Most of this literature centers on national economies. For Britain, the leading works include Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth (1688–1959) (Cambridge, 1964); R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981+). A revisionist work is N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985).
On the United States, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); Douglass C. North, Terry L. Anderson, and Peter J. Hill, Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (3d ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983); Lance E. Davis et al., American Economic Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States (New York, 1972).
On Italy, the best survey is in Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, eds., Storia d’Italia (Torin, 1973+), a magisterial multivolume work that includes both period volumes and topical histories on economic subjects.
On the low countries a national economic history that gives much attention to prices is J. A. van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries (New York, 1977).
Still a standard work on Sweden is Eli F. Hecksher, Sevriges ekonomiska historia fran Gustava Vasa (2 vols. in 4, Stockholm, 1935–49).
For Switzerland, see Antony Babel, Histoire économique de Geneve des origines au début du XVIe siècle (2 vols., Geneva, 1963).
Agriculture
On agriculture and price history see B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe: A.D. 500–1850 (London, 1963); E. Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (Paris, 1967); J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966); E. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Chicago, 1965); national and regional histories include Joan Thirsk et al., eds., The Agrarian History of England and Wales (8 vols., Cambridge, 1967 +); J. C. Toutain, Le produit de l’agriculture française de 1700 à 1958 (Paris, 1961); and Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe (London, 1980), which is specially helpful for central Europe; the English edition includes an additional bibliography on English agricultural history.
A general history of agriculture in the United States remains to be written; the leading works are still Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (2 vols., 1933; rpt. Washington, 1958), a work of remarkable scholarship; Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (1925; rpt. New York, 1941); Paul Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York, 1960); Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, 1963).
On harvest fluctuations, see W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuation and English Economic Life, 1480–1619,” Agricultural History Review 12 (1964) 28–46; idem, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic Life, 1620–1759,” Agricultural History Review 16 (1968) 15–31; C. Walford, “Famines of the World, Past and Present,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 42 (1879).
Technology, Energy, and Transportation
On technology and long-term change, a very large literature includes John A. Clark et al., “Long Waves, Inventions, and Innovations,” in Christopher Freeman, ed., Long Waves in the World Economy (London, 1983), 164–82; David Dickson, “Technology and Cycles of Boom and Bust,” Science 219 (1983) 933–36; Alan Graham and Peter M. Senge, “A LongWave Hypothesis of Innovation,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 17 (1980) 283–311; Alfred Kleinknecht, “Observations on the Schumpeterian Swarming of Innovations,” Futures 13 (1981) 293–307; Derek J. De Solla Price, “Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965) 568; an expression of skepticism appears in Nathan Rosenberg, “Technological Innovation and Long Waves,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 8 (1984) 7–24.
On secular trends in the history of energy, see Matthew Edel, “Energy and the Long Swing,” Review of Radical Political Economics 15 (1983) 115–30; George F. Ray, “Energy and the Long Cycles,” Energy Economics 5 (1983) 3–8.
On transportation and the long run, see Walter Isard, “A Neglected Cycle: The Transport-Building Cycle,” Review of Economic Statistics 24 (1942) 149–58; idem, “Transport Development and Building Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1942) 90–112.
