Chapter 3 The Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World Seminar

The revived Seminar

During the 1960s, the LSE was very successful in attracting a steady flow of research students from home and abroad but Fisher was not minded to continue Tawney’s early modern seminar at the Institute.⁶ The social sciences, he admitted, had become much more specialized since 1945 and the preoccupation with economic growth had made the earlier focus on changes in economic and social structures look rather old-fashioned.⁷ The history of capitalism, central to Tawney’s concerns, was decidedly out of favour. As Fisher approached retirement, however, he was persuaded by three younger colleagues, Penelope Corfield, Negley Harte and Peter Earle, to revive the Seminar in 1974. Corfield and Harte had sat at Fisher’s feet as PhD students and they were happy for him to preside over the Seminar in the traditional manner, assuring him that he would not be required to do any of the chores associated with running the programme.⁸ Jack’s brilliance and the attractive conviviality which he radiated were legendary, and talk often continued late into the evening. Post-seminar drinks in the University Tavern (now the College Arms), Store Street, followed by supper in Charlotte Street set a pattern which has hardly changed.⁹ The Seminar has run continuously since then with the support of a growing number of convenors (see Figure 3.1), none of whom would aspire to the role of ‘guru’.

The conviviality has continued, but in 2005, it was decided to reshape the Seminar and broaden its scope, reflected in a change of name from the Economic and Social History of Preindustrial England to that of the Early Modern World. Since we have a reasonably full record of speakers and topics since 1974, it is possible to show how we arrived at this metamorphosis – a gradual process, organic rather than planned – through which we accommodated new perspectives and approaches, whilst attempting to overcome, by degrees, the increasing fragmentation and insularity of the subject.¹⁰ In reconstructing the predominant themes, we have adopted the categorization used by the editors of the Economic History Review from 1971 onwards, with minor modifications.¹¹ For convenience, these may be presented as two groups of ‘core themes’ from a range of newer spheres of interest associated more closely with social history.

During the years of Fisher’s chairmanship, the overall direction and content of the programme were formed by two influences. The first of these was the Seminar’s membership itself – comprising Fisher’s former pupils in the early stages of their careers pursuing themes which he had either suggested, supervised or examined. Earle had worked on Mediterranean trade before 1550, Corfield on Norwich’s history from 1650 to 1850, and Harte on the English linen industry in the long eighteenth century. Harte continued to pursue his interests in textile history, but all three went on to develop overlapping interests in urban history and London history, encouraged no doubt by Fisher’s example. When Vanessa Harding became a convenor in 1986, the emphasis was further strengthened through her own work on medieval and early modern London in its demographic aspects, including health, housing and mortality. It was in the following year that the Women’s Committee of the Economic History Society was formed, by which time the proportion of women members had fallen from 20 per cent at the time of the Society’s foundation to only 10 per cent in 1987.¹² The Seminar saw women scholars well represented: at time of writing, we currently have equal numbers of men and women as convenors, with 26 per cent of papers presented by women speakers from 1974 to 2021, rising to 34 per cent over the past five years. Thanks to our hub location, we have also attracted regular attendees from outside London and overseas, especially North American students and researchers.

The second influence shaping the Seminar, in more diffuse ways perhaps, was the ‘Preindustrial England’ paradigm which acted as a wrapper for the fashionable textbooks of the 1970s.¹³ By the mid-1980s, as we have already noted, interpretations of the Industrial Revolution came under increasing scrutiny following a wave of revisionist writing simultaneously questioning the rate of eighteenth-century growth and asserting its regional character and the diversification of rural occupations.¹⁴ J. A. Sharpe (b. 1946) was one of the few textbook writers to complain of the obscurantist effect of the ‘pre-industrial’ label and reminded readers that Daniel Defoe had found ‘manufactures’ almost everywhere he went in his tours of the 1720s. Earle examined Defoe’s language of economic growth at one of the first meetings of the Seminar in 1975 and, like Sharpe, complained that scholars of modern history had failed to understand the buoyancy of what they condescendingly regarded as a pre-industrial economy and society. The ‘bustling prosperity’ of the inland trade was what impressed Defoe most.¹⁵

If ‘Tawney’s Century’ (1540–1640) barely emerged from the ‘dark ages in economic history’,¹⁶ the challenge facing the convenors in the 1970s and 80s was to bring together new research findings that captured the dynamism of the century after 1660, especially with respect to the linkages between farming and the rural environment, industrial development, and the expansion of internal and overseas markets (core themes one and two, see Figures 3.3 and 3.4). By 1972 the concept of ‘proto-industrialization’ was being used to integrate these themes but scepticism prevailed in several quarters for some time, particularly in Britain.¹⁷ The LSE’s strengths lay in traditional industrial, commercial and financial history; its only major contribution to agrarian history was Tawney’s Agrarian Problem (1912), rescued from obscurity by Jane Whittle and her collaborators a century later.¹⁸ It was at Leicester and then Oxford that the subject flourished under the leadership of Joan Thirsk (1922–2013), and it was Thirsk’s pioneering work on regional farming systems which provided the starting point for theories of proto-industrial growth and decline.¹⁹ Questions about family size and the age and seasonality of marriage were also central to the thesis. Although the sociologist David Glass (1911–78) had paired up social and demographic research at the LSE in the post-war years, it was in Cambridge that historical demography developed apace in the hands of Peter Laslett (1915–2001), Roger Schofield (1937–2019) and Tony Wrigley (1931–2022). In the 1970s, Jack Fisher occasionally expressed his impatience with the rate of progress in Cambridge, demanding to know: ‘when are they going to press the button?’²⁰

