Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:3 (Winter, 2018), 295–312.

Herbert S. Klein The “Historical Turn” in the Social Sciences The first professional societies in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, understood history to be closely associated with the other social sciences. Even in the mid-twentieth century, history was still grouped with the other social sciences, along with eco- nomics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. But in the past few decades, history and anthropology in the United States (though not necessarily in other countries) have moved away from the social sciences to ally themselves with the humanities— paradoxically, just when the other social sciences are becoming more committed to historical research. Until recently, historians read and interacted with the other social sciences on a systematic basis, working on themes that today are generally the exclusive concern of the other social sciences. The introduction of computers has made quantitative analysis more important in the social sciences as well as in history; studies of this kind flowed naturally from earlier work rooted in economic and social history throughout Europe and North America. Begin- ning in 1980, however, historians have become more interested in cultural studies, the so-called “cultural turn” in history. Part of the reason was a rejection of quantitative analysis, soon followed by a progressive distancing from the other social sciences, even by scholars supposedly trying to answer questions in economic history. As Mihm recently wrote in the American Historical Review, “For scholars trained in cultural history, the phrase economic history implies a faith in quantification and ‘data’ that strikes them as naïve.

Herbert S. Klein is Gouveneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University; Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution; and curator of the Latin America collection in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University. He is the author of “The First Americans: The Current Debate,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVI (2016), 543–561; with Francisco Vidal Luna, Brazil 1964–1985: The Military Regimes of Latin America in the Cold War (New Haven, 2017). The author thanks Donald Treiman, Stanley Engerman, Paul Hoffman, Marcello Carmagnani, James Robinson, César Ayala, Gail Treiner, Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, and Grant Miller for helpful suggestions and comments on initial drafts of this article. An earlier version was given as the 2017 Ervin Federik Kalb Lecture in History at Rice University. © 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_01159

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 296 | HERBERT S. KLEIN Political economy may be viewed by social historians as either too obsessed with high-level policy making and politics, or insufficiently attentive to questions of agency, much less historical actors other than white men.”1 This hostility toward economics is also amply demonstrated in recent studies of a new historical school called “Capitalism and Slavery.” Although concerned with basic economic issues, these studies make only a partial and incomplete effort to provide sys- tematic quantitative analysis. More importantly, they ignore most of the classic studies by economists about African slavery in the Americas. Thus, it is no surprise that two senior historians have called on their profession to ignore economics entirely and create their own type of economic history.2 Much of this increasing disdain of historians for the social sci- ences derives from the publication of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross in 1974. The North American historical profession first seemed overwhelmed by their analysis, but eventually, many his- torians took the rigorous criticism that economists and historians

1 For a European and North American program of the 1930s to generate historical price series, see Arthur H. Cole and Ruth Crandall, “The International Scientific Committee on Price History,” Journal of Economic History, XXIV (1964), 381–388; for an evaluation of the primary research of Earl Hamilton’s Spanish Price series, Ernesto López Losa, “The Legacy of Earl J. Hamilton: New Data for the Study Of Prices in Spain, 1650–1800,” Investigaciones de Historia Económica—Economic History Research, IX (2013), 75–87; for the French “Quantitative History” of the 1930s, Pierre Chaunu, “Les dépassements de l’histoire quantitative: retrospec- tive et perspective,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, VIII (1972), 647–685; for the rejection of the new cultural history, James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review, CXVII (2012), 746–771; Stephen Mihm (with Sven Beckert et al.), “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History,CI (2014), 512. 2 The three major works about African slavery are Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (New York, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, Mass., 2013). As Wright noted, “In the 1960s and 70s, dominion over economic history was vigorously contested between historians and economists. The outcome was decisive victory for the economics side, but at the cost of virtual extinction of economic history in history departments. A delayed consequence of this disciplinary separation has been the rise of movement in recent years to promote the ‘history of capitalism,’ largely in isolation from economics.” See Gavin Wright, “Review of Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom,” Journal of Economic Literature, LII (2014.), 27. For a review of Baptist’s book by several economists (John E. Murray, Alan L. Olmstead, Trevon D. Logan, Jonathan B. Pritchett, and Peter L. Rousseau), see Journal of Economic History, LXXV (2015), 919–931. Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy, “The Fall and Rise of Economic History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2015, available at https://www.mail-archive.com/ [email protected]/msg37633.html.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 297 leveled against the book as proof that quantitative analysis was essentially worthless. Yet, although critics had challenged the data and the quantitative results, none of them had suggested that using numbers per se was ahistorical or politically conservative. None- theless, the negative reaction to Time on the Cross among leading U.S. historians heralded a steady decline in systematic quantitative analysis within certain fields and even encouraged an outright rejection of quantitative studies as a tool of historical research.3 This situation has led to a growing lack of interest in the other social sciences among historians at the very time when the social sci- ences were becoming more historically oriented. A number of original and interesting fields of study have emerged within the discipline of history recently, many of them worthy of respect for their innovative methodologies. But North American historians still show hostility for any kind of quantitative and comparative work that does not fitinto these new styles and ideologies, especially in the field of social history. Although European pioneers in these new historical trends do not unilaterally see any inherent conflict between macro- or micro-history (in Ginzburg’sterms,“serial history and individual biography”), North American cultural historians are reluctant to relate individual experi- ence to the larger world that they inhabit; such a strategy would re- quire an explanation of the universality or the uniqueness of the individuals in question. This rejection of quantitative evaluation marks a good deal of the current cultural history. Moreover, the overwhelm- ing concentration of the profession in this new type of cultural history has not only reduced work in traditional social history; it has also de- pressed work in numerous other traditional historical fields, from economic and political history to diplomatic history.4