War, Politics, and Imperialism
On war and long-term Economic movements, see Albert Bergesen, “Cycles of War in the Reproduction of the World Economy,” in Paul M. Johnson and William R. Thompson, eds., Rhythms in Politics and Economics (New York, 1985), 313–32; Paul P. Craig and Kenneth E. F. Watt, “The Kondratieff Cycle and War: How Close Is the Connection?” Futurist 19 (1985) 25–28; Edward R. Dewey, “Evidence of Cyclic Patterns in an Index of International Battles, 600 B.C.-A.D. 1957” Cycles 21 (1970) 121–58; Charles F. Doran and Wes Parsons, “War and the Cycle of Relative Power,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980) 947–65; L. L. Farrar Jr., “Cycles of War: Historical Speculations on Future International Violence,” International Interactions 3 (1977) 161–79; Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles, cited above; idem, “Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles,” International Studies Quarterly 29 (1985) 411–44; Richard K. Hoskins, War Cycles, Peace Cycles (Lynchburg, Va. 1985); J. S. Lee, “The Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China,” China Journal 14 (1931) 111–15, 159–63; Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh, 1960); Albert Rose, “Wars, Innovations and Long Cycles,” American Economic Review 31 (1941) 105–07; J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965 (New York, 1972); Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills, 1982)
On the rhythm of imperialism, see Albert Bergeson, “Cycles of Formal Colonial Rule,” in Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World System (Beverly Hills, 1980); idem, and Ronald Schoenberg, “Long Waves of Colonial Expansion and Contraction, 1415–1969,” in Albert Bergeson, ed., Studies of the Modern World-System (New York, 1980).
Culture
On culture and the long run, see John Langrish, “Cycles of Optimism in Design,” Design Studies 3 (1982) 153–56; J. Zvi Namenwirth, “The Wheels of Time and the Interdependence of Value Change in America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1973) 649–83; idem and J. Zvi Namenwirth and Harold D. Lasswell, The Changing Language of American Values: A Computer Study of Selected Party Platforms (Beverly Hills, 1970).
General Works on Price Movements: Economic Theory
The index to an economics textbook of 565 pages by Donald McCloskey contains the following entry: “price, pp. II, 1–565.” In the largest sense, all Economic theory is about price movements. For readers uninitiated in this discipline, the best starting point is a good textbook, of which there are many. Among broad surveys, Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics (14th ed., New York, 1990), is a graceful and good-humored introduction.
The academic discipline of economics is divided in two parts. Macroeconomics studies the aggregate “behavior” of economic systems and what some economists call “absolute price levels.” Microeconomics is about individual choices in the market, mostly by two mythical decision makers, the “consumer” and the “firm.”
Outstanding among textbooks on macroeconomics is Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, Macroeconomics (New York, 1978), which has the merit for historians of including chapters that explicitly apply theoretical models to historical events since 1960.
Specially relevant here is Charles W. Calomiris and Christopher Hanes, “Historical Macroeconomics and American Macroeconomic History,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers no.4935 (1994), 1–77, which argues for “an historical definition of the economy” in a “pathdependent way.” The authors give much attention to Kuznets cycles, which are often called “long swings,” but they have nothing to say about price revolutions, which would have strengthened their substantive case. Calomiris and Hanes are much interested in �
�aggregate-demand shocks,” which produce “endogenous changes in aggregate supply.” They add a bibliography, which is a helpful guide to recent economic literature on long swings, a subject that has come to life in the 1990s.
Among microeconomic texts, Donald N. McCloskey, The Applied Theory of Prices (New York, 1982) is fun to read and might be specially recommended to students of history. Its author is an economic historian with a sense of humor and an awareness of the human dimensions of his subject.
On price movements in general and the problem of inflation in particular, economists have generated a vast literature which offers many different theoretical models of price movements. Two empirical essays on changing fashions in economic thought are Paul Bairoch and Bouda Etemad, “La litérature périodique d’histoire économique contemporaine,” Annales E.S.C. 42 (1987) 369–401; and George Stigler, “Statistical Studies of Economic Thought,” in Essays in the History of Economics (Chicago, 1965), 31–50.
Among the leading schools of thought in the United States are various monetarist approaches, Keynesian theories, neoclassical cost-push and demand-pull models, administered price theory, new inflation or competitive inflation theories, sociopolitical models, and rational expectations theories.
Many economists in America today believe that price movements are determined primarily by variations in the supply of money. The classic statement of the monetarist model in the early twentieth century was Irving Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money (New York, 1911, 1920, 1922, rpt. 1963); also idem, Appreciation and Interest (New York, 1896), The Rate of Interest (New York, 1907), and The Theory of Interest (New York, 1930). For a memoir of this remarkable, very interesting and unjustly maligned man, see Irving Norton Fisher, My Father—Irving Fisher (New York, 1956).