The core themes of industrial and agricultural history retained their place in the Seminar programme throughout, but with a preponderance of papers in the former. The years 1985–90 saw a surge of interest in industrial history including papers on Durham mining, Derbyshire lead-working, Midlands metalwares, woollen fabrics, new draperies, table linen, housebuilding and London’s luxury trades, to say nothing of earlier papers on Spitalfields and Canterbury silk, Staffordshire ceramics and the British distillery.²¹ Interestingly, many of these offerings involved an emphasis on urban manufacture and finishing, or centralized production; few impinged directly on the phenomenon of rural industrialization, which may have reflected the interests of the convenors and those working at the LSE. During the past fifteen years, however, increasing attention has been given to the history of work itself as the need for new research on specific industries has declined. Leisure preference and conditions of work were addressed earlier in papers by John Hatcher (b. 1951), Steve Hindle (b. 1965), Leonard Schwartz and Donald Woodward who went on to gather new wage series for Northern England, which helped to correct the southern bias and other deficiencies in the Phelps-Brown Hopkins series.²² Interest in rural and agrarian history was strongest in the very early years of the Seminar. Joan Thirsk gave the opening presentation in 1974, and contributions to the history of farming, landownership and rural society came from her former students including John Broad, John Chartres, and later, Jane Whittle, together with other specialists outside the LSE orbit: Mark Overton, John Beckett, Anne Kussmaul and Keith Snell. The last two Cambridge researchers produced important new findings about women’s work and seasonal employment in agriculture, leading Kussmaul to define late seventeenth-century England as the critical period in which regional specialization in farming created new opportunities for the expansion of rural industry.²³

With the exception of a paper by Eckert Schremmer of Heidelberg, the Seminar was not especially concerned to examine the limitations or theoretical status of the proto-industrial model; it was gradually absorbed into the lexicon.²⁴ The question of de-industrialization and diverse regional experiences, usually concealed in sectoral analysis, emerged as a key issue in the proto-industrialization debate, and served to revise traditional views of the industrial revolution. In the long run of course, the northern heartlands of the ‘industrial revolution’ themselves de-industrialized, and this obvious but neglected consideration called for serious reappraisal of the broader social and political transformations sheltering behind the label. Maxine Berg (b. 1950), Pat Hudson (b. 1948) and Julian Hoppit (b. 1957), who became a convenor in 2010, called for a rehabilitation of the industrial revolution as the product of diverse and impermanent regional experiences.²⁵

The most far-reaching revisions to the older ‘pre-industrial’ paradigm arose from a new focus on the early modern energy transition formulated by Tony Wrigley and sharpened by John Hatcher’s definitive work on coal production and Paul Warde’s research in environmental history, energy consumption and the pressure on timber supplies. In support of John Ulric Nef’s earlier claims, Hatcher and Wrigley showed how exploitation of coal enabled England to escape at an early date from the constraints of the organic economy.²⁶ In 1560, coal consumption provided 10 per cent of total English energy requirements; by 1700, that figure had risen to 50 per cent, putting England in a uniquely favourable position compared with its neighbours.²⁷ Not only did this support early industrialization, it also facilitated London’s exceptionally rapid rate of growth during the seventeenth century, albeit with costs attached. Paul Warde, who became a convenor in 2009, helped to give the programme an enhanced environmental dimension in two successful departures from our usual format. In 2010, we arranged a seminar/symposium with five speakers on ‘Cities, Ecology and Exchange, 1600–1800’, with Lex Heerma van Voss, Klas Ronnback and Leos Muller focusing on the North Sea–Baltic basin and the environmental costs of ‘fuelling the city’. And in 2014, Warde led a round-table session with Geoffrey Parker (b. 1943) on the latter’s Global Crisis (2013), with an emphasis on climate change, the significance of which was seriously underestimated by earlier writers.²⁸

New work on overseas trade was slow to resurface after Ralph Davis’s important mid-twentieth-century investigations based substantially on the Ledgers of the Inspector-General for the years 1697–1780 (see Figure 3.4). This chronological focus helps explain the general preoccupation with the possible contribution of the profits from foreign trade to economic growth and the ‘industrial revolution’. There was, however, also a reluctance to accept the reality of mercantilist modes of thought and practice (a view which now appears very dated). Relatively little attention was given to either the political contexts or the global structures within which commercial networks evolved. The measurement and analysis of trade flows continued along traditional lines, but it was especially Kirti Chaudhuri’s work – his Trading World of Asia (1978) and his 1981 paper to the Seminar which pointed to wider horizons. An enthusiastic admirer of Fernand Braudel (1902–85) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019), Chaudhuri encouraged us to move beyond neo-Ricardian assumptions about early modern trade and consider the hierarchical order of leading cities and trading zones, underpinned by coercion and military power.²⁹

