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CLAH Lecture: Living with History as a Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

Herbert S. Klein
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Looking over the course of my half century working in the fields of LatinAmerican and US history, I find that from the beginning to the end I have beenworking in a relatively isolated area of our historical profession. I have beencommitted to history as a social science, and in that framework, using mostlycomparative and quantitative analysis to study themes related to basic socialand economic structures. In this I have been much influenced by the traditionalvision of the Annales school of historical research. I have also been totallycommitted to working within the social sciences, having completed a minordoctoral field in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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The Americas , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 291 - 301
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Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2016 

Looking over the course of my half century working in the fields of Latin American and US history, I find that from the beginning to the end I have been working in a relatively isolated area of our historical profession.Footnote 1 I have been committed to history as a social science, and in that framework, using mostly comparative and quantitative analysis to study themes related to basic social and economic structures. In this I have been much influenced by the traditional vision of the Annales school of historical research. I have also been totally committed to working within the social sciences, having completed a minor doctoral field in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

But the profession even in its older days was uneasy with its social science label, a label that it seems to have mostly abandoned in the current era. In the 1960s when I first began to publish, history journal editors were often reluctant to publish work containing tables, though that quickly changed. They also found dual-author articles rather strange: to this day you will find very few such articles in historical journals, although they are common to the other social sciences.

After completing my studies in History and Anthropology at Chicago, working with Eric Wolf and Seth Leacock among others, I continued my training in the social sciences as a junior faculty member, working closely with an extraordinary group of other junior faculty members in the social sciences at Chicago. These included Robert Fogel and Philippe Schmitter, in economics and political science, and through them I read extensively in the social sciences literature and began learning quantitative methodology. This post-doctoral education continued in my early years at Columbia, where I worked with sociologists Donald Treiman and Jonathan Kelley on questions of social mobility.

It was Donald Treiman who introduced me to the more sophisticated applications of statistical analysis. I went through the punch-card and card-sorter phase for my first article on the slave trade and then moved on to the mainframe in the late 1960s, complaining about every new invention or procedure which I had to learn. But despite the fact that I was the only historian working at the computer centers at Chicago and Columbia, I persevered. My greatest triumph over the machines was when I succeeded on my own in mounting and reading a Russian-made tape that Manuel Moreno Fraginals had sent to me from Cuba to be used in our analysis of slave prices.Footnote 2

From all this varied experience I learned that I enjoyed working with people with viewpoints and methodologies different from my own and that they in turn appreciated my own quite different historical vision. This enabled me to begin a long period of joint research and publication with economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, and with many historians as well. Although I have continued working alone like a traditional historian on numerous themes in colonial and modern Latin American history, early on I also worked with other scholars. My first joint article was with a young historian, Marcello Carmagnani, who I met in the mid 1960s when we were both working in the AGI [Archivo General de Indias] in Seville.Footnote 3 Through Robert Fogel I met the economist Stanley Engerman in Chicago in the mid 1970s and began working with him on themes of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, as well as on the history of prices.Footnote 4

When I moved to Columbia in 1969, I started my first work on Brazil with the economist Nathaniel Leff.Footnote 5 I also began a collaboration with the sociologist Jonathan Kelly on questions of social mobility.Footnote 6 Then, in the 1970s, I began an entirely new field, the study of Spanish and Spanish American royal finance, in collaboration with two historians, the late John Tepaske and Jacques Barbier. My work with John Tepaske resulted in a multivolume publication of royal financial accounts for the major viceroyalties of the New World.Footnote 7 Jacques Barbier and I produced a series of articles on Spanish royal finance.Footnote 8

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I started teaching in Brazil, where I collaborated with the historical demographer Clotilde Pavia on studies of the free-colored in Minas Gerais.Footnote 9 In that same period Iraci Costa de Nero introduced me to the economist Francisco Vidal Luna, with whom I have published five books and numerous articles and with whom I continue to work on new studies on modern Brazil.Footnote 10 Along the way I edited a book with the economist Edmar Bacha and joined forces with David Eltis to help produce the first slave voyages collection, and even produced a book with my former student Ben Vinson.Footnote 11 Despite my intense interest in Latin America, I also found time to do several monographs on the United States, one of which was a joint work with the historian Laird Bergad.Footnote 12