The next generation of monetarists was led by Milton Friedman. In Isaiah Berlin’s disjunction between the hedgehog who knows one thing and the fox who knows many things, Friedman is a classic example of the academic hedgehog at work. His many works include “The Quantity Theory of Money: A Restatement,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (Chicago, 1956); The Optimum Quantity Theory of Money and Other Essays (Chicago, 1969); “The Role of Monetary Policy,” American Economic Review 58 (1968) 1–17. His major empirical work was published in a series of monographs: A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, 1963), Monetary Statistics of the United States (New York, 1970), and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom: Their Relation to Income, Prices, and Interest Rates, 1867–1975 (Chicago, 1982). Also important is Phillip Cagan, Determinants and Effects of Change in the Stock of Money, 1875–1960 (New York, 1965).
Another and more eclectic generation of monetary theory appears in Robert J. Barro and Stanley Fischer, “Recent Developments in Monetary Theory,” Journal of Monetary Economics 2 (1976) 151–55. Barro has also given us “Government Spending, Interest Rates, Prices, and Budget Deficits in the United Kingdom, 1701–1918,” Journal of Monetary Economics 20 (1987) 221–48; and Robert J. Barro and R. G. King, “Time-Separable Preferences and Intertemporal-Substitution Models of Business Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 99 (1984) 817–39.
For critiques of monetarism, see Robert J. Gordon, ed., Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics (Chicago, 1974); R. J. Ball, Inflation and the Theory of Money (London, 1964); Harry G. Johnson, Inflation and the Monetarist Controversy (Amsterdam, 1972–1976).
Keynesian models of price movements tend to differ from other approaches in their assumption that the movement of prices, wages, rents, and interest are “sticky” in various ways. See John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London, 1923); idem, A Treatise on Money (New York, 1930); idem, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London, 1936). The standard biography is R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London, 1963). For Keynesian approaches in America see Seymour Harris, The New Economics: Keynes’ Influence on Theory and Public Policy (London, 1947); James Tobin, The New Economics One Decade Older (Princeton, 1974); John Kenneth Galbraith, A Theory of Price Control (Cambridge, 1952); idem, Money (Boston, 1975); R. Clower and A. Leijonhufvud, “The Coordination of Economic Activities: A Keynesian Perspective,” American Economic Review 65 (1975) 182–88; Sidney Weintraub, “The Keynesian Theory of Inflation: The Two Faces of Janus,” International Economic Review 1 (1960); Axel Leijonhufvud, On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes (New York, 1968); Herschel Grossman, “Was Keynes a ‘Keynesian’?” Journal of Economic Literature 10 (1972) 26–35; Robert J. Barro, “Second Thoughts on Keynesian Economics,” American Economic Review 69 (1979) 54–59.
Neoclassical cost-push and demand-pull inflation models were developed in Richard T. Selden, “Cost-Push versus Demand-Pull Inflation, 1955–57,” Journal of Political Economy 67 (1959) 1–20; Robert J. Gordon, “The Demand For and Supply of Inflation,” Journal of Law and Economics 18 (1975) 871–74; idem, “Alternative Responses of Policy to External Supply Shocks,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1975) 183–204; Robert E. Lucas, “Some International Evidence on Output Inflation Trade-Offs,” American Economic Review 63 (1973) 326–34.
On administered price models and oligopoly theory, which hold that prices are determined in part by the distribution of economic power, see Gardiner Means, Industrial Prices and Their Relative Inflexibility, Senate Document 13, 74th Cong., 1st session (1935); idem et al., The Structure of the American Economy (Washington, 1939); Paul M. Sweezy, “Demand under Conditions of Oligopoly,” Journal of Political Economy 47 (1939) 569–73; U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Administered Prices, 86th Cong., 1st session (1959). On administered prices and excess demand, a suggestive essay is Martin S. Feldstein, “The Rising Price of Physicians’ Services,” Review of Economics and Statistics 52 (1970) 121–33.
