history of Germany?
Date: Friday, August 10, 2007

[Ed. note: the following remarks do not reflect any "official" position by the
H-
German editors on the substance of the economic history forum. As a
reminder, the original forum contributions under consideration can be
found at
http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/econ/econ_index.htm <https://synergy.txstate.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/econ/econ_index.htm> ]

As a cultural historian who prefers to find her history in libraries
and the books they hold, it lies far from my critical capacity to
provide a criticism or perhaps even a commentary on the contributions
and discussion points provided by the contributors so far. However, I
still have an opinion! So instead I have a formulated a series of
(potentially naive) questions directed at statements made by the
contributors, which are, however, directed at all of the H-German
readership as we think about our own methodological commitments, the
possibility of making other research choices, or an interdisciplinary
methodology that includes more "economic" elements.

1. When I look through these contributions, I find that some of them
adopt an explicitly econometric viewpoint, i.e., the idea that
econometrics is the way to measure economic matters in German history
and the basis of research results and narrative presentations of
developments. In response to this approach, I find myself somewhat
concerned that none of the contributors who favor it have included
any reference to criticisms of econometrics as a scholarly
methodology. In particular, is econometrics really a "neutral"
methodology that can be used by any economic school to answer its
questions? Or does it include its own biases? Is econometrics simply
the quantitative version of capitalist theory?

2. Insofar as a number of the research questions proposed by the
authors favoring a quantitative approach relate explicitly to the
development of capitalism, it would seem wise for me to try to
sidestep discussions of the ideological ramifications of the recent
(from the early modernist's viewpoint) political triumph of
capitalism over Marxism, but these matters are of course lurking in
the back of my head when I read manifestos about the importance of
economic approaches. One of the central "economic" questions in
twentieth-century Reformation research was the matter of the
Peasants' War (1525-6) and the relationship of peasant unrest to
actual economic conditions. While much of this debate was conducted
via an ever more hairsplitting Marxist class analysis, some of its
participants, particularly those on the East German side, did resort
to economic analyses, such as discussions of price series data,
feudal obligations, and cash and in kind tax burdens. I really think
this question is over, and while I enjoy discussing it with my
students, I do not especially miss it as a research priority. As the
question expanded and left behind economic matters, contributions to
the debate got more interesting, and I honestly do think that the
cultural history studies of peasant communities that relate their
political demands, material circumstances, traditional customs, and
notions of "liberty" to the willingness to participate in revolts
have brought us a great deal further since the 1980s, and I doubt
that a purely or even a primarily economic approach has anything more
to tell us. So, abstracting from the particular case to the general:
is the pre-1989 economic history of Germany so ideologically tinged
that it must all be rewritten? Are calls for return to economic
approaches an attempt to compensate for lost time spent on
vanquishing the specter of Marxism during the Cold War years? What is
being offered by a "new" economic history that is not present in the
"old" one?

2. More generally, we indeed used to have a heavily quantitative
history of German and of Europe more generally, and those of us who
are at least thirty-five have read a great deal of it in graduate
school. The books are still on the library shelves and now I send my
own students to them, although not with quite such a firm insistence.
I think the reason that many of us were forced to read heavily
statistical analysis of matters like the European peasantries, middle
classes and nobilities was precisely so that our professors could
demonstrate just what a cultural history of Europe could add to these
quantitative analyses. Recently, as Eli Rubin notes, Geoff Eley has
called for a more integrated methodology that combines the insights
of cultural history with those of the quantitative methods that were
the defining questions for my undergraduate advisers. For those who
insist on the primacy of economic history, what is the purpose of the
apparent advocacy of moving away from cultural history? If anything,
from my perspective, an understanding of the role of cultural factors
such as religion in world history and relations has taken on more,
not less, urgency since the turn of the century.

3. I am wondering if some of these contributions do not
simultaneously underestimate the current level of economic literacy
among historians and understate the amount of time and commitment
necessary to obtain the necessary quantitative proficiency to carry
out economic history research. Many American undergraduates at least
do take a year introduction to micro and macroeconomics that
introduces them to notions of and critical questions about concepts
such as elasticity, monetary theory, and so on. At least in my own
experience, however, after the third semester calculus would have
been necessary to complete the work and very quickly differential
equations would have been required. My own background in economics
was just barely sufficient to understand how the quantity theory of
money played into discussions about the relationship of "American
silver" to the "seventeenth-century crisis." My year-long high school
course in statistics did not give me enough preparation to understand
the multivariate analysis used in some studies of the early twentieth
century SPD. My impression is that graduate programs are tending
toward eliminating the potential of substituting statistics or
economics for a language because so few students are interested in
this option. My question is thus: shouldn't we (for both
undergraduates and graduate students) be emphasizing increased
economic _literacy_ either as a first step toward or in preference
to, a fully quantitative economic history?

4. My impression is that economic issues were not as fully abandoned
in early modern history as Eli Rubin seems to suggest happened in
modern cultural histories. Matters such as feudal relationships
necessitated continued attention at least to financial issues. In
addition to the works Rubin mentions, there are (inter alia) good
modern histories either published or nearing publication on matters
such as the economic and material conditions of the pre-Reformation
lower clergy in the diocese of Mainz; the relative financial burden
that Germany bore (in comparison to other national churches) in
financing the papacy; industrialization in the Schwarzwald; and the
alleged "wood shortage." All of them involve quantitative elements.
Still, the early modernist wrestles even more necessarily with the
problem of incomplete and/or unreliable data series (which is one
reason why estimates of the German population before 1800 vary so
wildly). What do we do with this source situation? As a related
question, of how much value are economic theories and quantitative
methods gauged to the evaluation and explanation of capitalism in
analyzing pre-capitalist economies? Don't we simply end up (once
again, as the discussion about the emergence of globalization has
done) characterizing early modernity as an incomplete version of
something that has its full-fledged version later, and thus missing
something important?

         Susan Boettcher
         University of Texas - Austin

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