Monday, September 23, 2013

the interregional slave trade in the antebellum south: new research






A copy of the paper can be found here:

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Explanations for the British Industrial Revolution, Revisited

It's been a while since I posted here. I thought I would get back into writing by briefly commenting on the lead article in the August 2013 Economic History Review by Jane Humphries.

Humphries takes aim at R. C. Allen's recent study of the origins of the British Industrial Revolution, which has been lauded as a very important and innovative work on this question. Allen focuses on four features that put the British economy at the technological "frontier" in the mid-to-late 18th century: higher wages than in the past, higher wages than in other countries, higher wages relative to the cost of capital, and higher wages relative to the price of coal. These four conditions in the "high wage economy" put Britain in a unique place for rapid capital-intensive investment, spurring productivity and hence growth.

The "high wage" thesis is part of what is called the "Habbakuk thesis". This argument maintains that labor is scarce (wages are high), then investors will want to find ways of saving money on labor, so they invest in machines and capital. This has the unintended effect of promoting industry and thus capitalism.

Humphries develops a three-pronged critique of Allen's claims.  All three points center around the nature of British labor markets in the time period of interest.

She first contends that wages were not that high relative to living standards. This builds off of a significant amount of research that Humphries has done recently on child labor and the plight of the poor in the Industrial Revolution. She cites a wealth of sources, essentially diaries and other direct accounts, that show that workers were indeed strapped for cash, barely "scraping by" if you will.

She then contends that family structure was considerably more stressed than what Allen assumes for his computations -- particularly regarding the caloric needs of a typical British household. Allen assumes a 2-child household when the reality was far different. This "patriarchal" assumption is a very old one and needs to be dropped in favor of a more inclusive idea of work or labor. Again, this draws on family economics and the need to incorporate unpaid women's labor into household needs and labor supply decisions and the production of value.

Finally, she contends that there was a dual labor market in Britain, which is not new, but she wishes to emphasize the labor market for women and children as having a quite dominant role. It was not just the labor market for the typical male worker that mattered. In fact, she showed how some employers specifically developed new machinery in order to allow women and children to take part in the work. Employing such workers also meant a lower wage bill -- another plus which is ignored in Allen's account.

The critique is all well and good, and like any good critique, it starts to raise more questions: how might we account for the rise of British capitalism? Is there an alternative theory that we can promote? If it's true that the high-wage story seems flawed, then what explains the rapid technological progress that took place? Perhaps something can be found in the story of the "disempowered" that Humphries mentions, who are all but forced into the factories, or at least, they take part in the capitalist labor market more out of necessity than want. Of course, such a story is known to many social and labor historians of early capitalism. But how might we bring new empirics (like Allen does) to test such claims and thus bring that perspective closer to current debates?

Friday, November 2, 2012

39 stripes - revisited





Sunday, October 28, 2012

democracy and the history of foreign policy

David Rieff writes here on democracy fetishism among Western capitalist countries/foundations. In the course of discussing the inherent contradictions of countries such as the US promoting democracy, he asks the following question:
In a world where history has emphatically not ended, where there are a number of competing economic models that will have to coexist and there is no global democratic consensus, why does democracy promotion remain a major foreign-policy priority for the United States?
Unfortunately, he has no easy answer, and instead leaves us to come to our own conclusions. The piece is nevertheless an interesting read. He concludes with the following:

Again, consider the Russian Federation. In some parts of the world, U.S. and Russian interests are at odds; in other parts of the world, they have interests in common. Under these circumstances, what is the national-interest rationale for supporting the internal opposition to the Putin regime and insisting that whatever happens, this support will continue? There is a term for that project: regime change. And the fact that it is being undertaken through peaceful means rather than military expeditions changes nothing about the desired end state of the democracy-building project.
          The Russian case is certainly going to be only the first of many. Understandably, the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States have unsettled the American policy establishment. And Washington has no experience dealing with successful pushback to its democracy-building ambitions and doubtless is scrambling to figure out what to do. In times of uncertainty, people’s first instinct often is to carry on as if nothing has changed. If Washington’s continued reliance on democracy promotion is an emblem of this, it would be entirely understandable. But this does not make it any less unwise.
One thing is clear: imperialism is not about to vanish, but will certainly change form as international power balances shift.

Thursday, October 25, 2012


Christopher Tomlins on Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, and Nathaniel Turner's Confessions:
Why did Memnon's reverberations haunt Thomas Roderick Dew? What was the sound that the broken, thrown-down statue of an Ethiopian warrior-king made when touched by the rising sun every day, day after day? Pausanias says it was like 'the breaking of the string of a lute or lyre.' Perhaps that was what Turner's voice sounded like in Southampton's courtroom -- the breaking of an 'endless pagan chain of guilt and atonement.' Not guilty.
Read more here:

Monday, October 8, 2012

columbus day


From chapter 1 of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (pg. 1)