“New inflation” models appear in W. David Slawson, The New Inflation: The Collapse of Free Markets (Princeton, 1981); and Frank C. Ripley and Lydia Segal, “Price Determination in 395 Manufacturing Industries,” Review of Economics and Statistics 55 (1973) 263–71.
Sociopolitical models of inflation include Fred Hirsch and John H. Goldthorpe, The Political Economy of Inflation (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Leon N. Lindberg and Charles S. Maier, The Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagnation (Washington, 1985); and Paul Peretz, “The Political Economy of Inflation” (thesis, Chicago, 1976).
Rational expectations theory hypothesizes that economic decisions are made not so much in response to past prices themselves as to perceptions of present and future prices in a world of incomplete information. This idea was put forward in John Muth, “Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements,” Econometrica 29 (1961) 315–35. It is examined in Milton Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy,” American Economic Review 58 (1968) 1–17; R. M. Solow, Price Expectations and the Behaviour of the Price Level (Manchester, 1969); S. J. Turnovsky and M. L. Wachter, “A Test of the ‘Expectations Hypothesis’ Using Directly Observed Wage and Price Expectations,” Review of Economics and Statistics 54 (1972) 47–54; Stephen Figlewski and Paul Wachtel, “The Formation of Inflationary Expectations,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63 (1981) 1–10; Clifford F. Thies, “Interest Rates and Expected Inflation, 1831–1914: A Rational Expectations Approach,” Southern Economic Journal 51 (1985) 1107–20.
Eclectic works include Gottfried Haberler, Inflation: Its Causes and Cures (Washington, 1966); Gardiner Means et al., The Roots of Inflation (New York, 1975); J. Popkin, ed., Analysis of Inflation, 1965–1974 (Cambridge, 1974); K. K. F. Zawadzki, The Economics of Inflationary Processes (London, 1965).
Other theoretical writings have centered on specific problems, including stagflation, disinflation, deflation, hyperinflation, long-term inflation, global inflation, the Economic consequences of inflation, methods of controlling inflation, price and wage controls, price relatives, price and wage movements, prices and income distribution, prices and interest, prices and emplo
yment, or prices and interest.
On stagflation, a difficult problem for neoclassical economics, see A. S. Blinder, Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (New York, 1981); Karl Brunner et al., “Stagflation, Persistent Unemployment, and the Permanence of Economic Shocks,” Journal of Monetary Economics 6 (1980) 467–92; Mokyr and Savin, “Stagflation in Historical Perspective,” cited above; Mancur Olsen, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, 1982).
Disinflation and deflation are periodically rediscovered as theoretical problems; see, e.g., Olivier Wormser, Déflation et dévaluation; Étude comparée de leurs effets sur les prix (Paris, 1938); Donald Franklin, “Risks of deflation,” Banker 136 (1986) 47.
Hyperinflation as a theoretical problem is studied from a monetarist perspective by Phillip Cagan, “The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (Chicago, 1956), 3–24.
Long-term inflation is the subject of Phillip Cagan, Persistent Inflation: Historical and Policy Essays (New York, 1979); and G. L. Bach, The New Inflation: Causes, Effects, Cures (Providence, 1958, 1973, 1974). Also useful are James Tobin, “Inflation: Monetary and Structural Causes and Cures”; Paul Beckerman, “Inflation and Inflation Feedback”; David Colander, “Towards a Real Theory of Inflation”; Thomas F. Wilson, “Institutional Change as a Source of Excessive Monetary Expansion”; Y. S. Brenner, “Sources of Inflation: Old and New”; Edward Marcus, “Inflation, the Terms of Trade, and National Income Estimates”; Patricia F. Bowers, “A Theoretical Analysis of the Exchange Process and Inflation”; Hyman P. Minsky, “Institutional Roots of American Inflation”; all in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages, 3–146, 265–77.
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