Beyond interacting with scholars from other disciplines and other countries, I have even had the temerity to retrain myself as a Brazilian historian, despite all my years of work in Spanish America. If that was not odd enough, I decided to teach quantitative methodology to historians. This I did for many years at Columbia and Stanford, as well as the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella [Buenos Aires], the Colegio de Mexico, the Universidad Nacional de Chile, the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade Federal do Paraná. Thus my career in both research and writing, and teaching, has been an unusual one by the standards of the profession.

I have not suffered for being a relative outsider, but have gotten the usual awards, grants, editorships and teaching positions. Occasionally, I would run into historians who thought my work was ahistorical because I used punch cards and worked with numbers. But these objections were part of the normal debates of the period. Recently, however, I have found the profession less and less accommodating to my type of work, at least here in the United States. It is true that numerous new fields of study have emerged among historians in recent years, many quite original and interesting, and they are worthy of respect for their innovative approaches. But there is a growing lack of tolerance among North American historians for my kind of quantitative and comparative work or studies that do not fit into the new styles, especially in the field of social history where I do most of my own research. What has disturbed me most is my extensive reading of recent theses being produced at leading American universities. Over the past 12 years as editor of the Cambridge University Press Monograph series on Latin America, I have read 30 to 40 of these dissertations from leading centers. Many of them demonstrated little or no sense of how to sample data, confused supposed canonical cases for whole classes of persons or events, and evidenced little awareness of traditional literature or comparative sense. At times, they were written in an impenetrable language.

This inward turning of the profession toward the humanities is occurring just as the other social sciences are making ever deeper commitments to historical research and taking up themes that used to be treated by historians. This in fact is a major shift within the social sciences, which a half century ago were far less interested in historical questions, and when historians were far more willing than now to do serious research in economic, political, social, and even demographic history.

While all fields in the social sciences have become more historically oriented, the biggest change has come in economics. Not only do you have economic historians doing this research, but also mainline economists. Today the call from leading economists in many fields is for a deeper understanding of historical process as a fundamental aspect of economic research. As Thomas Piketty has famously argued, economics without history is not a science.Footnote 13 His arguments have been supported by a diverse group of economists, especially in the recent discussion of the world economic crisis of 2008, which has revived interest once again in the causes of the Great Depression and the impact of historical financial crises in general.Footnote 14

But there also has been important new research by economic historians, and on a host of topics. In my own field of study there is little question that the work of economists has been fundamental in enriching the historical study of African slavery in Latin America. Yet, there have recently appeared studies on slavery and capitalism by US historians that virtually ignore all this accepted research.Footnote 15 This is a rather shocking indication of the growing divide between history and economics, just at a time when other research areas have been deeply enriched by their study of economics. Thus, political scientists, as well as economists, have been much influenced by what has been labeled the New Institutional Economics and involves analysis both of contemporary institutions that affect markets and the historical origin of those institutions. Economists such as North, Sokoloff and Engerman and Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, to mention just a few, have generated enormous international interest in their attempts to discover the factors that created the institutions which later determined the economic and social developments of a given society, and why some societies evolved institutions that promoted wide-scale economic growth and others retained institutions that rewarded only a few at the expense of the many.Footnote 16

Some have argued that initial resource endowments have defined later economic developments, whether they be mines or fertile lands. Others have argued that the determining factors were pre-existent population densities and empires conquered by Europeans, as opposed to sparsely settled regions where Europeans established colonies. Whether it was resource endowments, disease environments, pre-existent social structures, or other initial factors that lent themselves variously to elite exploitation or to more egalitarian outcomes, the ideas are openly debated. But all these influential new institutional economists have argued, following the lead of Douglas North, that these initial factors influenced later social and economic institutions and that these historic institutions in turn help to explain the differences in contemporary economies and societies.

