Social history as economic history in Sweden. Some remarks

Abstract

During the last two decades social history as a subject has developed rapidly, with regard both to the number of its practicioners as well as the general interest it attracts within the international academic community. In a book of some years ago D.C. Coleman even emphasized that its success has been so great that it has had a tendency to outcompete discourses of older and more distinguished standing; that is, political history as well as economic history. In several countries — particularly Britain — social history has acquired its own departments, and has thus created problems for the older and less buoyant disciplines which have had to compete with this vital and growing new subject for funding and students.¹     

Business history as economic history

Abstract

Since economic history became established as an academic discipline in the Swedish universities in the 1950s, more than ISO doctoral dissertations have been published. Of these, about 10% can be characterized as business monographs, while roughly another 10% deal with aspects of trade and industry, relying mainly on business archives. Business history, accordingly, has become an established part of economic history in Sweden. Most of the literature dealing with the history of firms does not, however, appear in the form of doctoral theses, a wide range of books has been published, from sometimes heavy, academic works by established scholars, to glossy anniversary pamphlets lacking scholarly interest.¹     

Swedish economic history before the 1980s

Abstract

The early days of economic history in Sweden — the many scattered, more or less important, contributions of the 19th century — have never been investigated. Hans Forssell's remarkable work on the 16th century has won well-deserved fame, but his was not an isolated case. Around the turn of the century, interest in the subject area increased, in Sweden as elsewhere. There were a few dissertations, formally in economics or in history (for instance, Eli Heckscher's in 1907). The first assistant professor of economic history to be appointed was Karl Petander, in Stockhohn in 1912.     

Recent Danish research in economic history — a survey

Abstract

Academic disciplines which straddle the traditional subject-boundaries have frequently to contend on the one hand with the great difficulty that the scientific environment is frail — e.g. university posts are few, library facilities poor and there is normally no serious research journal in the national language. On the other hand the very differences of academic working methods on each side of the traditional subject-boundaries can frequently give rise to fruitful controversies over theoretical and methodological problems, which can produce scholarly innovations at a pace which does not always necessarily characterise the established disciplines with their more copious resources. In what follows we shall test whether these two circumstances can be said to apply to the Danish border-discipline between economics and history. After a review of the institutional framework (in section 2) and an interim balance sheet of the discipline in section 3 the profile presented by the research subjects in the last couple of decades is sketched in section 4. Section 5 then raises the question of the interaction between social science theory and historical method, i.e. in large measure the question of the subject's real interdisciplinary raison d'être in Denmark. The article closes with a survey of some of the current problems for research in the subject.     

The way to industrialisation: A Finnish town history

Abstract

Scientific research on urban history in Finland dates from the end of the 19th century. The pioneer was Professor Carl von Bonsdorff, whose study of 17th century Turku (Åbo) is still a standard work in this field.¹ At the beginning of this century Professor Väinö Voionmaa added to the literature on the old pre-industrial towns his investigation of the rapid growth of Tampere (Tammerfors).² This city, ‘Finland's Manchester’, is a young industrial town; in order to survey its development before the beginning of the 20th century Voionmaa had to take a new quantitative approach. Since then Finnish research on urban history has grown to an extent that is quite out of proportion with the fact that urbanisation here is a late phenomenon. Historical studies now exist of practically every town, generally written by historians with professional training. In Finland historians have perhaps devoted themselves to a greater extent than elsewhere to research in local and thus also town history. The most ambitious attempt to produce a comprehensive history of a town from its foundation to the present is the history of Helsinki on which about ten historians are collaborating, six volumes of which have so far been published.³     

Danish economic history — Towards a new millenium

Abstract

Economic history is out for the count. One might get that impression from reading recent contributions in international journals,² and since the mid-1980s quite unscientific observations at several of the great international conferences of The International Economic History Association have led me to the conclusion that the age distribution of the participants has been rather skewed with an annoying dominance of the same sex and age as myself, that is middle-aged or elderly men. It points towards an academic field having passed its palmy days — around a generation ago.     

