
It is difficult to understand history or the conditions of
modern society without a strong grasp of the economic past. Time and again,
historic change is wrought by an underlying economic dynamic. For instance: what
were the economic roots of modern industrialism?; were resource scarcities a
positive element in stimulating technological change through the ages?; why were
the Malthusian predictions of overpopulation and starvation in the early 19th
century confounded?; were labour unions ever effective in raising workers'
living standards?; did high levels of taxation in the past normally lead to
economic decline?; what were the roots of economic imperialism and what effect
did it have on today's underdeveloped world?; and what were the effects of the
poor law reforms in Britain in the 1830s? These and similar questions profoundly
inform a wide range of intertwined social issues whose complexity, scope, and
depth should become fully evident in
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.
Unprecedented worldwide coverage and more than 875
authoritative articles written by the world’s most influential economic
historians make The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History a truly remarkable
work of scholarship—unparalleled in its discipline in scope and depth. Arranged
in alphabetical order letter by letter, there are also composite entries
gathering together discussions of similar or related topics under one headword.
For example, under the entry "Radio and Television Industry" the reader will
find three subentries: "Historical Overview," "Technological Change," and
"Industrial Organization and Regulation." A headnote listing the various
subentries introduces each composite entry. Five volumes feature articles on
concepts and definitions, countries and regions, institutions, historical events
and processes, and people. From
The contributors and editors for the most part write in
clear language with a minimum of technical vocabulary. The articles give
important terms and titles in their original languages, with English
translations when needed. A selective bibliography at the end of each article
directs the reader who wishes to pursue a topic in greater detail to primary
sources, the most useful works in English, and the most important scholarly
works in any language.
Entries are authoritative and accessible, designed for use
by both specialists and general readers. No other reference work covers economic
history across the globe—from prehistoric times to the present—in such depth.
To guide readers from one article to related discussions
elsewhere in the Encyclopedia, end-references appear at the end of many
articles. Blind entries direct the user from an alternate form of an entry term
to the entry itself. For example, the blind entry for "Coinage" tells the reader
to look under "Money and Coinage." The Encyclopedia includes approximately 425
photographs and seventeen maps.
Volume 5 contains the topical outline of articles, a
listing of Internet sites related to economic history, the directory of
contributors, and the index. Readers interested in finding all the articles on a
particular subject (e.g., natural resources and the environment or labor) may
consult the topical outline, which shows how articles relate to one another and
to the overall design of the Encyclopedia; the outline also appears at the
beginning of volume 1. The list of Internet sites directs the reader to sites
where more information on selected articles in the Encyclopedia can be found.
The comprehensive index lists all the topics covered in the Encyclopedia,
including those that are not headwords themselves.
An essential addition to all collections, the Encyclopedia
features:
- 875+
signed articles by 800+ renowned international experts
- 500
b/w illustrations that reinforce article concepts
-
Bibliographies for each article and extensive cross-references
- A
directory of contributors, topical outline of contents. includes
bibliographical references and index.
Excerpt: Economic history is much like a sparsely populated
country: its inhabitants are small in number compared to its much larger
neighbors in adjoining and related fields. The cultivators of its rocky soil are
few and the area is vast: economic history encompasses all the material aspects
of human existence through and before written history, describing a myriad of
diverse forms of economic activity and organization. The "mainstream" fields of
economics such as theory and applied microeconomics and the many fields and
subfields of the history profession attract far more scholars than economic
history. But as is true for many a small country, there are some of us who have
elected to dwell there and love it dearly, and they would never live anywhere
else. They feel its intellectual excitement, its many challenges, its sense of
community, and its ability to attract young scholars despite the often hard and
frustrating research involved.
To pursue
the metaphor a bit further, this country could be likened to what economists
like to call a "small open economy." Economic history has never been and should
never be anything like a closed field in which practitioners converse mostly
with one another. Instead, it stands at a busy intersection of history and the
social sciences, where economists, political scientists, sociologists,
anthropologists, demographers, and historians come and go. While the field has
had its strongest intellectual and institutional roots in history and economics,
it has always blithely ignored the artificial boundaries between academic
disciplines. Economic historians, by the very nature of their field, ask
questions that require a bewildering array of diverse specialists. The power and
the glory of the discipline has always been its willingness to venture out far
afield, to bring to the worlds of the economist and the historian insights and
information originating in the netherworlds of engineers, physicians,
agronomists, biologists, and geographers, as well as from the more lofty spheres
of political philosophy, social thought, and game theory. If ever there was a
bunch of eclectic intellectuals who will go almost anywhere to find their
models, their evidence, and their inspiration, economic historians are it.
The need
for such an interdisciplinary approach is related to the large size of the
territory covered by this small field. Economic history has at least three
dimensions it needs to span. First, it covers all of history, from the very
first days of written records and before, using archaeological and even
paleontological evidence, to recent statistical data and modern time series.
Second, its ambitions have always been explicitly global and international.