Some of the new institutional economists have carried out a lively and ever more interesting debate about why backward Europe and not Asia ended up dominating the rest of the world after 1500. This so called “divergence” debate has proposed a plethora of hypotheses as to whether it was Europe's concentration of artisans in urban centers, the constant aggressive warfare by the small states of Europe, the European family model, an early commitment to property rights, the availability of new American lands for an exhausted Europe, or a host of other institutions that led to European domination.Footnote 17 Whatever the model, the outpouring of books on this subject has in fact led to some first-class historical research by economists and historians.

But economics is not the only social science where major historical research is being done. Several of the themes central to the New Institutional Economics stress the role of political institutions, and these are also central to recent political science literature. Also, many of the areas currently being examined by political scientists are ones that historians deal with as well. To give just a few examples, the study of the origins and evolution of the modern welfare state, in which I have been involved for several years, has generated a controversial sociological and political science literature that tries to explain how such state institutions were created, where the ideas for them originated, and which classes and groups have supported them. Fortunately, this is one area where historians, political scientists, and sociologists have all continued to do detailed historical studies.Footnote 18

There are other areas of study, however, in which I see few historians working, but which could be of specific interest to Latin American scholars. The debate in political science about the viability of democratic systems, the nature of authoritarian regimes, and the question of transitions between the two, have all generated much discussion in the political science and sociology fields.Footnote 19 In fact, much of this literature goes back to earlier classic studies by sociologists and historians, as well as political scientists. As the sociologist Charles Tilly has suggested, in his study of state formation, “There is no way to create comprehensive, plausible, and verifiable explanations without taking history seriously into account.”Footnote 20 Similarly, historians are uniquely prepared to produce basic studies on historical inequality in ways that other social scientists are not equipped to do. I myself have explored this theme in a limited series of studies, and in our field it continues to be a major theme of debate among Mexican economists and economic historians.Footnote 21 Was inequality less marked in pre-industrial societies, or has society always been as highly unequal as today? What are the trends?

Historians can make use of wills and testaments, voting records based on property qualifications, tax lists, and militia records—all classic sources for such studies—to answer these questions. For example, there is a very lively debate in our field about income distribution in nineteenth-century Mexico.Footnote 22 Thus, we historians can actively engage in one of the most debated current issues in economics today, the question of trends in inequality. What is most useful to historians in the current political science literature is scholars' efforts to generate formal models. The questions they ask and the models proposed often provide an excellent set of themes that historians examining a particular historical case would find of great utility in organizing their own research. Unfortunately, the political scientists sometimes test these models using large cross-national datasets rather than with detailed historical analysis. While historians do not have to wade through these exercises in statistical analysis, they can nonetheless extract from them some excellent questions and models that can guide their own detailed research and nourish significantly these ongoing debates among the political scientists.

It is surprising to me that when I first began to write and do research in the 1960s and 1970s it was historians who were major participants in some of the research fields now dominated by political scientists, for example, the study of legislatures and elections. But recently, these fields have been neglected by historians and are now worked more assiduously by others. There are also fields that historians entered in a major way in combination with other social scientists, only to abandon those interests more recently. An example of this is the early work in demographic history, which saw a very active participation of both historians and demographers, but has now seen a falling away of historians, with fewer of them committed to this field.Footnote 23

Yet, some of the biggest recent debates are unresolved and still awaiting more systematic historical research. Thus, for example, the cause of the mortality revolution, one of the great historical changes in human history, is still a much debated issue. Was it modern medicine, sanitation and public health policies, or simply better nutrition that led to the extraordinary decline in mortality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century?Footnote 24 That historians can become active participants in these debates is shown by the recent growth of the subfield of anthropometric historical studies, that is, the study of the heights of populations as an indicator of health standards. Taking the lead of economists, who first explored this notion, historians especially in Latin America, are producing an impressive literature on the subject.Footnote 25

This major takeover of whole fields of historical studies by the other social sciences has resulted in both good historical research and a spate of poorly conceived and executed “historical studies.” There have been many path-dependency studies done by economists who have demonstrated a critical lack of serious historical research, just as there have been studies by political scientists who use large datasets to make claims with little historical depth that are based on questionable variables as proxies for basic historical indices. This in no way invalidates the need to work with these scholars—or to use their models and hypotheses to test them through detailed historical research. We have the tools and abilities that the other social sciences lack, and their need for our work is fundamental.

