Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-sh8wx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T07:58:52.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Long-Period Comparative Study: Some Historical Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

W. T. Easterbrook
W. T. Easterbrook
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In this paper I shall limit myself to various comments on integration narrowly conceived, that is, within the discipline of economic history itself, and to a few historical cases used to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of comparative method as a means to this end. Comparative study, as Miss Thrupp has stressed, scarcely represents a new departure in economic thought. The novelty seems to be rather in the almost universal appeal it now has for those who would explore the mysteries of change. This interest appears to be a consequence of the impact of recent developments in backward-area studies and the closely related pursuit of a general theory of growth; these tend to focus attention on different kinds and rates of growth and comparison becomes inevitable. In turn, accumulations of knowledge about economic change in very different contexts lead to the need for some means of correlating diese, partly for aesthetic reasons but also because a synoptic view of the landscape of change has its very practical use. Unless the whole field can be surveyed from a single point of view, and by this I do not mean the same point of view, it is very difficult to know where the need for more intensive exploration is greatest.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 1957 , pp. 571 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1957

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Youngston, A. Y., “Marshall on Economic Growth,” The Scottish Journal of Political Economy, III (02. 1956), 1–18.Google Scholar

2 Buckley, Kenneth, Capital Formation in Canada, 1896–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955) andGoogle ScholarRosenbluth, Gideon, Concentration in Canadian Manufacturing Industries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

3 See Hoselitz, Bert F., “Patterns of Economic Growth,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXII (11. 1955), 416–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Barbour, Violet, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950).Google Scholar

5 Thomas, Brinley, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). See alsoGoogle ScholarLewis, Arthur, “International Competition in Manufactures,” American Economic Review, XVII (05 1957), 578–95Google Scholar.