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It's a Long, Long Road to Tipperary, or Reflections on Organized Violence, Protection Rates, and Related Topics: The New Political History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Lance E. Davis
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Abstract

Twenty years ago Professor Frederic C. Lane recognized the close connection between economics and political history and suggested that it is impossible to understand fully the first without some understanding of the second. Relatively little work has been done in that area over the ensuing two decades. In that period both social and political historians have become more quantitative, and although their work has permitted us to discuss some alleged explanations of social and political development, it has not really produced viable alternatives. This failure is linked with the theoretical nature of the analysis. Although there does not appear to be a useful body of theory in sociology, positive political science offers such a structure for our understanding of political history.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1980

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References

1 The Conrad and Meyer article is certainly the one most frequently included in collections of the new economic history, and most practitioners appear to assign it historical precedence. Fogel and Engerman, for example, argue, “If any single essay can be identified as the study that launched the New Economic History it is ‘The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South’ by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer.” Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), p. 310Google Scholar.

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15 An area my colleague, Charles Plott, calls polinomics, taught perhaps, as Kousser suggests, by polygnomes.

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