Fluctuat nec mergitur: Economic history in Sweden at the turn of the century 2000

Abstract

Economic history as a subject is customarily likened on formal occasions to a landbridge uniting two scholarly continents: the economic and the historical. It can also be said that the subject is marked by two peculiarities. For more than a century it has stood outside mainstream economics, been an alternative, a subterranean current. In the same way it has always had to struggle in a subordinate relation to the subject of pure history, whether the latter called itself political history or purported to be capable of covering the entire field of history by itself. With this background in mind, it is above all interesting to ask oneself how the subject of economic history has been able to establish so strong and independent a position in Sweden.¹     

Catching up in Europe: Finland's Convergence with Sweden and the EU15

Abstract

Although numismatics is one of our oldest disciplines in the humanities, dating back to renaissance Italy, a doctoral thesis on coins and currency history is still unusual, largely because in many countries no systematic university teaching on the subject exists. Oslo University is the only one in Scandinavia where it is possible to take a basic examination in numismatics, and, significantly, it was from here that Skaare, former head of the university's coin cabinet, delivered his doctoral thesis, Coins and Coinage in Viking-Age Norway.     

Macroeconomic history in Sweden

Abstract

The term macrohistory can have reference to the overall history of large units, e.g. world development during the last two hundred years, or European history in the Middle Ages. Another example is the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Yet another is the macrohistorical problem posed by Jones in a recently-published book. He pursues the thesis that tendencies to economic growth have been present in most societies but that for various reasons they have been prevented from becoming more than just tendencies: “Why Europe rather than China?”¹     

Eli heckscher and the problem of synthesis a methodological note

Abstract

If the economic historian Donald McCloskey, well known for his rhetoric and his metaphors, is to be believed, the accomplished exponent of the discipline of economic history ought to possess two vital qualities. The scholar in question must be driven by “the historian's lust for facts and the economist's lust for logic.”¹ In a drastic analogy with the circus world, he likens this scholar to a tightrope walker who, to provoke the applause of the public, forces himself to cycle blindfold over Niagara Falls balancing an eel on his nose! I leave aside the question whether anyone has ever managed to perform this feat or is ever likely to. But the problem is challenging and interesting.     

A finnish textbook in economic history

Abstract

There is, to my knowledge, no work exactly corresponding to Professor Jutikkala's in any of the major languages. Uudenajan taloushistoria is a comprehensive and very skilful exposition of the economic development of the modern world and certainly much more than simply a good textbook in which material from generally recognized standard works, partial surveys, and particular investigations is brought together and rearranged. However much Professor jutikkala may have drawn upon the available modern literature, upon the writings of Heckscher, Clapham, Cole, Ashton, Ashley, Sombart, and other authorities, his book is stamped first and foremost by his own great familiarity with the vast field of his subject, by his own research and experience-especially in the field of agrarian and social history—and by his great versatility as a scholar. The author is not simply a historian with an economic training; he is also very conscious of the fact that economic development never occurs in society in forms which allow of a purely economic exposition. His method is—to     

English timber imports from Northern Europe in the eighteenth century

Abstract

English commercial history has tended to concern itself with tracing the pattern of exports, especially of textiles, rather than that of imports. There are, however, certain commodities on the import side that have attracted more attention than others—strategically important articles, for example, such as tar and pitch, which used to be designated as ‘naval stores’. These commodities, together with iron, constituted northern Europe's most important contribution to English imports in the eighteenth century.¹ The import of ‘naval stores’, like that of iron, was based upon northern Europe's vast forest resources combined with proximity to England. Of the regions within the orbit of English trade, only North America could boast continuous tracts of forest on a comparable scale; but the long transatlantic crossing retarded such imports from America, for wood and wood products were bulky commodities in relation to their value.     