3 Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on The Cross: The Economics of Amer- ican Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), 2v. Many historians date the 1970s as a watershed in historical studies, when quantitative analysis was summarily rejected as a tool of historical research. Accord- ing to William Sewell, during the 1960s and 1970s, “some historians adopted the positivist lan- guage that dominated sociology, political science, and economics,” but during the 1980s and 1990s, “many historians turned from social to cultural history and from positivistic to interpretive modes of thought” (“AHR Conversations, Explaining Historical Change; or, the Lost History of Causes,” American Historical Review CXX [2015], 1380). Cook, “The Kids Are All Right,” ob- served that some of the new cultural historians “described their turns as sparked by a growing crisis (e.g., within the quantitative social history of the 1960s and 1970s)” (756). 4 Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry, XX (1993), 22. For the debate about what the European pioneers called serial history and the application of advanced statistical analysis to historical data, see the exchange between

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 298 | HERBERT S. KLEIN This turning of the profession toward the humanities is occur- ring just as the other social sciences are becoming ever more deeply committed to historical themes. Barely a half century ago, when interdisciplinary-minded historians were far more committed to serious research in economic, political, social, and demographic history, the social sciences demonstated little interest in historical questions. In this respect, economics has undergone the greatest change. Mainline economists now do work that used to be the province of economic historians. Today, leading economists rou- tinely evince a deeper understanding of historical processes, involv- ing such themes as the economic effect of institutions, the influence of culture on markets, and even the relevance of weather and religion to an economy, along with the traditional themes of factors of production and organization of markets in different historical epochs.5 The world economic crisis of 2008 has also revived interest in the evolution of market imbalances. As Piketty famously argued, economics without history is not a science. His arguments have attracted heated debate among numerous economists, especially regarding the escalation of inequality in the industrial world and its relationship to capitalism. These themes coincide with an ex- pressed need for more empirical research in economics to test the validity of models. Most of the data available for such economic analysis is historical.6

Pierre Chaunu, “Histoire quantitative ou histoire sérielle,” Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, II (1964), 165–176, and Jean Marczewski, “Quelques observations sur l’article de Monsieur Chaunu,” ibid., 177–180. For the major decline of political history in American universities, see Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History?” New York Times, 29 Aug. 2016, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/opinion/why-did- we-stop-teaching-political-history.html. 5 For analysis of the return of history articles to mainstream economics journals, see Ran Abramitzky, “Economics and the Modern Economic Historian,” Journal of Economic History LXXV (2015), 1240–1251. Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano, “Culture and Institutions,” Journal of Economic Literature, LIII (2015), 898–944; Sriya Iyer, “The New Economics of Religion,” ibid., LVI (2016.), 395–441; Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken, “What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature,” ibid., LII (2014), 740–798. 6 Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Misuses of History (New York, 2015); Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different (Princeton, 2009). As Thomas Piketty noted at the end of Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge Mass., 2014), “Historical experience remains our principal source of knowledge. . . . To be sure, historical causality is always difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. . . . Nevertheless, the imperfect lessons that we can draw from history . . . are of inestimable,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 299 Social scientists show an increasing interest in how economic class affects the evolution of institutions and beliefs in capitalist so- cieties. This trend is occurring at at time when many U.S. histo- rians no longer seem as concerned with class as they are with an amorphous subaltern mass and undefined hegemonic elite. Equally, the study of social structures, social movements, and class con- sciousness has given way to “imaginaries” and microhistories of individual forms of resistance. But the interest of political scientists, sociologists, and especially economists in socio-economic models of class in capitalist societies has strengthened to become one of the most dominant new fields of research in the social sciences. Does economic growth lead to increases in inequality as Piketty postulated, or does it lead to increasing equality, as the old Kuznets model of growth maintained? As of now, Piketty appears to have the upper hand; modern societies seem to be moving rapidly to in- creased inequality. A growing body of studies questions whether inequality was the same or different before the Industrial Revolu- tion. Several economists have ventured into this field of study, where few historians dare to tread.7

