Theory and Historiography

Over the years I have published a number of articles that were explicitly or implicitly historiographical in their subject matter. The core message of them all is best captured by a short piece I wrote for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Economic History Association, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,” arguing that the best work in the field resulted from cross-disciplinary conversations between economists and historians. The sad truth of the matter is that such conversations have been relatively rare since the cultural turn in history in the mid-1970s, and the recent surge of interest in the history of capitalism has not revived them. As I argue in “Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution,” “Cultural Change and Business History,” and “Corporate Governance and the Expansion of the Democratic Franchise: Beyond Cross-Country Regressions,” there is much to bemoan about economists’ approaches to history. However, most of my work has focused on highlighting ways in which historians could improve their scholarship by borrowing the economist’s habit of testing hypotheses. Historians often write as if it were sufficient simply to make a plausible case for their ideas. Yet even a cursory glance at the economics literature is enough to demonstrate that many plausible ideas turn out to be wrong when they are subjected to rigorous testing. All plausibility really does is get an idea into the set of hypotheses that are worth scrutinizing. If one doesn’t go on to subject plausible hypotheses to further testing, one can make serious errors of inference. For example, as I show in “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” a failure to make simple comparison tests led historians to exaggerate the differences in economic behavior between farmers, on the one hand, and “capitalists” (merchants and manufacturers), on the other. Similarly, I argue in “Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty” that counterfactual analysis can help historians guard against a naïve acceptance of historical actors’ own narratives of their actions. My most sustained attempt to induce historians to introduce more economic theory and hypothesis testing in their work was a joint effort with Daniel M. G. Raff and Peter Temin to demonstrate the utility of the economics of imperfect information for the study of business history. We ran three conferences at the National Bureau of Economic Research that showcased exemplary work, and then synthesized the implications in “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a New Synthesis of American Business History,” published in the American Historical Review in 2003. The three sets of conference papers were published, along with comments on them by distinguished scholars, by the University of Chicago Press in 1991, 1995, and 1999.

Related Publications:

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Cultural Change and Business History,” Business and Economic History On-Line 15 (2017).

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Beyond the Old and the New: Economic History in the United States,” in The Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History, ed. Francesco Boldizzoni and Pat Hudson (London: Routledge, 2016), 35-54.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Corporate Governance and the Expansion of the Democratic Franchise: Beyond Cross-Country Regressions,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 64 (issue 2, 2016): 103-21.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,” Journal of Economic History 75 (December 2015): 1251-57.

Sven Beckert, et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101 (September 2014), 503-36.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Taking Counterfactual History Seriously,” California History 89 (Dec. 2011): 39-50.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Business History and Economic Theory,” in Oxford Handbook of Business History, eds. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37-66.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking Microhistory: A Comment,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Winter 2006): 555-61.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Against Whig History,” Enterprise and Society 5 (Sept. 2004): 376-87.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” Journal of American History 90 (Sept. 2003): 437-61.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 404-33.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Reframing the Past: Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty,” Enterprise and Society 2 (Dec. 2001): 632-59.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, eds., Learning By Doing in Firms, Markets, and Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 59-84

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “New Economic Approaches to the Study of Business History,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 57-79.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Daniel M. G. Raff, eds., Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).