[G&A pg 57] There are few brighter examples of reductionism and its opposite than the debates over inequality in Victorian Britain… The Victorian period has been researched and written about in both History and Economics departments as a major concentration of the field. Yet the two fields could not disagree more about what happened. Each measures a single index or perhaps compares to indices of well-being: criminality and height; education and wealth at death; migration and wages. Based upon these data, the economists conclude that the nineteenth century led to gains in equality, opportunity, and nutrition.

[pg 59] To take a more concrete example, there is the way that historians and economists both understand nutrition in the British Industrial Revolution. Ten years earlier, American economists performed a study of the nutrition of poor people over the course of the nineteenth century, as documented in the height and weight of individuals when first admitted to prison. The evidence seemed to suggest that poor people were gaining in nutrition over the century – in general, prisoners in 1867 were nutritionally better off than prisoners in 1812. 60

60 Johnson and Nicholas, ‘Male and Female Living Standards in England and Wales, 1812–1867’, [The Economic History Review 48 (1995)], 470–81.

[Screenshot of note 60 from original PDF version]

[G&A pg 58] Among economic historians dealing with inequality over the nineteenth century, a surprising number conclude that nineteenth-century industrialisation resulted in more nutrition for the poor, while twentieth-century ‘socialism’ resulted in higher taxes and stagnating social opportunity.54 According to economists, these numbers demonstrate conclusively that capitalism banished inequality during the nineteenth century, and could do so again.

54 Paul Johnson and Stephen Nicholas, ‘Male and Female Living Standards in England and Wales, 1812–1867: Evidence from Criminal Height Records’, The Economic History Review 48 (1995), 470–81; Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2002); Jason Long, ‘Rural–Urban Migration and Socioeconomic Mobility in Victorian Britain’, The Journal of Economic History 65 (2005), 1–35; Jason Long, ‘The Surprising Social Mobility of Victorian Britain’, European Review of Economic History 17 (2013), 1–23.

[Screenshot of note 54 from original PDF version]

[G&A pg 59] Yet data are abused when they are examined as a single facet of historical experience. The data from economics tends to take one aspect of economic experience – wages, the price of grain, or height – and interpret them as a proxy for freedom, democracy, or happiness.59

59 Johnson and Nicholas, ‘Male and Female Living Standards in England and Wales, 1812–1867’, 470–81; Robert J. Barro, ‘Democracy and Growth’, Journal of Economic Growth 1 (1996), 1–27; Jakob B. Madsen, James B. Ang, and Rajabrata Banerjee, ‘Four Centuries of British Economic Growth: The Roles of Technology and Population’, Journal of Economic Growth 15 (2010), 263–90; Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Numerare Est Errare: Agricultural Output and Food Supply in England Before and During the Industrial Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History 73 (2013), 1132–63.

[G&A pg 61] But a decade later, some British economists [Horrell et al.] reconsidered the data [used by the much-abused Johnson & Nicholas], having spent some time reading up on British social history. The data confirmed, counter to the original thesis, that the weight of working-class women actually went down over the course of the Industrial Revolution… When first admitted to prison, most of the working-class women in English prisons were so thin and frail that they actually gained weight on the few cups of meagre gruel regulated by national authorities to deter lazy paupers from seeking welfare at houses of correction.61

…Without a sensitivity to gender and age, the kind of sensitivity that the Cambridge economist Sara Horrell calls ‘the wonderful usefulness of history’ and attributes to her reading of historians of the Short Past, the evidence they looked at merely reinforced the prejudices of their field that Victorian industrialisation produced taller, better-fed proletarians.62

61 Sara Horrell, David Meredith, and Deborah Oxley, ‘Measuring Misery: Body Mass, Ageing and Gender Inequality in Victorian London’, Explorations in Economic History 46 (2009), 93–119; Sébastien Rioux, ‘Capitalism and the Production of Uneven Bodies: Women, Motherhood and Food Distribution in Britain c. 1850–1914’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, (2014): doi:10.1111/tran.12063.