irreplaceable value” (574). See also idem, “Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, XXIX (2015), 67–88. Economists have even used the same sources as cultural historians to analyze fundamental economic issues: Using prizes given in World’sFairs, Petra Moser examined the problem of patent protection and industrial innovation in “Patents and Innovation: Evidence from Economic History,” ibid., XXVII [2013], 23–44). Marc Goñi examined the social galas of nineteenth-century England in “Assortative Matching and Persistent Inequality: Evidence from the World’s Most Exclusive Marriage Market” [2013], available at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Marc+Go%C3%B1i+%26+marriage&btnG= &as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=#. 7 Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review, XLV (1955), 1–28. For comparative global studies of inequality, see Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality and the Global Inequality Extraction Ratio: The Story of the Past Two Centuries,” Explorations in Economic History, XLVIII (2011), 494–506; idem, “Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now,” Global Policy, IV (2013), 198–208; idem, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Pre-Industrial Inequality,” Economic Journal, CXXI (2011), 255–272; for studies of specific times and places, François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, “The Size Distribution of Income among World Citizens, 1820–1990,” American Economic Review, XCII (2002), 727–744; Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Princeton, 2016); Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Tracing the Be- ginning of the Kuznets Curve: Western Europe during the Early Modern Period,” Economic History Review, XLVIII (1995), 643–664; Esteban A. Nicolini and Fernando Ramos Palencia, “Decomposing Income Inequality in a Backward Pre-Industrial Economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century,” ibid., LXIX (2016), 747–772; Guido Alfani, “The Rich in Historical Perspective: Evidence for Preindustrial Europe (ca. 1300–1800),” Cliometrica (October, 2016), doi:10.1007/s11698-016-0151-8; Jaime Reis, “Deviant Behaviour?

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 300 | HERBERT S. KLEIN In addition to class, stratification, and inequality, social scien- tists currently examine long-term trends in social mobility and their relationship to inequality—a traditional area of research by sociologists now also a concern of economists. Unfortunately, these matters—as well as others raised about how class affects voting and life expectancy, intergenerational mobility, residential segregation, marriage/family, etc.—remain outside the purview of historians who seem oblivious to the basic structures and institutions of society. The recent presidential election revealed the basic disjunc- tion between the issues that most of the U.S. population finds to be important and those that U.S. historians tend to favor.8

Inequality in Portugal 1565–1770,” ibid. (November 2016), doi:10.1007/s11698-016-0152-7; Osamu Saito, “Growth and Inequality in the Great and Little Divergence Debate: A Japanese Perspective,” Economic History Review, LXVIII (2015), 399–419; Facundo Alvaredo et al., “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, XXVII (2013), 3–20. 8 For sociologists, see James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774–1873 (New York, 2007); for a survey of the earlier work by sociologists on these historical issues, Marco H. D. Van Leeuwen and Ineke Maas, “Historical Studies of Social Mobility and Stratification,” Annual Review of Sociology, XXXVI (2010), 429–451; for the expansion of traditional intergenerational studies of mobility to multigenerational ones, Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (Princeton, 2015); for a more restrained and solidly based historical study of the influence that grandparents and parents exert on children’s socio-economic status in an eighteenth-century society, José Antonio Espín Sánchez, Salvador Gil-Guirado, and Chris Vickers, “The Old Men in the Census: Inequality and Mobility in 18th Century Murcia,” paper presented at the Stanford Economic History Workshop, February 15, 2017; Joseph Ferrie, Catherine Massey, and Jonathan Rothbaum, “Do Grandparents and Great-Grandparents Matter? Multigenerational Mobility in the US, 1910–2013,” NBER Working Paper No. 22635 (September 2016); for a review of these early and often contradictory findings, Gary Solon, “What Do We Know So Far about Multi- generational Mobility?” NBER Working Paper No. 21053 (March 2015); for a sociological anal- ysis of the basic issues relating to this theme, Robert D. Mare, “A Multigenerational View of Inequality,” Demography, XLVIII (2011), 1–23. For a summary of new research about changing historical world patterns of wealth distribu- tion, see Anthony B. Atkinson, Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” Journal of Economic Literature, XLIX (2011), 3–71; Piketty and Saez, “Inequality in the Long Run,” Science, CCCXLIV (2014), 838–843; Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century;forare- thinking of why economic growth does not lead to poverty reduction, David M. Cutler et al., “Macroeconomic Performance and the Disadvantaged,” Brookings Papers on Economic Ac- tivity, I (1991), 1–74; for the social, economic, and residential factors that affect U.S. mobility, Raj Chetty, et al., “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mo- bility in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXXIX (2014), 1553–1623; for the social and economic conditions influencing U.S. intergenerational mobility, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, “Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and the Decision to Drop out of High School,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring, 2016), 333–396; for the extreme dif- ferences in morbidity and mortality by social economic status, Barry Bosworth, Gary Burtless, and Kan Zhang, Later Retirement, Inequality in Old Age, and the Growing Gap in Longevity between Rich