This shift in thinking brought overseas expansion back to centre stage, with a transfer of emphasis from the intra-European trades to Eurasia and the Americas. It required a radically different approach to histories of empire and the unholy synergies between commerce, slavery, forced labour and the appropriation of ‘new world’ resources. Nuala Zahedieh, who became a convenor in 2001, contributed several papers which showed how London merchants made mercantilism work in the Atlantic trades before 1700 by manipulating the Navigation Acts and opening up rent-seeking opportunities to their advantage. As a result, the value of London’s plantation trades roughly doubled from 1660 to 1700 and generated much larger trade flows than the mainland colonies.³⁰ Several speakers emphasized the transnational character of Atlantic commerce and the porous character of imperial boundaries, but it is only recently that the operation of the plantation system itself and the history of the enslaved have made their way into the seminar programme. Much Anglo-American writing, following eighteenth-century precedent, has tended to emphasize the high returns from Atlantic commerce, whilst disparaging the value of trade with Asia, with its associated drain of silver from the Americas, the connecting thread between the two.³¹ Chaudhuri’s volumes had already signalled the Eurocentric bias of such an outlook, and during the 1990s, interest in the trades and economies of South and Southeast Asia grew rapidly.

Increased interest in overseas expansion from the 1650s inevitably involved much closer examination of the consequences of inter-state rivalry, including extension of the state’s capacity for revenue raising and the limitations and direction of its commercial policies. These concerns were represented in the Seminar’s programme, which gradually shifted towards the second group of core themes (see Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Julian Hoppit had earlier pointed to the often contradictory and undisciplined character of much economic literature of the period and its frequent orientation towards the objectives of specific lobbies and interest groups. Few would argue now that the state possessed a masterplan guiding its approach to economic legislation or had the resources to enforce it consistently.³² Nevertheless, as Zahedieh and Ormrod suggested in a joint presentation, the underlying presence of strong central tendencies in the commercial sphere more than justifies continued engagement with the concept of mercantilism.

Although more realistic conceptions of mercantilism have prevailed over the years, interest in the history of economic thought per se has declined, while contributions to financial history have grown alongside the build-up of work on overseas trade, credit networks and financialization. Anne Murphy, Alejandra Irigoin and Coskun Tunçer, who became convenors in 2010, 2014 and 2020 respectively, have helped to sharpen an existing focus on histories of financial and monetary history, which has encompassed a flood of new work on financial markets, property values, taxation and the rise of fiscal-military states. It was at a summer meeting of the Seminar in 1984 that John Brewer described the significance of the ‘unfashionable work of the clerks and bureaucrats of the eighteenth-century Excise Office’, which developed into one of the most persuasive approaches to the history of state formation in England, Europe and beyond.³³ D’Maris Coffman threw fresh light on the introduction of the excise which helped to place the origins of the British tax state firmly in the 1640s and 50s, in line with Patrick O’Brien and Michael Braddick’s revisions of North and Weingast’s simplified account. Papers by Patrick Walsh, Aaron Graham, Guido Alfani and Peter Wilson helped to break down the Anglocentric bias of the fiscal-military state paradigm.

The rapid expansion of economic history in the 1960s inevitably generated pressures to reconnect with, and explore, societal issues which did not necessarily impinge on the economic historian’s concern with industrialization. Population history became a major focus. In 1965, Peter Laslett described the newly formed Cambridge Population Group as a reflection of the shift towards ‘sociological history’, a less Anglocentric history which would move beyond economic analysis and give greater weight to comparative studies of European, Asian, African and Oceanic societies.³⁴ Laslett’s central interest lay in the history of family formation in the context of ‘face to face societies’, in which demographic characteristics were far from constant or uniform. Tony Wrigley went on to pioneer the application of quantitative techniques to the analysis of parish registers and anticipated the emerging results of The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (1989) in a paper to the Seminar in 1981. This shifted the weight of demographic logic away from mortality to marriage and specifically, nuptiality. Papers in English demographic history dominated the programme in the late 1970s and early 80s and continued to add new layers of local information over the next two decades, especially in the areas of infectious disease and mortality which the Cambridge findings had to some degree relegated, from Justin Champion, Mary Dobson, Vanessa Harding, and indeed Tony Wrigley. Migration studies also flourished with contributions from Peter Clark, David Souden, Jeremy Boulton and John Landers, for a period which saw dramatically high rates of internal migration to London.

