THEORY AND HISTORY IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF BRITAIN
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1988.tb01033.x |
| Date | 01 February 1988 |
| Published date | 01 February 1988 |
| Author | MarkA. Gray |
Sconirh
Journal
offolirical
Economy,
Vol.
35,
No.
1,
February
1988
0
1980
Scottish
Economic
Society
Review
Section
THEORY AND HISTORY IN THE
ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF
BRITAIN
MARK
A.
GRAY
Department
of
Economics
Heriot- Watt University
C.
H.
LEE,
The British economy since
1700:
A
macroeconomic perspective,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
1966,
pp.
ix
+
297, f25.00
(cloth)
f8.95
(paper).
The
publication
of
Clive Lee’s book marks
the return
of
economic historians to a
fundamental debate in the study of the
British growth experience, namely the
paradox
of
early industrialisation, rising
national income and trade superiority
followed by the most remarkable decline in
economic performance sustained by an
industrialised nation in its history over
recent generations. It is the familiar story
of success followed by consummate failure
to maintain that success.
If
the history
of
Britain’s growth record appears less drama-
tic and discontinuous, less the story
of
fundamental economic revolution, in the
light of the recent research cited throughout
Lee’s volume the ‘relative decline’
of
Britain still begs historical answers to both
invidious
and
tractable questions.
The fact that explanations
of
poor
growth
performance since the war have not been in
short supply makes the need for a
comprehensive explanation of the historical
decline of Britain particularly acute; and
indeed economic historians have not been
reluctant to offer detailed analyses
of
the
sources
of
economic decline. This new role
for the economic historian requires, natu-
rally, a familiarity with and a command
of
the economists’ conceptualisation
of
the
process
of
growth, development and in-
dustrialisation and the extensive and consis-
tent use
of
neoclassical steady-state analysis
in this book
is
one
of
its most attractive and
novel features.
So
Clive Lee’s book is
timely both as a survey of the “slow-and-
balanced growth” literature and its evidence
and as an interpretation
of
the (macro-
economic) manifestation
of
that pattern
of
economic evolution; similarly, Lee adopts a
structural perspective in the second half
of
the book in support
of
an explanation
of
recent growth performance which integrates
the Kaldorian analysis of distributive and
allocative performance with the more
abundant evidence for the later period
of
change in the structure
of
aggregate supply.
Historians, it seems, can discriminate
between the useful, appropriate, theory and
inappropriate
or
unpromising material.
This ability to use theory intelligently is
not,
of
course, entirely novel. When
Marshall suggested to Lord Acton that
Clapham be encouraged to write the
economic history
of
the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries it was principally
because he believed Clapham to possess
“.
. .
more analytical faculty than any other
thorough historian whom
I
have ever
taught”.’ Yet since the success
of
the
neo-classical reaction to Methodenstreit
historical economics, historical study using
economic theory and, more nearly an aim
of
the German school, the critique
of
theory
by means
of
history has become but a
marginal activity
of
the economic historian.
One finds it difficult to explain this attitude
without resort to the notion that it was the
economists rather than the historians who
pulled away from the supposedly historicist
brink towards which Roscher, Knies and
others were leading them: certainly the
resort to theory and history by theorists and
historians appears to have been transformed
by the neoclassical defence
of
inductive
theorising in the late nineties. More
recently,
of
course, this perverse division
of
labour has to some extent been curtailed
and more gallant cooperation
or
integration
of
historians and theorists is now possible.
Yet still it is difficult to think
of
more than a
‘Marshall to Lord Acton,
13
October
1897,
Cambridge University Library
Add.MSS.
6443
(e)
205.
92
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