Historians in general are rather suspicious of theories—and who is to blame them? The temptation to do violence to historical reality is strong, and must be resisted with might and main. However, bad company will sooner or later corrupt even the best of manners; and the economic historian, owing to his long and intimate association with that bold and reckless crowd, the theorists, has finally learned to overcome his scruples and inhibitions. Like the children of Israel, he goes a whoring after Baalim: he tries to develop a general theory of economic growth.

The building of the Deseret Telegraph line by the Mormons in early Utah is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the intermountain West. It is the only known instance in which a major regional telegraph line was constructed and operated by a church. It is also the only case in which a major line was, from the beginning, a completely public enterprise. It is a remarkable example of the agency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) in promoting the economic welfare and cultural unity of its membership in the last third of the nineteenth century.

There is a widespread impression among students of American financial history that, in the period immediately following the panic of 1837, American financiers engaged in sharp practices amounting to the wholesale deception of British bankers and European investors. This impression has been fostered especially in connection with the well-known episode of the partial or complete repudiation of state bonds by Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Michigan, and Florida in the 1840's. According to the charge, the large British bankers originally transacted business in the United States only through old and established bankers and agents. This enabled them to avoid the more speculative securities. Much of the distribution of bonds in England was done through three British firms, which were prominent in the merchant-banking business for the American trade: Thomas Wilson & Co., Timothy Wiggin & Co., and Geo. Wildes & Co.—popularly known as the 3 W's. A change for the worse occurred—so the charge runs—when these firms were forced to suspend payments because of the financial strain in England and the United States in 1837. After the resumption of specie payments in the United States the following year, a more speculative type of American banker, assisted by high-pressure salesmen who were sent to England, was prominent in financiering. These agents were so persuasive that they involved the British bankers in the wildest of schemes, and these bankers, in turn, disposed of American securities to equally innocent investors.

When Clapham began to teach economic history at Leeds in 1902 Schmoller had just finished his Foundations of Political Economy, and the first edition of Sombart's Modern Capitalism had just appeared. In the early editions of J. A. Hobson's Evolution of Modern Capitalism many aspects of the Marxian interpretation of history were effectively expressed and afforded a clear measure of the stimulus that economic history was to receive from this general approach. But these influences were not the dominant factor in Clapham's thought at the beginning of his career or at any later period. His interests in history came from Lord Acton and from Alfred Marshall. Marshall was anxious to draw him into the field of economic history, “he was eager to get historical work done.” Clapham says in the Inaugural Lecture, “… he pointed out to me tracts of economic history which needed someone's work. Then he pointed at me and said—‘Thou art the man.’ I hesitated then, for Acton's power was on me, as I hope it still is. But Marshall has prevailed.”

The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.