London was not included in the Cambridge Group’s sample of 404 parish registers and the sources for the capital’s demographic history remain numerous but fragmented, ‘of varying degrees of rawness and reliability’.³⁵ Unsurprisingly, then, London history provided major opportunities for new research, especially from 1974 to 1995 (see Figure 3.5). As we have noted, all four of the original organizers had special interests in metropolitan history, which was strengthened when Vanessa Harding became a convenor in 1986. Penelope Corfield had already presented an inviting prospectus for describing the social and economic life of provincial capitals, at a time when urban history was experiencing a great surge of interest.

It was in 1976 that Lawrence Stone (1919–99) had rather unkindly described urban history as a new field in search of a project. If this contained even a grain of truth, that project would in due course materialize at the IHR with the establishment in 1988 of the Centre for Metropolitan History (CMH) directed by Derek Keene (1942–2021). By 1700, London had become the largest manufacturing centre in England, if not in Europe, and members of the CMH’s ‘skilled workforce project’ – part of the larger ‘achievement project: intellectual and material culture in modern Europe’ – presented new findings about the spatial clustering of skills in the city and the incremental nature of innovation, informed by close collaboration with museum curators. Robert Iliffe, Michael Berlin, David Mitchell and Lien Luu covered industries which included scientific and navigational instruments, shipbuilding, goldsmithing, luxury textiles and brewing.³⁶ The first two also considered the role of guilds as repositories of useful knowledge. More recently, Patrick Wallis, who became a convenor in 2009, reviewed current debates about the role of apprenticeship in the development of a skilled workforce from 1550 to 1800, and Judy Stephenson looked beneath London wage rates to discuss the categorization of skill, before becoming convenor in 2020.

To some extent, urban history provided us with a clear pathway into social and cultural history, the signposts for which had been provided by Jack Fisher’s description of Jacobean London. The demands of the newly urbanized country gentry, Fisher stressed, led to a seasonal demand for leisure facilities, housing and hospitality that would persist for generations.³⁷ By the late seventeenth century, the divorce between elite and popular culture in London was becoming increasingly apparent as Peter Burke (b. 1937) emphasized, but London’s expanding middling sorts were able to participate in new forms of sociability, refinement and material display which mimicked gentility, through an emerging ‘culture of politeness’, described by Larry Klein. A succession of papers explored print culture, art auctions, music performance, dining ceremony, and the world of clubs and coffee houses involving the formation of a culture-consuming public in the metropolis.³⁸

If the consumption of culture had a strongly metropolitan and urban dimension, the demand for everyday items of household consumption opened an inexhaustible field for historians at almost every level of society in town and countryside. The ‘world of goods’ shifted our attention from histories of production to the material culture of domestic life in a way which seemed to echo the enthusiasms of Artur Hazelius and the Swedish folk-life museum movement of the late nineteenth century.³⁹ Lorna Weatherill’s paper of 1983 on consumer behaviour and material culture, 1660–1760, proved to be a defining moment in establishing a new agenda for social and cultural history in both a rural and urban environment. The analysis of probate inventories which underlay Weatherill’s work also informed a string of presentations on the consumption of clothing and textiles from Margaret Spufford (1935–2014), Beverly Lemire, Negley Harte, Catherine Richardson, John Styles and Darron Dean.

As Figure 3.3 shows, interest in urban history was strongest in the earlier years of the revived Seminar, peaking in 1990–95 and falling away thereafter. Enthusiasm for social history came later, following in its wake, but also dwindled from 2005 onwards. From an early commitment to urban history, Penelope Corfield championed the reintegration of economic and social history with History, and in 1987–8 exchanged her role as a convenor of the Preindustrial England Seminar for convenorship of the Eighteenth Century Seminar. The two increasingly ran in parallel, and the former continued to include papers in urban, cultural and social history. Jack Fisher played a reduced role as seminar chair, as illness took its toll, a year or so before Penelope’s move sideways. His death in January 1988 marked the conclusion of a remarkable period of intellectual growth in premodern English history which embraced the humanities and the social sciences. By 1989, the Seminar was left with three convenors, and David Ormrod joined the group soon afterwards, with interests in commercial history and museum practice, the latter via an attachment to the CMH and the Museum of London.

New directions

These recollections show how, in several ways, the Seminar developed, responded to, and sometimes initiated efforts to broaden the thematic content of its programme. Nevertheless, it appeared to some that the tribe of economic historians in the wider world was losing its special dispensation, that of infinite promise. One of the darker prophets of doom was Donald Coleman (1920–95) who argued, uncharacteristically, that the subject was facing a series of self-inflicted problems arising from excessive respectability and loss of the subject’s oppositional posture which had fired earlier writers like Tawney and J. L. and Barbara Hammond.⁴⁰ Jack Fisher also experienced disappointment in later years, and regretted that ‘changing intellectual and cultural trends led to economic history losing its previously great research allure, with the 1960s and 70s rise of urban, social, gender and later cultural history’.⁴¹ The appeal of specialized economic history degrees was indeed declining by the 1980s and required attention, but the outburst of self-criticism was overdone. Successive cuts in university funding made small departments particularly vulnerable – economic history amongst others – and administrative restructuring, with hindsight, was inevitable. Many faced closure or amalgamation. During the difficult years of the 1990s, the Institute’s seminars and the encouragement offered by its then director, Patrick O’Brien, provided invaluable support for those seeking new ways forward.