Housekeeping ideology and equilibrium policy in eighteenth-century Sweden

Abstract

In the last issue of SEHR, Jonas Ljungberg carried out an analysis, based on his price history studies, of various methods of measuring economic/industrial transformation.¹ In the main the article opposes two methodological approaches against each other, the one referring to the works of Josefsson/Örtengren and consisting of the measuring of transformation pressure in the diffusion of relative prices over fixed demarcated periods, and the other alluding to the work of Gerschenkron and measuring transformation by means of a running coupling of variously-constructed indices of price movements. The comments on Ljungberg's methods and results which follow are intended as a criticism of his very imprecise use of the concept of the “Gerschenkron effect” and thus of the concept of transformation. They are not to be construed as an opinion on the general question of methodology, where we entirely share Ljungberg's view as to the general fruitfulness of using index calculations in an historical analysis.     

Economic history research in Sweden since the mid-1970s

Abstract

In the Swedish university system, economic history forms an independent subject falling within the faculty of social sciences. Professorships in the subject were established at Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Lund and Umeå between the end of the 1940s and the end of the 1960s. A second chair was established at Lund in 1988. Furthermore, resources have been increased step by step through the addition of other kinds of teaching and research services, including a lectureship at Örebro. Teachers from departments of economic history give tuition not only within the bounds of their own subject but also as components of lengthy courses of professional training, for example, for history teachers and economists. AU the departments in the subject provide research training leading to writing of dissertations in economic history. Most of them also offer a licentiate examination as an intermediate stage on the way.     

The monetary history of Rome

Abstract

The internationally-renowned Swedish historian, Professor Sture Bolin, has devoted himself, ever since his youth, to the problems of monetary history and to the study of coinage as a historical source. His doctoral thesis on the finds of Roman coins in independent Germany ¹ Fynden av romerska mynt i det fria Germanien. appeared in 1926; it was an important work which, by using numismatic source material, contributed considerably to the understanding of the relations between the Roman Empire and the Germans. After the publication of this work he continued to study the functions of money in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and this research resulted in the publication, between 1939 and 1957, of a number of important papers. During the same period he worked steadily on a major work designed to provide a synthesis of the problems relating to the state and its currency from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The first volume of this work, State and Currency in the Roman Empire to 300 A.D. ² Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1958, p. 357, 45 Sw. Kr. , has now been published. The book is the product of a lifelong study of a central theme of economic history, and it unquestionably justifies the great efforts expended on it. It is a work of genius, epoch-making in its field, throwing completely new light upon Roman monetary history, and marking a culminating point in this branch of study.     

The transatlantic tar trade

Abstract

The tar trade has been of especial interest to Finnish commercial history, as tar has been regarded as Finland's main export article in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹ However, the studies of Professor Aulis J. Alanen suggest that this was no longer the case during the final phase of the Swedish regime, when the boom in shipbuilding for export, the new sawmill industry and the rising incomes from freights reduced the share of tar exports in the balance of payments. The significance of tar production and the tar trade was nevertheless fairly considerable for a long time in Northern Finland.     

Was feudalism inevitable? A critique of K.G. Persson

Abstract

In a recent article,¹ K.G. Persson has raised a number of interesting problems concerning the tenability of some of the main theses of historical materialism as embodied in G.A. Cohen's defence of the Marxian theory of history.² In particular, Persson addresses the historical materialist view that feudalism was an inevitable stage in the development of the forces of production. He accepts Cohen's position that purposeful human action can be compatible with the concept of inevitable events in that something may be said to be inevitable if rational individual actions are bound to be such that the specific event will necessarily follow.³ The problem with this concept of inevitability is that it is easy to see its analytical value in a world of perfect knowledge and no uncertainty, but Persson does not exploit this weakness and focusses instead on two other aspects of the issue: first, does inevitability, understood as the outcome of rational (but uncoordinated) individual actions, mean optimality? And second, is there a tension between this idea of inevitability and the principles of historical materialism? The first is easily disposed of. If game theory has shown nothing else, surely it has demonstrated that individual rationality does not necessarily bring about socially optimal outcomes.⁴ The second issue is somewhat more complex and deserves greater attention, because in addressing it Persson revives an important model of the feudal economy that can yield some considerable insights.⁵ I will present Persson's discussion of the tensions between historical materialism and inevitability briefly in the next section, but will concentrate mainly on the model of the feudal economy he builds. In Section III I will offer what I hope will be some constructive criticism of this model. A brief conclusion is presented in Section IV.     

