Lessons from a fight between economists and historians

jgoodguy

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Lessons from a fight between economists and historians Emphasis mine.
Because slavery drove secession and formed much of the politics of the Civil War until Reconstruction, this thread is in Secession and Politics.

There seems to be a tug of war over Capitalism between economists and historians.

IN A fascinating new piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry examines an intense, ongoing debate between historians and economists on the role American slavery played in the industrial revolution. A number of recent books by historians (including Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told, with which The Economist has an unfortunate history) argue that growth in output in American cotton, made possible by America's slave economy (and rising brutality within it), was crucial in fostering the nascent industrial revolution, which had its beginnings in the mechanisation of textile industries. The conclusions of these historians stand in stark contrast to the general view among economists and economic historians, that in the absence of slavery, industrialisation would have occurred more or less as it actually did.

When economists gripe about historians retreating from economics, historians offer a counternarrative: "The problem is the economists left history for statistical model building," says Eric Foner, a historian of 19th-century America at Columbia University. "History for them is just a source of numbers, a source of data to throw into their equations." Foner considers counterfactuals absurd. A historian’s job is not to speculate about alternative universes, he says. It’s to figure out what happened and why. And, in the history that actually took place, cotton was extremely important in the Industrial Revolution.

Reading Mr Foner's remarks, one wants to respond: But how do you know? How do you know cotton was extremely important to industrialisation if you don't consider the counterfactual? Mr Foner is describing a history of description rather than a history of explanation. Don't get me wrong; description is a critical part of the work of the historian. Before we can venture to explain why something happened we must have some sense of what happened. But it is flatly unscientific to reckon that description is explanation.


 
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