As chair of the Economic History Society, Patrick arranged a series of four annual meetings of sixty heads of independent departments of economic and social history at the Institute from July 1997 to September 2000 to exchange information and consider strategies to protect and promote the future of the subject. Departments at risk, of course, had limited scope for manoeuvre and were forced to reshape their offer to meet the circumstances of their institutions, which usually involved ‘moving in with the neighbours’. What was initially seen as a ‘crisis of economic history’ soon gave way to what the Women’s Committee of the Society saw as a new start, a ‘renaissance of economic and social history’, announced at its annual workshop in November 1997. It was at this meeting and at the Seminar on the previous day that Jan de Vries developed his highly influential thesis of an ‘industrious revolution’, which shifted debates about eighteenth-century growth from technology and capital formation to consumer aspirations, an approach which had been underway, as we have seen, from the early 1980s.⁴² To those earlier discussions, de Vries added a tighter logic which encompassed questions of labour supply and work intensity, agricultural specialization, household-level choices and the activities of women as consumers. This reconnected with earlier debates about proto-industrialization, but this time round, resistance to the idea of a ‘long road to the industrial revolution’ was much reduced.⁴³

The Seminar continued to promote cultural and social history through the 1990s up to 2005 (Figure 3.5), but in that year, with Larry Epstein’s encouragement, the decision was taken to place the emphasis further towards the economic end of the spectrum and to follow the turn towards global economic history. This came about in response to three sets of changes. First, many other seminars at the Institute were now dealing with cultural history, especially the Eighteenth Century Seminar. Second, the digital revolution of the 1990s had taken us into the world of big datasets utilizing national accounts and spanning several centuries which helped to end the traditional view of the earlier period in terms of unrelieved Malthusian stagnation, already prefigured in research on the Netherlands.⁴⁴ Third, some of us (including Epstein and Ormrod) had been closely involved in the launch of the IHR’s Global History Seminar from 1996 onwards and had incorporated elements of comparative global history in our undergraduate teaching. The ‘long road to the industrial revolution’ made us increasingly aware of the need to make connections across large spaces and long timespans.

It was Patrick O’Brien who, following his appointment as director of the Institute in 1990, created its first seminar in global history. With a background in middle eastern and comparative European economic history and the backing of a scholarly philanthropist, Gerry Martin, Patrick developed the first master’s degree in the UK for the subject.⁴⁵ Without his vision and energy, it has been said, ‘the field of global economic history would not exist’.⁴⁶ The Journal of Global History was launched in 2006, and engagement with grand meta-narratives has gradually given way to more finely textured micro level analysis. Patrick regularly attended our Seminar in the 1990s, and several members took part in conferences and workshops arranged by the IHR-based ‘achievement project’ in London, Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam, closely related to the emerging Global Economic History Network (GEHN) at LSE.⁴⁷ Giorgio Riello, a regular member of the Seminar and contributor became GEHN’s research officer. Developing debates in global history, it seemed, were creating new opportunities for rethinking not only national history but also the variety of ways in which global dynamics impinged on local and regional economies.⁴⁸

Soon after joining the LSE staff in 1992, Larry Epstein (1960–2007) became a regular member of the Seminar and gave papers on regional development in late medieval Italy and transfers of technological knowledge in Europe from 1200 to 1800. He agreed to become a convenor in 2005 in the session following the departure of Peter Earle and Vanessa Harding. The occasion was marked with a memorable relaunch party at which the Preindustrial England Seminar became the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World. The change was not merely cosmetic but reflected the interests of the 2005 group of convenors in Atlantic, Northern and Southern European economic history, and our impatience with the pre-industrial paradigm. The proportion of non-English papers began to grow significantly: by the spring term of 2006, four out of five papers were devoted to non-British topics (see Figure 3.6). It would be impossible to overstate the sense of personal and intellectual loss that we felt with Larry’s tragically early death in February 2007. His work on comparative European economic development was invaluable in helping to reshape our priorities. Paul Warde and Patrick Wallis became convenors in 2009 and their support enabled us to move forward.

The shift of emphasis from English to world history after 2005 has been beneficial in many respects but has brought with it the risk of incoherence and fragmentation, charges which many had levelled against the proliferating varieties of Anglocentric history of the 1960s and 70s. At the very least, we wanted to move away from the debilitating insularity and diffusionist perspectives of many traditional accounts of ‘the first industrial nation’. As de Vries and van der Woude emphasized, the industrial revolution contributed to a ‘larger process of economic modernization [which] involved more than industrial production [and] unfolded in a European zone larger than England’, a zone best described as the North Sea Economy.⁴⁹ Bearing this in mind, we have paid special attention to new research in Dutch and Anglo-Dutch commercial, cultural and economic history. Our close links with the Low Countries Seminar have facilitated this, not least through occasional joint meetings to which Herman van der Wee, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Jan de Vries, David Ormrod, Oscar Gelderblom and David Freeman contributed.⁵⁰ In time, the movement of people, skills and ideas between the countries bordering the North and Baltic Seas, together with trade, shipping and financial transfers all combined to bring about a ‘little divergence’ between the fortunes of Northern and Southern Europe, providing an underlying meta-narrative capable of holding together these fragments of research.⁵¹ Without this kind of selectivity and conceptual support, conversations within global history risk falling into ‘polyphony at best, chaos at worst’.⁵²

