Bridging Histories: Exploring the Intersection of Economics and Social Dynamic
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History is about individuals; economic history is about groups of people. It’s an over-simplification, but one that encapsulates why history is classified as part of the humanities, economic history as a social science. Both can be exciting and interact; the story of Chinggis Khan is part of the history of Mongolian hordes sweeping across Asia. The actions and motives of a single person operate within, and may influence, the group of which they are a part.
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In dealing with groups of people, we need to describe their collective behaviour. That means assessing the average of the group and the variation around it. This is alien to many historians for good reason: it doesn’t make much sense to talk about the average pope. But it makes a lot of sense to describe the average age at which people get married, because that has changed so much even in recent years, or to explain average income at different times in the past. To do this we have to use statistics and theory.
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These words cause some historians to recoil. But statistics are just a method, not an end in themselves. They are no more difficult to understand than medieval handwriting or deciphering ancient DNA; once they’ve been learnt, they seem easy. Economic theory is no harder than political theory and both have their place in understanding the past. However, both statistics and economic theory need clear explanation; economic historians need to avoid jargon and mustn’t assume that what comes easily to them will make sense to their audience. As economic history has become increasingly dominated by economists, their mathematical bias has resulted in what can often appear a reduction of history to numbers. Economics-trained economic historians have spent the last 20 years striking grand historical quantitative comparisons across huge stretches of time and place, [for example] the comparisons of wages across Europe from medieval times through to the Industrial Revolution, now the subject of a great debate…
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But with breadth inevitably comes a lack of depth... That does not, however, mean that we must give up on cross-country or cross-time comparisons; the historian who aims for depth – and the one who aims for breadth – are complementary, not competing. And, just because data from the past is imperfect (and cannot capture everything), doesn’t mean that we should completely abandon quantification; it just means we must be careful to take it with a pinch of salt – and to be more reverential to the archives…
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Economic historians and historians in general share a common enemy: economics. There is a long-standing tendency to think of ‘the economy’ as a detached yet volatile force that has shaped people’s lives throughout history. This impersonal approach results from the desire to isolate and assess economic developments in a rational way. Yet, that process in itself limits the appeal of economic history by detaching it from the real-life experiences of individuals and communities. In other words, economics is one of the principal reasons for economic history’s lacklustre reputation. If instead those real-life experiences are placed at the centre, the subject has the potential to come to life. It is a way to make sense of how people of the past negotiated with the material world around them, including, it should be stressed, other people; hence, the common pairing of economic and social history.