According to Horrell et al. 2009, in their very large sample of prisoners, women gained weight in prison, but men generally lost, suggesting that life outside prison was harder for lower-class women than for men. But other representations by Guldi’s are simply incorrect. (a) Horrell et al. were not countering poor Johnson & Nicholas, for the latter also reported (thankless) evidence of greater “nutritional insult” for women than for men !!! (b) Horrell et al. were not “reconsidering” the data from the punching bags J & N, because the two studies used completely different prison populations and different time periods ! (c) The first page of Horrell et al. summarises the previous theoretical and empirical findings on the different experiences of men and women during the Industrial Revolution — completely contrary to Guldi’s claim that disciplinary prejudices had prevented economic historians from noticing ! (d) Sara Horrell does not attribute her “sensitivity” to reading the “historians of the Short Past”. That’s just made up by Guldi. In her review (Horrell 2003) of The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Horrell appropriates the phrase “the wonderful usefulness of history” from Deirdre McCloskey which is a very general praise of historical information.

By the way, I should add, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1, obliterates Guldi’s claim that economic historians are uniformly cheerful about Victorian income inequality :

When Guldi cites an actual wage optimist, she gets the crucial detail all wrong ! 

Guldi has completely garbled the findings of Hoffman et al. (three of whom are from University of California-Davis, only one from Caltech). They argue inequality declined after 1800, not after 1870. In fact by 1870, most of the decline was complete. That point alone completely obviates Guldi’s “contrasting interpretation” involving Manchester trades unions. Contra Guldi, Hoffman et al. also do not attribute the fall in inequality after 1800 entirely or perhaps even primarily to globalisation (i.e., falling prices of grain imported from North America and the Russian Empire). They also cite industrialisation. That’s obvious from comparing the difference in nominal and real inequality over time. From page 342 of Hoffman et al. :

The changes in inequality over time obviously can’t be explained exclusively by the difference in real and nominal values of inequality (i.e., by purchasing power), and Hoffman et al. do not claim otherwise. The paper is primarily about the period 1500-1800, when, the authors argue, the rising prices of staple goods for the poor worsened income inequality for the lower classes in real terms.

[G&A pg 27] The institutions of international development looked to history to supply a roadmap to freedom, independence, economic growth, and reciprocal peacemaking between the nations of the world. [Many examples follow.] By the 1960s, economic historians like David Landes had retooled the study of the history of the Industrial Revolution in direct support of Green Revolution policies, promising a future of abundant riches on the back of a history of constant invention.43

43 David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London, 1969); William J. Ashworth, ‘The British Industrial Revolution and the Ideological Revolution: Science, Neoliberalism and History’, History of Science (2014): doi: 10.1177/0073275314529860.

[G&A pg 63] To counter the claims of climate scientists about rising CO2 and a changing climate that merited immediate action, some economists proposed their own version of past and future, one that emphasised continuous technological innovation and economic growth since 1700, and proposed that no matter what dangers had recently been revealed by climate science, the invisible hand of the market would take care of them.9 Neither side really substantiated their claims by taking into account the others. Instead, both sides had mutually irreconcilable models of the past based on limited data of their own.

9 Ilan Noy, ‘The Macroeconomic Consequences of Disasters’, Journal of Development Economics 88 (2009), 221–31; Servaas Storm, ‘Capitalism and Climate Change: Can the Invisible Hand Adjust the Natural Thermostat?’, Development and Change 40 (2009), 1011–38; Noy and Aekkanush Nualsri, ‘Fiscal Storms: Public Spending and Revenues in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters’, Environment and Development Economics 16 (2011), 113–28; Indur M. Goklany, Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY, 2012): http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2225298

[Screenshot of note 9 from original PDF version]

[G&A pg 66] Economists like Anil Markandya have used historical thinking to cut the Gordian knot of growth vs ecology. Markandya revisited questions of environmental regulation with new data gathered over a century and a half from the experience of regulation in Britain. His conclusion was that Britain had started regulating sulphur dioxide and other contaminants as early as 1821, all ‘without any serious impact on GDP per capita’.17 Historical data like Markandya’s have proved capable of refuting early economic doctrine about the trade-offs between innovation and ecology.18

17 Anil Markandya, ‘Can Climate Change Be Reversed under Capitalism?’, Development and Change 40 (2009), 1141.

18 Kenneth Arrow et al., ‘Economic Growth, Carrying Capacity, and the Environment’, Ecological Economics15 (1995), 91–5; David I.Stern and Michael S. Common, ‘Is There an Environmental Kuznets Curve for Sulfur?’, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 41 (2001), 162–78.