While the evidence that economic historians use is not spread evenly and
uniformly over the planet, there has always been a tacit assumption that every
economy and every society has an interesting story to tell. If this story can be
illustrated in detail with statistical data and firsthand illustrations, all
the better. If not, however, economic historians will work with whatever
evidence can be found, reconstructing the past from the shards and debris that
time has forgotten to sweep away. The more sparse the evidence, the more
tantalizing of synthesis, there is no room for such teleological approaches, and
we have made an effort to avoid such pitfalls. All the same, this is not to deny
the economic achievements that the industrialized West has made in the past two
centuries in terms of affecting the standard of living in a considerable (and
expanding) part of humankind. Without confusing material well-being and comforts
with "happiness," "social harmony," "economic freedom," or any other
encompassing measure of well-being, no serious work in economics can deny that
the achievements of the past two centuries are as real and as momentous as they
are incomplete and costly. In emphasizing the real accomplishments in material
economic welfare, from reduced infant mortality and increased stature to an
ever-expanding access to leisure, arts, and high-quality food and clothing, any
work in economic history must acknowledge the irreversible impact that modern
economic growth has had on the nature of the human condition-even if we confine
it largely to the material side. Perhaps it is too simple and too confining to
speak of economic Progress with a capital P, as if we could really assess the
trend in economic change as a favorable development, the many horrors of the
twentieth century notwithstanding. Yet surely we can, to cite the historian
Robert Darnton in a famous essay, speak of "progress" with a small p, material
and commercial. It consisted of small, incremental, local but real victories in
the eternal struggle of humanity against disease, starvation, discomfort, infant
mortality, malnutrition, bad housing, premature aging, and mind-numbing,
backbreaking, and dangerous work that machines eventually took over in large
part. The processes we may call-in the absence of a better term---"economic
modernization" can be measured in part as rising productivity. Better economic
organization and improved technology led to growing economic capabilities,
teasing out more product per unit of input. It led to the gradual disappearance
of the boredom and stupefying monotonousness of work and production in earlier
times. It is the function of economic history to reveal the truth about the
so-called good old times before the Industrial Revolution, just as it is its
duty to fully display the costs of urbanization, the frustrations of
commercialization and mass consumption, the horrors that modern technology and
mass production can inflict during times of war, and the ambivalent impact that
technological change has had on the majority of humanity who happened to live
outside the industrialized world. Economic historians need to show the full
effect of the many fluctuations and cycles in economic activity, the setbacks
during wars and depressions, and the disruptions caused by inflation,
unemployment, ill-conceived or evil economic policies, and the often ghastly
social and economic experiments that all mark the modern era.
Economic
history, in any event, deals with much more than just "how rich" a society was
and how its riches were distributed. A great deal of research has been carried
out on how the economic matrix of production and exchange functioned in the
human past. What kind of contracts existed and how were property rights defined
and enforced, how did society provide for public goods, how did it take care of
its poor and unfortunate? Economic history needs to show how people allocated
their time between work and leisure, their resources between consumption and
investment, how they transferred assets between generations through inheritance
practices. Every economy, moreover, rested its production system on certain
bodies of skills and knowledge, yet because these skills resided primarily in
the perishable human mind, mechanisms needed to be found to educate the young
and, if possible, to expand the knowledge base. Similarly, in each society that
ever was, there is an ever-present tension between those who tried to make their
living by producing goods and services, either by the patient toil of farmers or
the more entrepreneurial activities of merchants and bankers, and those who
sought their riches through redistribution from one group to another, whether
through violence, taxes, forced exclusions, or fraud. The prevalence of such
opportunistic or "rent-seeking" behavior depended on the cultural beliefs and
norms of each society, but also on the kind of incentive structures and
distribution of political power prevailing in the institutions of each economy.
Much of the material in this Encyclopedia surveys, in one form or another, these
essential details from a historical perspective.
One
institution to which economic historians have paid much attention in recent
years is the family. It is now well understood that research in the economic
history of the family is a legitimate field, and that the economics of
population change cannot be understood without describing the details of the
dynamics of the family: at what age did people get married, what kind of
resources were exchanged and pledged before and during the marriage, how did the
family allocate resources between man, woman, children, and other members, and
how were demographic decisions made? In view of the enormous amount of evidence
accumulated by demographic historians, we are much better informed about these
pivotal developments in human history. A set of very different institutions, but
equally central to the understanding of our past, are those that made
accumulation and exchange possible: money, credit, contracts, insurance, law
enforcement, and institutions that engendered trust and reciprocity and made
local and long-distance trade possible. These institutions include those that
lubricated the process of exchange: the emergence of coins and other means of
exchange, the use of letters of credit, bills of exchange, and the emergence of
financial institutions. We cover the full range of these institutions, from
medieval contracts to modern exchange rates, from bimetalism to the working of
the gold standard and post-1945 international monetary system. These topics have
been given considerable space because they are of interest to students and
scholars, and because they have been the subjects of a great deal of research.
In the end economic history is largely what economic historians do.
Outside the
social interactions in markets and other institutions, there are the
interactions between people and their environment-though a precise boundary is,
of course, hard to draw. Yet we have included a great deal of information on the
physical environment and human biology, since economic activity and well-being
by definition depends on the number of people around, as well as on their
health and longevity. To understand that, economic historians have looked in the
past at the causes and severity of diseases, the tendency of women to nurse
their babies, the connection between nutrition and health, changes in climate
and rainfall, pest and flood control, and many similar variables. Finally, we
have a substantial number of entries about individuals, men and women, who for
one reason or another are of importance as economic historians, entrepreneurs,
inventors, financiers, and scholars. The entries are followed by brief
bibliographies and listings of Internet sites that will allow interested readers
to explore the topics further. The Encyclopedia in its entirety will be made
available electronically online in 2004 through institutional subscriptions to
its online site.
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