Jared Diamond and other social scientists have even proposed that history is the prime laboratory for social science research, since it allows for “natural experiments” that are otherwise unavailable to most of the social sciences. They often cite to the contrasting development of North and South Korea after World War II as an excellent case for such a quasi-natural experiment, but they have also found value in studies of the impact of the slave trades on various societies of Africa, the varying institutional changes in European countries conquered by the French Revolutionary armies, and in British colonial direct and indirect rule in India.Footnote 26 There are even important historical issues identified in some of the new biological sciences, above all genetics, that provide important tools to answer basic historical questions about the preconquest history of the Americas as well as post-contact migrations.Footnote 27 We historians could easily participate actively in these discussions, but I find few of my colleagues willing to read this work, or engage these issues.

What also impresses me is that this falling away from the social sciences is very much a North American and, to a lesser extent, a Northern European characteristic. From my work in Latin America I have a sense that historians in those countries and in Southern Europe—especially in France, Iberia, and Italy—are far more open to the social sciences and have been more engaged with them from the beginning than their counterparts in the United States. In these countries, as in the United States, new cultural studies have emerged, but they are not as dominant as they are here. Rather, they are just one of many related approaches, thanks in part to the continuation of the older Marxist tradition and to the ongoing influence of the Annales school. It may be for this reason among US historians my writings on Latin America have greater resonance than my writings on the United States. In this country social scientists have responded well to my studies on population, for example, but few US historians find them interesting. At the same time I have recently found an unusual niche for my recent work in Brazilian social history, where I have been marked as a historical sociologist. Since sociology in Brazil is far less quantitatively committed than it is here in the United States, I have been asked to write articles on contemporary social change from a broad historical perspective for several major collections of general or modern Brazilian history, a subject that is usually the area of competence of sociologists.Footnote 28

However much effort it takes, we should not turn our backs on the social sciences and create our own stunted versions of economic or social history, as has recently been argued by several historians.Footnote 29 As Naomi Lamoreaux has suggested, there is a middle ground in which both groups can work fruitfully and enrich both fields. The questions these economists and other social scientists ask are fundamental. There is no reason why historians cannot deal with these issues and provide valuable insights into these questions, or even directly challenge these causal models.Footnote 30 Whether they do history well or poorly, these social scientists have offered interesting and important hypothesis that can be fruitfully used and tested by historians.

What I can say from all this reading and personal experience is that the social sciences, which when I began my career often tended to be ahistorical, have now overwhelmingly abandoned this hostility and moved toward a fuller appreciation of the importance of historical understanding for answering some of the most basic questions they treat. It is my hope that historians will read this literature and respond to it creatively. My plea, then, is not for the profession to abandon its current concerns with agency or identity, for example, but to also provide for and tolerate alternative approaches. I hope that in the future more of us can rejoin the social sciences and participate in these important debates. Otherwise our work will be done badly by others, and we in turn will find ourselves less and less relevant and ever more isolated from the major issues facing the modern world.

References

1 Herbert S. Klein, the Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and long-time professor at Stanford University, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator of the Latin America Collection at that institution's Library & Archives. He is the 2015 recipient of the Conference on Latin American History's Distinguished Service Award. This lecture was delivered as he received the award at the CLAH annual conference in Atlanta, January 2016.

