We all make our scholarship out of a potpourri of works created by other
scholars pursuing different methods, and to engage in a "Methodenstreit" would
not only be useless, but even might -- in the unlikely event that any one party
to such a Streit succeeded -- kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. My own
work has relied upon scholarship following a greater diversity of theories and
methods than any one scholar could or would endorse. In my work I treat a topic
that unquestionably belongs to economic history, the transformation of
agricultural production in the Atlantic world as bound labor was replaced by
formally free labor and as international commodities markets expanded. I
approach this topic, however, with methods more common in cultural history than
in economic history, relying on the tradition emerging from the three thinkers
Paul Ricoeur has called "the masters of suspicion": Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (or
Althusser, Foucault, Lacan). This tradition -- the tradition often referred to
as "theory" -- allows me to treat what is called "the economy" as the outcome
of historical conflicts, part of the same plane of analysis as "culture,"
"identity," "society" and many other topics of recent historiographical
interest.[1]

Marxism and psychoanalysis are inseparable as theoretical approaches to
history, but I will focus here on Marxism because this forum is, after all,
about a topic more commonly associated with dialectical materialism than with
psychoanalysis. There are at least two distinct ways that Marxism might apply
to German economic history. First, as Albrecht Ritschl points out, Marxism is
one among many approaches -- he also lists classical, neoclassical, Marxist,
Freudian, Weberian, and the Frankfurt School -- by which one might approach a
history of the thing called the economy. Here, as Susan Boettcher rightly
warns, one should remain alert to the political and ideological implications
and biases of the methods one chooses. At the same time, as Scott Eddie has
reminded us, non-Marxist economics has incorporated enough Marxist economics
(and Marx, I might add, more than enough non- Marxist economics) at least to
blur the distinction between Marxism and anti-Marxism within histories of the
economy.

Marxism also (like psychoanalysis and Nietzschean genealogy) refuses the
segmentation of the world into separate things, like the economy, culture,
gender-kinship-household systems, diplomacy, etc. While hostile critics (and
even some sympathizers) think of Marxism as about "the economy," the idea that
there is an economy distinct from the totality of history is an artifact of the
reification that Georg Lukács has identified as central to so much non-Marxist
social thought. Splitting history into sections, like an orange, is convenient
in the world of university scholarship, but should not be allowed to interfere
with our understanding the world. Marxism (like psychoanalysis and Nietzschean
genealogy) refuses dominant categories of "subject" and "society," as well as
subcategories like "gender," "race," "the economy," "class," "culture," to ask
how these apparently real things are effects -- not causes -- of dynamic
conflicts. Even while Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have had their ups and downs at
the GSA or the AHA, they have flourished and developed for more than a century
in a broad and diverse international and interdisciplinary scholarly community.

My current project I hope will illustrate the practical feasibility of the
approach I describe.[2] It began as a portrait of an expedition sent by Booker
T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute to transform the cotton industry in German
Togo from the local production of textiles to the export of raw cotton to the
world market. What looked at first like a transfer of technology from African
Americans to what were understood as their coracialists in West Africa turned
out, I found, to involve the reorganization of agricultural production around
racial identities and categories of free labor in Germany, West Africa, and the
United States. The images and the realities of patriarchal German peasant
householders, female Polish migrant laborers, male African plowmen, sexually
"disorganized" Polish immigrants in Chicago, and African American sharecroppers
all were mutually supporting effects -- not causes -- of struggles around a
reorganization of agricultural production. In these struggles, elites sought to
take advantage of increasingly profitable and interconnected global commodities
markets while others fought in their own ways for autonomy and prosperity.
(There really does appear to have been a little homo oeconomicus in each of
them.) The apparently cultural and political aspects of these conflicts were as
economic as the apparently economic aspects were cultural and political. What
commonly counts as economic today, may count as cultural tomorrow, and
vice-versa. Refusing to reify -- or identify -- culture and economy ends up, I
hope, producing a good account of those things we learn, in ordinary language,
to identify as "culture" and "economy."

By treating the economy as an historical construction rather than as an
autonomous entity, historians do not lose the reality of the economy. Theory
has never denied reality, even by claiming reality is "just culture," but
rather has always sought to establish a robust relationship to reality. History
inspired by theory certainly does not seek to diminish the value of the kind of
rigorously quantitative studies discussed by other contributors to this
discussion. It rather depends precisely on such scholarship. Indeed, in
addition to reading Althusser and Lacan -- in fact because I read Althusser and
Lacan -- I also count bales of cotton and compare cotton prices with the prices
of palm oil and other commodities. Thus I hope not only to take from, but also
to contribute to, the traditions of German economic history discussed in this
forum.


[1] The work of Timothy Mitchell has been especially inspiring for me. See
especially his _Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).

[2] This paragraph summarizes some of "A German Alabama in Africa:
The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West
African Cotton Growers," _American Historical Review_ 110
(2005): 1362-1398.

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