A second focus has been to pursue the kind of comparative work which the growing accumulation of big datasets has facilitated (see Figure 3.2, series 6, 1200–1800). Several individual scholars offered new long-run perspectives, especially on variations in wages and prices, central to constructing national income estimates, including Donald Woodward (wages in Northern England, 1450–1750), Jane Humphries (womens’ wages in England, 1260–1850), Sevket Pamuk (wages and incomes in the Near East, 1100–1800). Especially important was Robert Allen’s reassessment of European economic growth and the significance of England’s high wage economy from the mid seventeenth century, arising from a buoyant protoindustrial base and the export of light worsteds.⁵³

Of major interest was the collaborative work by Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell and Mark Overton involved in estimating changes in GDP per capita over six centuries from 1270, bravely exposed at intervals to the Seminar, which, along with Alex Klein and Bas van Leeuwen’s contributions resulted in their landmark volume British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (2015). For early modernists, the most striking outcome of Broadberry and others is its affirmation that the years 1651–1770 were characterized by a measurable dynamism comparable to that experienced during the century after 1770, with GDP per capita approximately doubling in both sub-periods (increases of 97.7 per cent and 97.5 per cent). It is, of course, the reduction of population pressure which underlies this favourable assessment of the long century following the civil wars; for the period 1470–1651, the corresponding figure is minus 4.3 per cent.⁵⁴ The value of historical national accounts for the centuries before 1850 is nevertheless limited and, as Pat Hudson reminded us, GDP per capita measures tell us nothing about the social distribution of resources, human wellbeing or environmental sustainability.⁵⁵

Regarding the larger question of the ‘great divergence’ between western Europe and east Asia, it was inevitable that the Seminar would begin to prioritize Asian economic history following publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s landmark text The Great Divergence (2000).⁵⁶ As Richard Drayton emphasized some years later, the history of globalization is easier to grasp once we regard Europe as a peninsula of Asia.⁵⁷ Several papers addressed different aspects of the trade and organization of the European India companies, with a predominant domestic or metropolitan emphasis in each case. More recently, however, we have included contributions with a sharper Asian focus, centring especially on Indian textile production and the transfer of skills between the Indian and British silk and cotton industries. In 2009 and 2016, Giorgio Riello contributed papers on the trades in raw cotton and cotton fabrics and framed the history of the first ‘global industry’ outside the conventional Anglocentric (or Lancastrian) pattern.⁵⁸ These and a series of papers from earlier contributors owed much to the familiar turn towards consumer behaviour represented especially in Maxine Berg’s contributions, focused initially on the Birmingham metal trades before moving on to the growing taste for Asian imports, especially of luxuries and semi-luxury goods.

The appetite for exotic Asian commodities in Europe is conventionally seen as a major driving force behind early modern consumer culture but rising silver prices in seventeenth-century China resulting from the Ming dynasty’s shift from paper money, played an equally important if not a determining role. Shortly before joining the organizing group, Alejandra Irigoin highlighted American–Eurasian exchange in her important discussion of trans-Pacific bullion and commodity flows carried by the Manila galleons from Acapulco to Manila, the basis for the first integrated global trade flows from the late 1560s. With her encouragement, we have paid increasing attention to Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American history in ways which have counterbalanced the hitherto predominant Northern European emphasis. Access to Spanish-American silver and its recirculation between Southern and Northern European markets emerged as a central issue in papers by Alejandro Garcia-Monton and Claudio Marsilio. Several speakers have recently examined regional aspects of Iberian economic and financial history, starting with Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s magisterial survey of Spain’s overall economic performance in a European perspective from 1270 to 1850.

Conclusion

Broadly speaking, we have continued along the path which we set in 2005, one which leads beyond Protestant Anglophone views of the world to encompass divergence and global interconnectedness. The grand narrative which Tawney and Power embraced, the rise of capitalism, has been replaced by a series of smaller scale configurations which lend themselves more readily to measurement and modelling for those inclined in that direction. This has caused some to complain that the subject ‘too often deploys its methodology on its face, like scaffolding on a building abandoned by bankrupt builders’.⁵⁹ But this is too pessimistic, and the turn towards global histories of material culture and consumption is now sufficiently embedded in the literature to generate a flow of engaging new paradigms and research questions. Far from ignoring ‘new economic history’ and quantitative methods, we have maintained a very broad understanding of what comprises ‘economic and social history’, seeing them as mutually dependent. Despite the increasing strength of more technical economic history, we have cultivated a ‘middle furrow’ and have followed a broadly historical approach.