2 Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, Klein, Herbert S., and Engerman, Stanley “Nineteenth Century Cuban Slave Prices in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 88:4 (December 1983): 1201–1218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Klein, Herbert S., with Carmagnani, Marcello, “Demografía histórica: la población del obispado de Santiago, 1777–1778,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de Historia 32:72 (Primer Semestre, 1965): 57–74.Google Scholar

4 The works cited in this note and the succeeding are largely by Herbert S. Klein, with collaborations and exceptions as noted. With Engerman, Stanley, “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor: Notes on a Comparative Economic Model,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century, Fraginals, M. Moreno, Pons, Frank Moya, and Engerman, Stanley L., eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 255–269;Google Scholar “Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro,” Cahiers d'Études Africaines (Paris) 15:59, pp. 381-398; “Slave Mortality on British Ships, 1791–1797,” in Liverpool, The African Slave Trade and Abolition, Occasional Papers, Vol. 2, Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair, eds. (Liverpool: Historical Society of Lancashire and Chesire, 1976), 113–122; “Facteurs de mortalité dans le trafic française d'esclaves au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales. Économies, Societés, Civilisations 31:6 (l976), 1213–1223; “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and their Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly 35:2 (April 1978): 357–374; “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor: Notes on a Comparative Economic Model,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor, Fraginals et al., eds., 255–269; “A demografia dos escravos americanos,” in População e sociedade. Evolução das sociedades pré-industriais, Maria Luiza Marcílio, ed. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984), 208–227; jointly with Katia Mattoso, “Trends and Patterns in the Prices of Manumitted Slaves: Bahia, 1819–1888,” Slavery & Abolition (London) 7:1 (May 1986): 59–67; “Methods and Meanings in Price History,” in Growth and Integration in the Atlantic Economy: Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America, Lyman Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 9–20.

5 With Leff, Nathaniel, “O crescimento da população não Européia antes do início do desenvolvimento: O Brasil do século xix,” Anais de História 6 (1974), 51–71 Google Scholar

6 With Kelley, Jonathan, “Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory of Stratification in Post-Revolutionary Society,” American Journal of Sociology 83:1 (July l977), 78–79;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory Applied to the National Revolution of Bolivia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

7 With Tepaske, John, Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America, 1580-1825. (3 vols.; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Ingresos e egresos de la Real Hacienda en Nueva España (2 vols.; Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia, 1986, 1988; These 5 volumes are available in Excel files at http://realhacienda.colmex.mx/.

8 With Barbier, Jacques, “Revolutionary Wars and Public Finances: The Madrid Treasury, 1784–1807,” Journal of Economic History 41:2 (June 1981): 315–339;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Las prioridades de un monarca ilustrado: el gasto público bajo el reinado de Carlos III, 1760–1785,” Revista de Historia Económica 3:3 (1985): 473–495; and “Recent Trends in the Study of Spanish American Colonial Public Finance,” Latin American Research Review 23:1 (1988): 35–62.

9 With Paiva, Clotilde, “Slave & Free in 19th-century Minas Gerais: Campanha in 1831,” Slavery & Abolition (London) 15:1 (April 1994): 1–21;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Freedmen in a Slave Economy: Minas Gerais in 1831,” Journal of Social History 29:4 (June 1996): 933–962.

10 With Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Brazil since 1980 (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also, with the addition of de la Costa, Iraci, Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (São Paulo: EDUSP & Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2009);Google Scholar Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

11 With Vinson III, Ben, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed., revised (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

12 A Population History of the United States, 2nd ed., revised (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); with Bergad, Laird, Hispanics in the United States, 1980–2005 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar

13 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, chapt. 1.