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 301 Historical institutions that affect contemporary societies have recently become a major field of contemporary research, especially in economics and political science. The New Institutional Eco- nomics involves analysis of both the contemporary institutions that affect markets and the historical origins of these institutions. Influ- ential economists and political scientists—such as North, Sokoloff, Engerman, and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, among others—have opened inquiry into the causal factors that determined why certain societies evolved institutions that promoted wide-scale economic growth whereas others fostered institutions that rewarded only a few at the expense of the many. Were outcomes due mainly to original resource endowments, disease environments, pre-existent social structures, a lack of exploitable native populations, or to other initial factors that tended toward either elite exploitation or more egalitarian economies? The debate is ongoing. But all of these new institutional economists, following North’s lead, argue that these initial factors significantly determined the social and economic institutions that followed, helping to explain differences in contem- porary economies and societies.9

and Poor (Washington D.C., 2016); Ellen R. Meara, Seth Richards, and David M. Cutler, “The Gap Gets Bigger: Changes in Mortality and Life Expectancy, by Education, 1981–2000,” Health Affairs, XXVII (2008), 350–360; Cutler et al., “Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradients in Mortality,” NBER Working Paper No. 15678 ( January 2010), doi: 10.3386/w15678. 9 For a key pioneering work, see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York, 1990); for a survey of early work in the New Institutional Economics, Nathan Nunn, “The Importance of History for Economic Development,” An- nual Review of Economics, I (2009), 65–92; for compilations of earlier articles, Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institu- tions (New York, 2012); Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Eco- nomic Review, XC (2001), 1369–1401; idem, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVII (2002), 1231–1294; idem, “The ‘Rise of Europe’: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review, XCV (2005), 546–579; Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (NewYork,2005);fortheeffect of different legal institutions on economy, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins,” Journal of Economic Lit- erature, XLVI (2008), 285–332. For a useful survey of all the debates, provided by a sociologist, see Henning Hillmann, “Economic Institutions and the State: Insights from Economic History,” Annual Review of Sociology, XXXIX (2013), 251–273; for a lively debate about the relative positive or negative impact of colonial institutions, which has become a theme in Mexican history, Rafael Dobado González and Héctor García Montero, “Colonial Origins of Inequality in Hispanic America? Some Reflections Based on New Empirical Evidence,” Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, XXVIII (2010), 253–277.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 302 | HERBERT S. KLEIN The New Institutional Economics has shown considerable preoccupation with explaining why Europe, which lagged behind the more advanced Asian societies for a long time, eventually came to dominate the rest of the world after 1500, in what Pomeranz called “the Great Divergence.” Scholars have been known to cite Europe’s concentration of artisans in urban centers, its constant ag- gressive warfare, its family model, its early commitment to prop- erty rights, its ability to exploit the new world, and its guild system of organizing and transmitting knowledge as putative reasons for its world domination. But whatever the model, the outpouring of studies on this subject has led to an abundance of historical re- search by economists, with the participation of only a few inter- disciplinary historians.10 Importantasitisinthisrespect,economicsisnottheonly social science in which major historical research has appeared. Sev- eral of the themes central to the New Institutional Economics that emphasize the role of political institutions are also central to recent literature in political science. Moreover, many of the areas that political scientists, and sociologists, currently explore have received attention from historians as well—for example, the origins and evolution of the modern welfare state. Fortunately, this is one area in which historians, political scientists, and sociologists have created a coherent body of literature in which they actually cite each other. A lively debate about property rights, taxation, and their effect on the formation of modern states sees historians as well as economists taking sides. As Tilly noted, in the study of state formation, “there is no way to create comprehensive, plausible, and verifiable explanations without taking history seriously into account.” Initially, interdisciplinary historians were active

10 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in David V. Glass and David E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History: Essays in Historical Democracy (London, 1965), 101–146; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence; The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Philip T. Hoffman, Why Europeans Conquered the World (Princeton, 2015); David de la Croix, Matthias Doepke, and Joel Mokyr, “Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy,” NBER Working Paper No. 2231 (March 2016), doi: 10.3386/w22131.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 303 participants in this research, but other social scientists have now taken the lead.11 In the 1960s and 1970s, historians were the major contributors in some of the fields of study that political scientists, sociologists, and economists now dominate, such as elections and legislative roll calls, political participation and mass movements, the failure of la- bor and socialist parties in the United States, or the impact of the New Deal. Sociologists often consult historical examples of poli- cies and examine how policymakers read and interpret historical experiences. Studies of government policies, politics, elections, elites, and diplomatic history that were once the classic province of history are now largely done elsewhere. Another field in which historians initially worked with other social scientists but not so much anymore is demographic history, which has largely devolved to demographers alone.12

