The Program Committee for the thirty-seventh annual meeting of the Economic History Association was formed in late November 1976, ten months before the convention. The Committee selected the participants whose papers are published in this issue after a comprehensive consultation procedure with a large and wide-ranging sample of members of the Association. The basic guidelines followed by the Program Committee may be briefly stated. First, it was felt that the session topics should pertain to past achievements in the field, as well as reflect issues relevant to the 1970s. Hence, it was decided to include a “summing up session,” in which the importance and achievements of three influential schools in economic history could be evaluated. The three other sessions, as well as the majority of workshops, dealt with issues which were felt to be of considerable interest to scholars at present and in the foreseeable future.

More and more it seems that presidential addresses are an occasion for reflecting on matters of method and on the nature of scholarly disciplines. Perhaps this is because these addresses are usually given after dinner, and sated audiences are notoriously indifferent to specialized scholarship. But today we are inaugurating an innovation and have scheduled this talk for an earlier hour. This is not because we feared the membership would be too sleepy after eating to pay attention—you may be just as sleepy after a long day of papers and discussions—but rather to free you all for the gastronomic and touristic pleasures of New Orleans by night. And so, if I may presume on your gratitude for this thoughtfulness, I should like to put before you some of my own reflections on the character and direction of our discipline. I do so the more readily because I am the first president of the Association in some years now to have come to economic history from the side of history. This, I may say, is in itself a capsule symptom of the changes in the profession.

The members of the Association must be sick to death of “The Achievements of the Cliometric School.” The health of a field, it is said, is inversely proportional to the percentage of essays on method, by which standard cliometrics itself was sick to death in childhood and is only just now recovering. The few essays on method appearing nowadays are usually commissioned, lack revolutionary fervor, and have become as predictable as sportswriting: gee whiz, how extraordinary has been the growth of cliometrics; cliometrics, of course, is gravely limited by its attachment to neoclassical economics; do not be alarmed by counterfactuals. Essays on method, like articles on the sportspage, irritate the players (nobody loves a critic), flatter the owners (in whose pay he sometimes labors), and hearten the loyal fen (with the written equivalent of the chant “We're number one”). They foreshadow the post-season banquets and their awards: Most Valuable Scholar, Best Book Reviewer (Golden Glove), or, in another mode, Best Historian in a Supporting Role, and Farce of the Year.

It is impossible within the confines of a short paper to provide an adequate survey of the main works in Marxist economic history. The most that can be done is to introduce a limited number of issues that best illustrate the contributions of Marxist scholars. The topics covered in this paper include feudalism and the decline of serfdom, the transition to capitalism, the crisis of the seventeenth century, the English Civil War, and the rise of factories. An attempt is made to integrate these subjects into a more or less chronological account of European history.

In his presidential address last year Robert Gallman quoted a letter written by Lucien Febvre to Marc Bloch. Febvre and Bloch were the first editors of the journal Annales, and Febvre's exhortation on this occasion to break down the barriers among the social sciences was only one among many. Gallman's “Notes on the New Social History” would have pleased both French scholars, especially the allusion to verve and “trumpet call.” Today we are concerned with the role of economics in the galaxy of disciplines the Annales claim to unify in their “grand alliance.”

Unfortunately, what follows does not answer the title question—although I conclude that the preponderance of current evidence answers yes, that economic burden did spark the Revolution. Rather, what follows elaborates the ingredients required for a definitive answer and, as a by-product, illuminates why the historical treatment of the origins of the American Revolution remains a muddle.

The formation of the Jewish national home in Palestine provides an opportunity to examine the economics of an unusual “nation building”: the planning and making of a national existence without a state. The revival of Jewish nationality in Palestine started in the late nineteenth century with the first immigration motivated by national ideology (Alia Rishona) and with, the establishment of the World Zionist Organization (1897), whose goal was to create a Jewish political entity and ultimately a state. It was not, however, until the end of World War I that the revival achieved momentum. The Balfour Declaration (November 1917) proclaiming Britain's intention to promote the formation of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine after the war provided the supportive political environment for the renewal of Jewish nation building. Moreover, both the League of Nations (which officially granted Britain the mandate) and the British government recognized the Zionist Organization as the legitimate representative of world Jewry and as the leading body of the emerging Jewish community in Palestine for matters concerning the national home. This gave the Zionist Organization an international legitimacy to add to its legitimacy among Jews as a quasi-governmental institution for the purpose of re-establishing their national existence.

Between 1900 and 1940, organized industry and the federal government, acting in conjunction with the states, created an American social welfare system. The two major participants in this process evolved along similar lines during this period. Both began as simple organizations and developed into complex, functional bureaucracies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the federal government did not exist as a social welfare entity. Private corporations, the first to face the administrative and economic problems posed by the development of national markets, created social welfare systems for their employees long before the New Deal. Until the depression, these efforts enjoyed clear supremacy. By the end of the 1930s, however, a distinctly “public” social welfare bureaucracy and program had been developed on the federal level. Corporations and the state underwent similar changes but at different times, and the difference in timing influenced their relations. This essay describes the growth of these public and private bureaucracies and identifies their similarities and differences during the early twentieth century.

The history of European trade is replete with cases of aggressive and restrictive commercial policies. These policies were part of the permanent nature of economic relationships among European nations from feudalism onward. Keynes' golden age passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace exaggerates the extent to which prewar Europe was a free trade zone.

Since the early seventies studies on the Italian economy of the thirties have become one of the liveliest aspects of the debate on Fascism as a whole. This trend reverses the long neglect of the early postwar period and the lack of information that went with it. Fresh ideas and facts are now contributed at a fast pace; all attempts to summarize views and trends are bound to be soon outdated by new research. The central notion of these recent studies is that some of the structural features of the present-day Italian economy came to life in the early thirties as a response to die depression.

The Japanese occupy a unique place in the history of America's immigrants. They were denied the privilege of naturalization (until 1952), forbidden to purchase or lease farm land (in California, 1913–1956), driven from their homes by the wartime evacuation and confined in concentration camps (1942–1945). Yet the Japanese are now one of the most successful of all ethnic groups in America. The narrative of this remarkable experience has been written often and well, and detailed studies of its political, legal, and social aspects have been made. Economic historians, however, have done relatively little to analyze and learn from the Japanese-American experience.

Since the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay, historians have implicitly recognized the significance of community characteristics on levels of economic opportunity. Nevertheless, even though the last two decades have witnessed the publication of a number of occupational mobility studies of a wide variety of communities, the nature of the community under examination has been largely overlooked. Thus, while the authors of these studies have frequently found different levels of mobility, the practical necessity of focusing on one community in these undertakings has precluded any systematic attempt either to explain variances among communities or to measure precisely the impact of community characteristics on levels of opportunity.

The purpose of the following essay is to evaluate the existing economic opportunities for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and to indicate the pace of their economic progress during the period 1890–1914. This purpose can best be achieved by viewing the mass migration of these European Jews in the proper perspective, that is, in terms of the dynamics of their situation at the places of original habitat; second, by differentiating successive cohorts of immigrants in terms of their skill composition, literacy, and degree of experienced urbanization, all elements important for the adaptability to and utilization of existing economic opportunities; third, by analyzing the structure of the U.S. industries that provided employment opportunities to the East European Jewish immigrants; fourth, by assuming the income level and standard of living of the native-born labor force as the yardstick for measuring the economic progress of the immigrants. Such an approach may broaden our understanding of the mechanism of adjustment that enabled the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe both to take advantage of existing economic opportunities and to create new ones.