14 See for example Eichengreen, Barry, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Misuses of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015);Google Scholar and Reinhart, Carmen M. and Rogoff, Kenneth, This Time Is Different (Princeton University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

15 See for example Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014);Google Scholar and Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).Google Scholar For reviews by economic historians of the Baptist book, see Logan, Trevon D., Olmstead, Alan L., et al., Journal of Economic History 75:3 (September 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46708, accessed August 14, 2016; and the review of the Walter Johnson book by the historian Philip Morgan in the American Historical Review 119:2 (April 1915), pp. 462–464. These authors note the absence of an engagement with the traditional economic history literature on the subject, and even the absence of historians who wrote on these subjects in the past century. In contrast, see the very positive review of the Baptist book by Eric Foner, New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 3, 2014, which shows no awareness of these problems. As Naomi Lamoreaux has noted, both this book and Becket's, Sven Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)Google Scholar “reveal the significant errors that resulted from the author's lack of economic intuition or knowledge of research findings bearing on their topics.” Lamoreaux, Naomi, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,” Journal of Economic History 75:4 (December 2015): 1251–1257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 A key pioneering work is North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A useful survey of the early work in this new institutional economic history is found in Nunn, Nathan, “The Importance of History for Economic Development,” Annual Review of Economics, 2009, Vol. 1: 65–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For compilatons of many of their earlier articles, see Sokoloff, Kenneth L. and Engerman, Stanley L., Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);Google Scholar and Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James A., “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91 (2001): 1369–1401;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002): 1231–1294; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95 (May 2005):546–579; and Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A subset of these debates concerns the development of differing legal institutions and their impact on the economy. See La Porta, Rafael, de Silanes, Florencio Lopez, and Shleifer, Andrei, “The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins,” Journal of Economic Literature 46:2 (June 2008): 285–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Coatsworth, John H., in “Inequality, Institutions, and Economic Growth in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40 (2008): 545–569 CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a useful critique of these new models as they apply to Latin America.

17 Wong, R. Bin, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);Google Scholar Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Hajnal, John, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History, Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C., eds. (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 101–146;Google Scholar Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Wong, R. Bin, Before and Beyond Divergence; The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the new work of Hoffman, Philip T., Why Europeans Conquered the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 The basic works are by the sociologists Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1990)Google Scholar, and Skocpol, T., Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University. Press 1995).Google Scholar In addition, there is the important historical survey by the economist Lindert, Peter, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Among historians producing first-class research on this topic are Baldwin, Peter, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Dutton, Paul V., Origins of the French Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Limiting discussion to only a few of these themes, one can begin with the older studies by O'Donnell, Guillermo, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1979)Google Scholar; and the volume edited by O'Donnell, Guillermo and Schmitter, Philip, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. From there, one might go on to raising such questions as why military regimes peacefully leave office, which occurred throughout Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. That theme is analyzed by Wintrobe, Ronald, “The Tinpot and the Totalitarian: An Economic Theory of Dictatorship,” American Political Science Review 84:3 (1990): 849–872 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One might also ask why and how it is that states adopt similar reforms or even common revolutionary activities. See Weyland, Kurt, ”Theories of Policy Diffusion: Lessons from Latin American Pension Reform,” World Politics 57:2 (January 2005): 262–295 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A good review of the debates in political science about the role of presidents and parliaments in Latin America is found in Munck, Gerardo L., “Democratic Politics in Latin America:New Debates and Research Frontiers,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 437–462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Tilly, Charles, “Why History Matters,”in Oxford Handbook of Political Science, Goodin, Robert E., ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 525 Google Scholar.

21 Klein, Herbert S., “A participação politíca no Brasil do século XIX: os votantes de São Paulo em 1880,” Dados. Revista de Ciéncias Sociais (Rio de Janeiro) 38:3 (1995): pp. 527–544.Google Scholar This work formed part of the dataset used by the economists Bértola, Luis, Castelnovo, Cecilia, Rodríguez, Javier, and Willebald, Henry, in “Income Distribution in the Latin American Southern Cone during the First Globalization Boom and Beyond,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50:5–6 (2009): 452–485;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also my work with Willis, Edmund P., “The Distribution of Wealth in Late Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Histoire Sociale/Social History (Ottawa):18:36 (November 1985): 259–283.Google Scholar

22 See for example González, Rafael Dobado, and Montero, Héctor García, “Colonial Origins of Inequality in Hispanic America: Some Reflections Based on New Empirical Evidence,” Revista de Historia Económica 28:2 (2010): 253–277;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Coatsworth, “Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America.”