11 For the basic works in this coherent body of literature, all of it by sociologists, see Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (New York, 1990); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); for a historical survey by an economist, Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2004); for research by historians, Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–1975 (NewYork,1992);PaulV.Dutton,Origins of the French Welfare State (New York, 2002), among many others; for a survey of recent work by sociologists and po- litical scientists about the U.S. system, Monica Prasad, “American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature,” Annual Review of Political Science, XIX (2016), 187–203. Much of the debate about property and taxation began with North and Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History, XLIX (1989), 803–832. For the latest attempts to quantify this debate, see K. Kivanc Karaman and Sevket Pamuk, “Different Paths to the Modern State in Europe: The Interaction Between Warfare, Economic Structure, and Po- litical Regime,” American Political Science Review, CVII (2013), 603–626; Van Zanden, Buringh Eltjo, and Maarten Bosker, “The Rise and Decline of European Parliaments, 1188–1789,” Eco- nomic History Review, LXV (2012), 835–861; Edgar Kiser and April Linton, “Determinants of the Growth of the State: War and Taxation in Early Modern France and England,” Social Forces, LXXX (2001), 411–448; Charles Tilly, “How and Why History Matters,” in Robert E. Goodin and idem (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Science (New York, 2006), 525; idem, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (New York, 1992). 12 For a survey of recent voting studies, see Jordan M. Ragusa and Mathew Tarpey, “The Geographies of Economic Voting in Presidential and Congressional Elections,” Political Science Quarterly, CXXXI (2016), 101–132; for Congressional roll-call voting from 1789 to 1985, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Vot- ing (New York, 1997), updated to 2004 in Ideology and Congress (New Brunswick, N.J., 2011); idem and Nolan McCarty, Polarized America, The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, Mass., 2016; orig. pub. 2006); for the effect of international trade on party and voting behavior in Congress, David Autor et al., “Importing Political Polarization?

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 304 | HERBERT S. KLEIN This major transfer of economic, political, and social themes that used to find a home in interdisciplinary historical studies to the other social sciences has had mixed results. Much of the path-dependency research of economists shows a lack of serious historical context, and a number of studies in political science make historical claims that show little depth, based on the faulty variables often employed as proxies for basic historical indices. The historical questions raised in these works, however, may well be fundamental and important; historians would do well to take their causal models seriously. But U.S. historians’ unwillingness to en- gage with this important social-science literature is an indication of an unfortunate growing divide.13 As several social scientists and interdisciplinary historians have suggested, history is the only laboratory that social scientists can

The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” NBER Working Paper No. 22637 (September 2016), doi: 10.3386/w22637; for a historical study of political participation, Daniel Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review, CVIII (2014), 479–498; for recent research on the evolution of U.S. unions, Michael Goldfield and Amy Bromsen, “The Changing Landscape of US Unions in Historical and Theoretical Per- spective,” Annual Review of Political Science, XVI (2013), 231–257; Barry Eidlin, “Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948,” American Sociological Review, LXXXI (2016), 488–516; for the New Deal, Price V. Fishback, Michael R. Haines, and Shawn Kantor, “The Impact of the New Deal on Black and White Infant Mortality in the South,” Explorations in Economic History, XXXVIII (2001), 93–122; Fishback., William C. Horrace, and Kantor, “The Impact of New Deal Expenditures on Mobility during the Great Depression,” Explorations in Economic History, XLIII (2006), 179– 222; for a sociological analysis of historical experience, Ann Hironaka, “Boundaries of War: Historical Changes in Types of War, 1816–1980,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Stanford Univ., 1998). Historical demography began with the work of Louis Henry, Manuel de démographie his- torique (Genève, 1967), which proposed parish records as a means to reconstruct historical demographic indices and thus launched an abundant literature in family reconstitutions for Europe. The vanguard works of the Cambridge School were Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1973) and E. Anthony Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (New York, 1981). What followed in the United States were such works as John Demos, A Little Commonwealth; Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1970). For a survey, see Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, XLVII (1990), 477–502. 13 As Pikkerty observed, “Models can contribute to clarifying logical relationships between particular assumptions and conclusions but only by oversimplifying the real world to an ex- treme point, . . . [and thus] models are a language that can be useful only if solicited together with other forms of expressions,” particularly with historical experience (“Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, XXIX [2015], 70).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 305 use to look at trends. Diamond, for example, claims that history allows for “natural experiments” that are otherwise unavailable to most of the social sciences. Social scientists often cited North and South Korea after World War II as excellent case studies for such a quasi-natural experiment, but they also have adduced stud- ies about the effect of the slave trade on various African societies, of minimum wage increases on employment, and so on. Important historical issues even lurk in some of the new biological sciences— above all, the new field of human genetics—in which historical research has revolutionized our understanding of how populations grew, most especially in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans.14 This retreat from the social sciences is largely a North American and, to a lesser extent, northern European characteristic. In other parts of the world, historians are far more open to the social sciences. In Spain, for instance, the economic journals reg- ularly publish historians as well as economists. In the less dogmatic countries, the new cultural studies are not as pre-eminent, thanks in part to the continuation of the older Marxist tradition and to the ongoing influence of the Annales school. Certain subfields of historical research in the United States, such as the classical world, precolonial Africa, or modern China, still attract coopera- tion with the social sciences, as well as the humanities. But the prevailing trend in the United States has been an abandonment of the social sciences.