The danger we now face, it could be argued, arises from a drift towards incoherence and fragmentation in a virtual world of unlimited possibilities. It was in the autumn term of 2020 that we moved the Seminar onto an online platform, enabling us to provide a programme of seven speakers located in Paris, Pittsburgh, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Georgetown, Stanford and Porto. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent we will revert to our pre-Zoom format of face-to-face meetings, drinks, dinner and the uninhibited sociability for which we are famous. Hopefully we will. Video conferencing, however, has enabled us to discuss global history globally, at minimal cost, and it may be that we could in future combine real gatherings at the IHR with speakers and participants joining us from across the world – at least sometimes. If so, we might consider a more thematic and integrated programme to avoid undue fragmentation.

Notes

1. * I am grateful to Penelope Corfield, Vanessa Harding, Pat Hudson, Negley Harte, Julian Hoppit, Nuala Zahedieh and Patrick Wallis for comments, suggestions and recollections.

2. 1.  A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney, English Economic History: Select Documents (London, 1914), p. v.

3. 2.  L. A. Clarkson, ‘From England to Australia to Ireland: A Cultural Odyssey’, in Living Economic and Social History, ed. P. Hudson (Glasgow, 2001), pp. 42–6 at p. 45.

4. 3.  S. Howson, ‘Keynes and the LSE Economists’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, xxxi (2009), 257–80.

5. 4.  R. Floud interviewed by Danny Millum (2008): archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Floud_Roderick.html [accessed 1 October 2022].

6. 5.  C. K. Harley, ‘British Industrialization before 1841: Evidence of Slower Growth during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, xlii (1982), 267–89; N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985).

7. 6.  R. Dahrendorf, A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 430–31.

8. 7.  F. J. Fisher, ‘The Department of Economic History’, LSE Magazine, iv (Nov. 1971), 3.

9. 8.  N. B. Harte, ‘In Memory of F. J. Fisher’, in London and the English Economy, 1500–1700, ed. P. J. Corfield and N. B. Harte (London, 1990), p. 28.

10. 9.  Wine in the Common Room has replaced beer-drinking, and speakers no longer face a ‘trek’ to the Neel Kamal on Charlotte Street as this restaurant has closed down.

11. 10.  W. Clarence-Smith, ‘Editorial’, Journal of Global History, i (2006), 1.

12. 11.  N. B. Harte, ‘Trends in Publications on the Economic and Social History of Great Britain and Ireland, 1925–74’, Economic History Review, xxx (1977), 20–41 at pp. 33–4.

13. 12.  N. B. Harte, ‘The Economic History Society, 1926–2001’, in Living Economic and Social History, ed. Hudson (Glasgow, 2001), pp. 1–12 at p. 8.

14. 13.  L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England, 1500–1750 (London, 1971); B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society from 1500–1700 (London, 1977); and T. K. Derry and M. G. Blakeway, The Making of Pre-Industrial Britain (London, 1973).

15. 14.  P. Hudson, ‘The Regional Perspective’, in Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, ed. P. Hudson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 5–38; P. Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 101–32; J. Stobart, The First Industrial Region: North-west England, 1700–60 (Manchester, 2004).

16. 15.  J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760 (London, 1987), p. 142; P. Earle, The World of Defoe (London, 1976), p. 108.

17. 16.  F. J. Fisher, ‘Tawney’s Century’, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in Honour of R. H. Tawney, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 1–14; F. J. Fisher, ‘The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History?’ Economica, xxiv (1957), 2–18.

18. 17.  D. C. Coleman, ‘Proto-Industrialization: A Concept too Many’, Economic History Review, xxvi (1983), 435–48; R. Houston and K. D. M. Snell, ‘Proto-Industrialization? Cottage Industry, Social Change, and Industrial Revolution’, Historical Journal, xxvii (1984), 437–92.

19. 18.  J. Whittle (ed.), Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660 (Woodbridge, 2013).

20. 19.  J. Thirsk, ‘Industries in the Countryside’, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 70–88; J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1640–1750, Vol. 1, Regional Farming Systems (Cambridge, 1984).

21. 20.  Templeman Library, University of Kent: Barker Oral History Tapes, BAR/10.

22. 21.  Respectively: Keith Wrightson, Andy Wood, Marie Rowlands, Richard Conquest, Luc Martin, Ronald Berger, David Mitchell, Elizabeth McKellar, Helen Clifford; and Natalie Rothstein, Lorna Weatherill, John Chartres.

23. 22.  D. Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–1750 (Cambridge, 1995). H. Phelps-Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of Building Wages’, Economica, xxii (1955), 195–206.

24. 23.  A. Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 170–80.

25. 24.  For example, see: R. Allen, ‘Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe’, Economic History Review, lvi (2003), 403–43.

26. 25.  M. Berg and P. Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, xlv (1992), 24–50; J. Hoppit, ‘Counting the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, xliii (1990), 173–93; J. Hoppit, ‘Understanding the Industrial Revolution’, Historical Journal, xxx (1987), 211–24.