23 This began with the work of Henry, Louis, Manuel de démographie historique (Geneva: Droz, 1967)Google Scholar. who proposed a model using parish records to reconstruct historical demographic indices, which resulted in producing an abundant literature in family reconstitutions for Mexico and Brazil. For Latin America, see for example my essay “Familia y fecundidad en Amatenango, Chiapas, 1785–1816,” Historia Mexicana 36:2 (October-December 1986): 273–286; as well as the survey by Romero, Cecilia Andrea Rabell, La población novo hispana a la luz de los registros parroquiales (Mexico: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1990)Google Scholar; Marcilio, Maria Luiza, Caiçara, terra e população (São Paulo: Paulinas-Cedhal, 1986)Google Scholar; and most recently Inostroza, Xochitl, “Matrimonio y familia en sociedades andinas: propuestas desde la reconstitución de familias de Santiago de Tacrama o Belén. Altos de Arica, Virreinato del Perú (1763–1820),” Historia (Santiago) 47:1 (2014): 65–90.Google Scholar In turn, the so-called Cambridge School led by Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost, (New York: Scribner, 1973)Google Scholar, and Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, had its impact in early colonial US history in the works of historical demography, including those by Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth; Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Lockridge, Kenneth A., A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: Norton, 1970)Google Scholar. See the survey of this work by Archer, Richard, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 47:4 (October 1990): 477–502 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See the controversial studies of McKeown, Thomas, The Modern Rise of Population (London: Edward Arnold, 1976)Google Scholar; and Fogel, Robert W., The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For alternative arguments on the impact of public policies as primary influences see Cutler, David M. and Miller, Grant, “The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The Twentieth-Century United States,” Demography 42:1 (2005): 1–22;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Szreter, Simon, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline, c. 1850–1914: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine 1:1 (1988): 1–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the significant impact of actual medical interventions in the less developed countries of Latin America in the mid twentieth century—and the rejections of those interventions as a causal for the development of advanced societies—see Arriaga, Eduardo E. and Davis, Kingsley, “The Pattern of Mortality Change in Latin America,” Demography 6:3 (August 1969): 223–242 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 For a survey of the field see Richard H. Steckel, “Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions,” working paper 14536 (Cambridge: [US] National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008). Work in this area for Latin America includes López-Alonso, Moramay, Height, Health, Nutrition and Wealth: A History of Living Standards in Mexico 1870–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2000)Google Scholar; and Frank, Zephyr, “Stature in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro: Preliminary Evidence from Prison Records,” Revista de Historia Económica 24:3 (2006): 465–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 See Diamond, Jared and Robinson, James A., eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. A classic and often-cited study of a natural experiment is that of Card, David and Krueger, Alan B., “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84:4 (September 1994): 772–793.Google Scholar

27 See my essay, “The First Americans: The Current Debate,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 46:4 (Spring 2016): 543–561.

28 Klein, Herbert S., with Luna, Francisco Vidal, “Mudanças sociais no período militar (1964–1985) in Cinquenta anos: a ditadura que mudou o Brasil, Aarão, Daniel et al., eds. (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editora, 2014), 66–91;Google Scholar and Klein, “População e sociedade, 1960–2000,” in Historia do Brasil Nação: 1808–2010, 5 vols., Leila Schwarz, ed. (São Paulo: Fundación Mapfre & Editora Objetivo, 2014), Vol. 5, 31–73.

29 Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy, “The Fall and Rise of Economic History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2014. For an attempt to weld cultural history with a very strange reading of economic history, see the recent essay by Lipartito, Kenneth, “Resassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,” American Historical Review 121:1 (February 2016): 101–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 For a thoughtful discussion of how economists and historians can work together and the problems that will arise if they remain apart, see the essay by Lamoreaux, “The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary,”1251–1257.