ENGAGING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES But how can historians engage with the increasingly quantitative and technical work done in the social sciences? More easily than might be expected. A com- mand of advanced quantitative techiques is hardly necessary to read this literature. Most scholarly articles in the social sciences,

14 See Jared Diamond and Robinson (eds.), Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Bruno S. Frey, David A. Savage, and Benno Torgler, “Behavior under Extreme Conditions: The Titanic Disaster,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, XXV (2011), 209–222; Jeremy Ferwerda and Nicolas L. Miller, “Political Devolution and Resistance to Foreign Rule: A Natural Experiment,” American Political Science Review, CVIII (2014), 642–660. For an economic study of a natural-historical experiment often cited in the economics literature, see David Card and Alan B. Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review, LXXXIV (1994), 772–793. Klein, “The First Americans: The Current Debate,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVI (2016), 543–561.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 306 | HERBERT S. KLEIN as in the natural sciences, begin with a survey of the pertinent literature before describing their methodologies and justifying their data. After presenting their quantitative findings, they con- clude with a discussion of how their analysis proves or disproves their hypotheses. This model may be more conspicuous in the hard sciences than in the social sciences, but it is generally the norm. Any literate historian can decide whether such arguments make sense, whether the models relate to the data, and whether the data are appropriate for the questions raised. Reading through an enormous technical literature can lead to a coherent view of the issues at stake and an appreciation of the basic findings. Historians can and should read this literature, and they can enter the debates through their own studies. The social sciences are in need of serious historical research by interdisciplinary histo- rians. One area in which historians have a distinct advantage over social scientists is the collection of large original data sets mined from historical archives. Not many social scientists are willing to expend the effort to do this fundamental work for individual societies and different time periods. Wills, testaments, tax and property lists, voting registrations based on property qualifications, censuses, cadastral surveys, militia records, parish registers—all traditional sources for historians—can inform the study of society in different times and places from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Historians have the skills and sources to challenge long-term trends and examine the specific historial events that helped to shape them.15 Historical data sets are not useful just in studies of inequality or mobility; they can also serve to elucidate a specific historical pe- riod or define a particular group in its historical setting. Numerous projects show that such data sets can became a major tool for the social sciences. One case in point is the Atlantic slave-trade voyage project. Similarly, the data set of colonial royal finance in Spanish America has yielded abundant research by historians as well as economists. Moreover, Reher, a demographic historian, created

15 As Florencia Torche, a sociologist, concluded after surveying social mobility studies for the highly unequal societies of Latin America, the assumption that all of these societies function in a similar way with respect to social mobililty by necessity “is a challenging task and requires nu- anced historical knowledge of the countries compared” (Torche, “Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality: The Latin American Case,” Annual Review of Sociology, XL [2014], 636).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 307 one of the most sophisticated surveys of immigration produced in Europe so far.16 But historians can also exploit the world of new source materials made available by social scientists. One of the most important re- sources founded by sociologists and later developed by historians is IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) at the University of Minnesota. IPUMS contains samples of indidivuals (usually 1 percent to 5 percent of a total population) in U.S. historical census materials from 1850 to 2010 and of individuals in the censuses of eighty-two other countries since 1960. It also has samples for the annual U.S. Current Population Surveys since 1962 and basic numbers down to the county level in all of the U.S. censuses since 1790. In recent years, it has added survey data from health, educational, and time-use surveys. It is the single most important place to start for any work involving census and survey data for the United States. The data are available in machine-readable format prepared for SAS and SPSS

16 The voyages database at http://slavevoyages.org/ has two parts—(1) the 5,000 voyages with complete information about numbers carried and mortality and (2) the estimates of total slaves carried for another 30,000 voyages. Economists and other social scientists have used these data for multiple studies: Nunn, “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’sSlaveTrades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXXIII (2008), 139–176; idem and Leonard Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review,CI (2011), 3221–3252; Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau, “The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa,” ibid., 571–576; James Fenske and Namrata Kala, “Climate and the Slave Trade,” Journal of Development Economics, CXII (2015), 19–32. The records of Spanish colonial finance, published in five volumes by John TePaske and Klein by Duke University Press and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia in Mexico, are available at http://realhacienda.colmex.mx/. For recent articles based on this source, see Rafael Dobado and Gustavo A. Marrero, “The Role of the Spanish Imperial State in the Mining-Led Growth of Bourbon Mexico’s Economy,” Economic History Review, LXIV (2011), 855–884; Matthew C. LaFevor, “Building a Colonial Resource Monopoly: The Ex- pansion of Sulphur Mining in New Spain, 1600–1820,” Geographical Review, CII (2012), 202– 224; Anne-Marie Desaulty et al., “Isotopic Ag–Cu–Pb Record of Silver Circulation through 16th–18th Century Spain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, CVIII (2011), 9002– 9007; Carlos Alejandro Ponzio, “Globalisation and Economic Growth in the Third World: Some Evidence from Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies, XXXVII (2005), 437–467; Luis Alonso, “Financing the Empire: The Nature of the Tax System in the Philippines, 1565–1804,” Philippine Studies, LI (2003), 63–95; Carlos Newland and Martín Cuesta, “Revueltas y presión impositiva en el espacio peruano, 1691–1790,” Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, XXI (2003), 477–500; Luz Marina Arias, “Building Fiscal Capacity in Colonial Mexico: From Fragmentation to Central- ization,” Journal of Economic History, LXXIII (2013), 662–693; for the 2006 Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes survey organized by David Reher, http://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/es/ operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_C&cid=1254736177005&menu=resultados&secc= 1254736195388&idp=1254735573002.