[Screenshot of note 18 from original PDF version]

[G&A pp 66-67] Some of that work confirms that the West has been on a long path to environmental exhaustion, moving from one energy source to another, generation by generation, a process that helped to give rise to the modern nation-state, at the time a form of ‘international government’ of unprecedented size and strength. That was the answer that historian Paul Warde has now provided to a starting question of striking relevance – how was it that early-modern Europe had survived an ecological crisis of unprecedented scale? – required him to invent a new way of doing history, essentially one that required modelling big data over three centuries of information in obscure archives. Over the course of years, travelling from small town to small town, Warde began adding up all of the illegal infractions that happen over centuries, relating them to climate events, and judging how our ancestors found a way out. In this account, new forms of governance become important in reaction to environmental exhaustion, at times when fighting over a collapsing ecosystem results in anarchy that only a new form of government can resolve. 19

19 Historians of Germany have documented a crisis in wood that spread through early-modern Europe and propelled the search for new colonies with unfelled timber to exploit, and later coal and oil to burn. Their work has involved examining the court records of dozens of local vicinities across Germany, documenting when and under what conditions peasants received the maximum punishment possible for chopping down trees that were not their own. Paul Warde, ‘Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c. 1450–1850’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), 28–57; Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2006). More generally, see Astrid Kander, Paolo Manamina and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 2014).

[G&A pg 70] Histories of how ruling powers in the West employed expert civil engineers, foresters, and agronomists to unilaterally discount the wisdom of local peoples managing their land have stressed the way that capitalism, the nation-state, and rule by landlords are directly related to the environmental destruction that characterises the last two hundred years of the Anthropocene. Evidence of the rise of the doctrine of ‘improvement’ in Enlightenment Europe give us a hint of way new ideas about class and racial superiority, not merely economic strategising, tipped the sudden accumulation of power into the hands of a few landlords at the dawn of the industrial age, leading to a new ideology that wedded power to the exploitation of the environment.30

30 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, 2013).

[Screenshot of note 30 from original PDF version]

Overall, according to a standard account, the areas of western Europe that practiced the new husbandry in 1800 were not much more numerous than they were in 1600—the technological “agricultural revolution” was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon.235 There is no remotely comparable example in China of custom or law delaying the spread of the best known agricultural practices on such a massive scale.236

Other improvements were also foregone because of European land laws. Both the draining of marshes and the irrigation of existing farm land in eighteenth-century France were greatly retarded by customary rules and legal procedures that made it almost impossible to buy off those threatened by such improvements—even where it would have been very profitable to do so. It took the Revolution to abolish the privileges and simplify the procedures involved.

[G&A pg 109] : We live in an age where big data seem to suggest that we are locked into our history, our path dependent on larger structures that arrived before we did. For example, ‘Women and the Plough’, an economics article in a prestigious journal, tells us that modern gender roles have structured our genes and our preferences since the institution of agriculture.56

[Screenshot of above passage from original PDF version.]

56 Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn, ‘On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (2013), 469–530.

Edit 14 Nov 2014 : Several people have complained that I single out Guldi even though the book is co-authored. My rationale is simply that, based on the references, the interests, and the emphases displayed in the book, as well as previous works of both authors, she must have written most of The History Manifesto and Armitage is mostly attaching his prestige name as secondary author. PS: A precursor to The History Manifesto was this article [Edit 15-04-2015: this is the earlier draft version I had read] which appeared [sic] in Annales. In that piece Armitage’s name appears first, and the text itself seems more weighted toward intellectual history. It’s also relatively light on the notes. The book, however, has got a much greater orientation toward economics, economic/social history, especially as pertaining to Britain in the 19th century, the environment, “utopian” activism, land movements, etc., all areas of specialisation for Guldi. So I believe she was largely responsible for the dilation of the article into the book, including the fulsome footnote-packing. As it turns out, all the references whose use in The History Manifesto that I criticise above, were absent in the Annales article, except for the reference to David Landes

Edit #2 : Recently, at Columbia, Jo Guldi stated quite explicitly that The History Manifesto is “an attack on the discipline of economics”:

Edit 18 March 2015: I have just learnt that at least seven of the notes in both the HTML and PDF versions of The History Manifesto have been altered in order to eliminate or modify references highlighted above. Where appropriate I have linked to screenshots of the original references from the originally published PDF version. Edit 23 March 2015: Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler have issued a statement to the same effect. Also, I’ve compiled a list of the changes I know about in a PDF document. Edit 30 March 2015: Cambridge University Press has posted a revision notice for The History Manifesto.