by Eric Rauchway

Darrin McMahon asks "about the fortunes of economic history and of the understanding (or not) of economics by historians." As I believe the only economist on the Open U contributor list is Lawrence Summers, whose response to this query may not come quickly, I will offer my 2 cents. My university, UC Davis, hosts one of the best collections of economic historians in the country: Gregory Clark, Peter Lindert, Alan Olmstead, and Alan M. Taylor. I can say this without immodesty, because not one of them is in my department--the History Department--they're all economists. Nor is this atypical. Off the top of my head--this is not a comprehensive list--I can name sharp scholars of the economics of the Great Depression (Christina Romer, Brad DeLong; Ben Bernanke before he became Fed chair), nineteenth-century globalization (Jeffrey Williamson, Lance Edwin Davis), railroads (Robert Fogel), immigration and internal migration (Claudia Goldin, Joseph P. Ferrie), slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction (Fogel, Goldin, Stanley Engerman, Richard Sutch, Gavin Wright), who all work outside history departments, as indeed do most of the authors who publish in the Journal of Economic History. You can still find economic historians in history departments--Sutch's coauthor Roger L. Ransom; Robin L. Einhorn, William R. Summerhill, Niall Ferguson--but they're no longer so thick on the ground as once they were. What happened? Partly, technical innovations in economic methods made it difficult for the untrained to understand the new economic history. As C. Vann Woodward wrote when Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross came out, ordinary historians felt "coerced by references to 'vast research effort involving thousands of man and computer hours' and inconceivable mountains of statistical data." As Peter Novick writes in his indispensable That Noble Dream, the increasing isolation of economic history was one of a series of "centrifugal forces" pushing the various subfields of history away from one another, and pushing some entirely out of history departments altogether. Economic history might have moved out of history departments for market reasons as well. If, to pursue economic history, you had to master technical skills that would make you eligible for an appointment in an economics department, you would probably prefer that to an appointment in a history department: economists get paid more because they're eligible for employment in government and business as well as universities. Is this split a Bad Thing? Well, if traditional historians continue to keep abreast of changes in economic history relevant to their work and vice versa, so they can incorporate it into their teaching and scholarship, then it's probably okay.