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or Excel worksheets. But IPUMS even has an online program that allows individual users to create analytical and summary tables without the use of these statistical packages.17 Another major source for the history of income, employ- ment, health, family, class, ethnicity, and race are the national household surveys that most countries have been taking since the late twentieth century. Historians in virtually every major country can do modern historical studies based on these sources or on the well-known General Social Surveys that many nations compile. The U.S. version, which has been run by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) since 1972, allows modern so- cial and political historians to trace long-term trends in political values and perceptions, along with the usual socio-economic vari- ables of social mobility or changes in family structure. The bi- annual European Social Survey, which began in 2002, is an extraordinarily detailed survey of political participation and beliefs, along with income, social mobility, religion, marital and immi- grant status, household size, and fertility rates. Even an older his- torical panel survey such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which began following 5,000 American families and their offspring every year since 1968, can produce valuable information about poverty or changing family dynamics. Life surveys, which systematically ask retrospective questions, can help to keep track of multiple generational changes in a given population.18

17 The IPUMS microdata are “individual records containing information collected on per- sons and households. The unit of observation is the individual. The responses of each person to the different census questions are recorded in separate variables.” See https://usa.ipums. org/usa-action/faq#ques0. For an important study based on these data, see Zhong Deng and Donald J. Treiman, “The Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Trends in Educational Attainment in the People’s Republic of China,” American Journal of Sociology, CIII (1997), 391–428. IPUMS-Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, found at https://www.ipums.org/, has gener- ated numerous historical articles. For two of the most original, see Steven Ruggles, “The Transformation of American Family Structure,” American Historical Review,XCIX(1994), 103–128; J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War His- tory, LVII (2011), 307–348. Klein and Laird Bergad drew from this series for Hispanics in the United States, 1980–2005 (New York, 2010). 18 Since 1996, the Interamerican Development Bank, the World Bank, and the United Na- tions Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-CEPAL) have sponsored household surveys (MECOVI) in most of the Latin American countries. Even a poor country like Bolivia provides them. The Brazilian household survey, called the PNAD (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios), has been available since 1976; simple research tools now permit easy

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 309 Surveys also exist for particular subsets of a population. The As- sociation of Religion Data archives (ARDA) houses a major depository of surveys regarding all types of religious groups throughout the world since the 1980s. It is an invaluable resource concerning such highly charged issues in the United States as changing attitudes to- ward sex, gay marriage, divorce, and abortion, as well as religious participation and identity. It can even be consulted for such informa- tion as Pentecostal beliefs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia or details about other major religious groups thoughout the world. Most of these data sets are compatible with the usual statistical packages as well as with Excel format and simple ASCII files, even allowing anal- ysis without these programs. The PEW Research Center is another major source for much-cited information about U.S. politics, polit- ical participation, and political orientation; Hispanic trends; global attitudes; media; and religion since the beginning of this century. The Human Development Index (HDI), an initiative of the United Nations (UN) that includes every country and sub-region from 1980– 2015, has become yet another indispensable research tool; econo- mists now deploy it to study nineteenth- and twentieth-century populations.19

analysis of its questions starting in 1995 (https://sidra.ibge.gov.br/acervo#/S/Q). The original data sets from 1976 onward can be processed in SPSS or SAS formats. For the NORC “Index to Data Set (by Data Order),” see http://gss.norc.org/get- documentation (accessed February 28, 2017); for the list of variables for the European Social Survey, see “Appendix A8 Variable List, ESS7-2014 ed. 3,” with the data sets in all of the basic formats, at http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/ (accessed February 28, 2017); for the PSID, http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/; for the utility of the PSID study for analyzing the causes of povety, Mary Corcoran, “Rags to Rags: Poverty and Mobility in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology, XXI (1995), 237–267; for family issues, W. Jean Yeung et al., “Children’s Time With Fathers in Intact Families,” Journal of Marriage and Family, LXIII (2001), 136–154; for a life survey that evaluated how the changing nature of the labor market affected occupational careers of men and their fathers since the 1920s, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, “Career Opportunities in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Dynamic Approach to the Study of Life-Course, Cohort, and Period Effects,” European Sociological Review, II (1986), 208–225. 19 For the ARDA data, see http://www.thearda.com/Archive/browse.asp (accessed March 1, 2017); for the PEW surveys, http://www.pewresearch.org/data/download-datasets/ (ac- cessed March 4, 2017); for the HDI, http://hdr.undp.org/en/data# (accessed March 1, 2017); Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “World Human Development: 1870–2007,” Working Papers in Economic History, Universidad Carlos III De Madrid (January 2013), available at http://www.uc3m.es/uc3m/dpto/HISEC/working_papers/working_papers_general.html (accessed March 1, 2017); Leandro Conte, Giuseppe Della Torre, and Michelangelo Vasta, “The Human Development Index in Historical Perspective: Italy from Political Unification to the Present Day,” No. 491, Department of Economics, University of Siena (2007), available at https://ideas.repec.org/p/usi/wpaper/491.html (accessed March 1, 2017).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 310 | HERBERT S. KLEIN In addition to the data sources that have emerged in recent decades as fruitful contributors to modern social, economic, and political history, historical-economic data has also become avail- able from such diverse agenciesastheWorldBank,Eurostat, the various UN agencies, along with the copious material produced by most of the census organizations in the world, which often possess data that reach back into the nineteenth century. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)isacitedsource throughout the world for knowledge about the history of agricul- ture during the last half-century. Historians, on their own or sometimes in collaboration with sociologists and economists, can produce historically relevant studies using these freely available re- sources. Many social scientists are eager to work with historians. They respect the unique skills and perspectives that historians can bring to their studies.20