A theorist on basic questions of economic history

Abstract

The author of this slim, essay-like book—now translated into Swedish¹—s-is a leading economic theoretician, noted for his contribution to the development of Keynesian theory and to the theory of the short-run dynamics of the trade cycle, as well as to modem theory of macro-economic growth. He is, however, known to a generation of modern economists above all as a ‘market’ theorist within the Walrasian tradition. In the present book he abandons his role as a strict market theorist, concerned with such things as the ‘existence’ and ‘stability’ of market equilibria, and attempts to explain the historical emergence and development of the market system or economy as an institution or set of institutions. He disarmingly forfeits any claims to expertise on this topic, and I think wisely so; but he is far from being altogether a layman or a newcomer to economic history. He professes an early love of the subject, and although it was a romance that never resulted in marriage, he has, through constant association with leading British economic historians and through his own writings in the history of economic thought, preserved and developed some of the faculties of a historian. Yet, this book-as its title indicates-is essentially theoretical. Hicks develops a set of interpretative hypotheses mainly by a priori reasoning. The empirical references must be looked upon more as illustrations of his theses than as evidence in support of their empirical validity.     

The growth of a population research group in economic history

Abstract

In Sweden there is a long tradition of studying the relationship between population and economic and social history. We have only to mention names such as Eli Heck-scher during the 40s and Gustaf Utterström during the 50s. Now population studies within the discipline of economic history are centered on the University of Lund. In the other departments of economic history population studies have had an occasional character. In Lund, however, they have been more “institutionalized” and for ten years have formed a special section of the Department, the “Research Group in Population Economics” with its own seminars, courses, etc. The causes are obvious: the different institutions are too small separately to carry out such a cost- and resource-intensive topic. A dispersion of the resources would also be an obstacle to develop its necessary research-continuity. In the following short survey of the development of the topic in Sweden it is therefore natural that I should concentrate on the population group in Lund. To characterize our research profile in a few words I emphasize     

Increased international integration is a prerequisite for more and better research in economic history

Abstract

In the article “Is Swedish Research in Economic History Internationally Integrated?” ¹ Daniel Waldenström, Is Swedish Research in Economic History Internationally Integrated?, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. LIII, 2005:2, 50–77 , I present new facts on the past international publications and conference participation activity of Swedish economic historians. In contrast to claims made in a recent large public investigation, my data show that Swedish economic historians have not published extensively in international journals, or books, in recent years. This can in part be explained by the custom to write predominantly monographs, to write mostly in Swedish, and to use hardly any quantitative methods or theory-based economic analysis. Naturally, I am well aware that there may also be some other factors at work, and that empirical investigations of this kind are always open to objections. Problems regarding sample selection, variable definitions and so forth cannot be avoided, and to focus mainly on journal article publications in a field where books and anthologies play an important role raises some concern. ² See, e.g., the discussion in my article on these issues relating to the works by Diana Hicks and others. However, my article does not advocate any methodological dogmatism and acknowledges that economic history research can be conducted and presented in many different ways, using several different methodologies. The important thing is to recognise that there is great potential in combining such an open-minded methodological attitude with an active interest and participation in the research that appears in the many international peer-reviewed journals. This would not be to import some foreign (American) methods or views of the field so much as trying to revive the true Swedish economic history in the spirit of Eli F. Heckscher. In my view, this is the most consistent strategy to ensure both more and better future Swedish research in economic history.