27. 26.  E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988); E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the Indus- trial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010); J. Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry: Volume 1 Before 1700 (Oxford, 1993).

28. 27.  P. Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales, 1560–2000 (Rome, 2007), p. 59.

29. 28.  G. Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013).

30. 29.  K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1987); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge, 1990).

31. 30.  See N. Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 2010).

32. 31.  N. Zahedieh, ‘Overseas Trade and Empire’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, I, 1700–1870, ed. R. Floud, J. Humphries, and P. Johnson (Cambridge, 2014).

33. 32.  J. Hoppit, ‘The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–1760,’ Historical Journal, xlix (2006), 79–110; J. Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2017).

34. 33.  J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989).

35. 34.  P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965), pp. 231–3.

36. 35.  V. Harding, ‘The Population of London, 1550–1700: A Review of the Published Evidence’, London Journal, xv (1990), 111–28 at p. 111.

37. 36.  Centre for Metropolitan History: Annual Report 1997–8 and Tenth Anniversary Conference Papers (London, 1998), pp. 52–8. See also: https://archives.history.ac.uk/cmh/projects.html [accessed 1 Oct. 2022].

38. 37.  F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xxx (1948), 37–50.

39. 38.  From Adrian Johns, David Ormrod, Rosamond McGuiness, Carole Taylor, David Mitchell, Peter Clark, Brian Cowan.

40. 39.  S. Rentzhog, Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea (Kristianstad, 2007), pp. 4–32.

41. 40.  D. C. Coleman, History and the Economic Past: An Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History in Britain (Oxford, 1978), pp. 116–19.

42. 41.  P. Corfield, ‘Fellow Historians’ (2018): https://www.penelopejcorfield.com/history-making/fellow-historians/ [accessed 1 Oct. 2022].

43. 42.  Seminar Paper 7, Women’s Committee Workshop (7–8 Nov. 1997). J. de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, liv (1994), 249–70; J. de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008).

44. 43.  J. L. van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy on a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (Leiden, 2009), pp. 1–14.

45. 44.  J. de Vries and A. M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy (Cambridge, 1997).

46. 45.  A. Macfarlane, ‘Interviews with Leading Thinkers: Patrick O’Brien, 28 May 2005’: https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1141911 [accessed 1 Oct. 2022]. P. K. O’Brien, ‘Global History’ (2008): https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/global_history.html [accessed 1 Oct. 2022].

47. 46.  T. Roy and G. Riello (ed.), Global Economic History (London, 2019), p. v.

48. 47.  P. O’Brien et al. (ed.), Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge, 2001).

49. 48.  M. Berg, P. Hudson and K. Bruland, ‘Writing the History of Global Challenges for the 21st Century’, A Discussion hosted by the British Academy and the Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Tq2VsAH4o [accessed 9 Jan. 2022]

50. 49.  De Vries and Van der Woude, First Modern Economy, p. 716; D. Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge 2003), p. xiii.

51. 50.  Our limited contact with French colleagues, except for Guillaume Daudin and Phillippe Minard, is regrettable; recent papers in French economic history by Richard Drayton and Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière focused on the Caribbean.

52. 51.  A. M. de Pleijt and J. L. van Zanden, ‘Accounting for the Little Divergence’, European Review of Economic History, xx (2016), 387–409.

53. 52.  E. Frankema, G. Sood and H. Tworek, ‘Editors’ Note: Global History after the Great Divergence’, Journal of Global History, xvi (2021), 1–3.

54. 53.  R. Allen, ‘Reassessing European Economic Growth, 1500–1800’ (unpublished seminar paper, 16 Apr. 2004), and Allen, ‘Progress and Poverty’, 406–9.

55. 54.  S. Broadberry, B. M. S. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton and B. van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 226–44, esp. appendix 5.3.

56. 55.  P. Hudson, ‘The Industrial Revolution, Relatively Speaking’ (unpublished seminar paper, 9 Jun. 2017); P. Hudson, ‘British Economic Growth 1270–1870, by S. Broadberry et al. (Cambridge, 2015)’, Economic History Review, lxix (2016), 363–5. See also: P. Hudson, ‘Industrialization, Global History and the Ghost of Rostow’ [The Economic History Society’s Annual Tawney Lecture] (University of Warwick, 2014): https://ehs.org.uk/multimedia/tawney-lecture-2014-industrialisation-global-history-and-the-ghost-of-rostow/ [accessed 1 Oct. 2022].

57. 56.  K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000). See also S. Broadberry and S. Hindle ‘Editors’ Introduction’, Economic History Review [Special Issue: Asia in the Great Divergence], lxiv (2011), 1–7.

58. 57.  R. Drayton, ‘France and the World Economy in the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished seminar paper, 9 Dec. 2011).

59. 58.  See also G. Riello and P. Parthasarathi (ed.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford, 2009).

60. 59.  Clarkson, ‘From England to Australia to Ireland’, p. 45.

References