A host of themes are waiting for the kind of serious research that historians are well equipped to do, such as the problems of in- equality and social mobility, which currently attract heated debate in economics. The well-researched historical studies about mate- rial distribution that have emerged in every society with the requisite data are, except for the rare exception, the work of econ- omists and sociologists, not interdisciplinary historians.21 But major problems in demographic history also await histor- ical research. One of the most important is the cause of the mor- tality revolution, an enormous change in human history, which is still highly controversial. What led to the extraordinary decline in mortality that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—modern medicine, sanitation and public health policies, or simply better nutrition? The recent growth in the subfield of historical anthropometrics—that is, the study of population heights as an indicator of health standards—shows that historians can

20 For a few of this historian’s collaborations with other social scientists—including anthro- polgists, sociologists, and economists—see Klein and Engerman, “Shipping Patterns and Mor- tality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825–1830,” Cahiers d’études africaines,XV (1975), 381–398; idem and Jonathan Kelley, Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory Applied to the National Revolution of Bolivia (Berkeley, 1981); idem and Francisco Vidal Luna, The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (New York, 2014). 21 One of the few historians to enter the debate about inequality is Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2017).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 HISTORICAL TURN | 311 become active in this area. First developed by economic historians for Europe and North America, these studies, which initially used military conscript records from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, reveal the effect of class and regional conditions on health and welfare. They have recently extended their reach to shed light on other areas of the world.22 Questions regarding inequality and social mobility and race and class in individual societies during particular periods are as rel- evant to historians today as they ever were. Now, when the social sciences are producing a wealth of data and serious historical re- search about these and other matters, historians would do well not to ignore it. The “historical turn” in the social sciences has brought a fuller appreciation of the importance of historical under- standing for answering basic questions. The historical profession need not abandon its current concerns—with agency or identity, for example—but it needs to provide for, and tolerate, alternative approaches and to re-engage with the social sciences for its own

22 For the mortality issue, see two controversial studies, Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (London, 1976); Fogel, The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death, 1700– 2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York, 2004); for alternative arguments about the public policies as primary influences, Cutler and Grant Miller, “The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The Twentieth-Century United States,” Demography, XLII (2005), 1–22; Simon Szreter, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mor- tality Decline c. 1850–1914: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine, I (1988), 1–37; Cutler, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney, “The Determi- nants of Mortality,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, XX (2006), 97–120; Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton, 2013); Jonathan Chapman, “The Contribution of Infrastructure Investment to Mortality Decline: Evidence from England and Wales, 1861–1900,” available at http://www.jnchapman.com/research. For a survey of anthropometrics, see Richard H. Steckel, “Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions,” Explorations in Economic History, XLVI (2009), 1–23; Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth, “Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality,” American Political Science Review, CVIII (2014), 1–22; Timothy J. Hatton and Bernice E. Bray, “Long Run Trends in the Heights of European Men, 19th–20th Cen- turies,” Economics and Human Biology, VIII (2010), 405–413. The journal Economics and Human Biology is an especially useful source for ongoing research in this field. For a critique of the validity of samples in a study that found a height decline in the nineteenth-century United States, see Howard Bodenhorn, Timothy Guinnane, and Thomas Mroz, “Sample-Selection Biases and the Industrialization Puzzle,” Journal of Economic History, LXXVII (2017), 171–207. Recent anthropometric work for Latin America includes Moramay López-Alonso, Height, Health, Nutrition and Wealth: A History of Living Standards in Mexico 1870–1950 (Stanford, 2000); Rafael Dobado González and Héctor García Montero, “Pre-Independence Spanish Americans: Poor, Short and Unequal . . . or the Opposite?” Revista de Historia Económica, XXXIII (2015), 15–59; Zephyr Frank, “Stature in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro: Pre- liminary Evidence from Prison Records,” ibid., XXIV (2006), 465–489.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01159 by guest on 27 September 2021 312 | HERBERT S. KLEIN sake as well for the sake of important debates outside its immediate purview. Otherwise, historians will find themselves less and less relevant and ever more isolated from the major issues facing the modern world. In that case, both history and the social sciences will suffer.

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