Z: **Archived from Fall 2007**: American Economic History: Economics 113

Comments on Engerman and Sokoloff

Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (1994), "Factor Endowments: Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies" http://www.nber.org/papers/h0066

Comments on Sheridan

Richard B. Sheridan (1976), "Sweet Malefactor": The Social Costs of Slavery and Sugar in Jamaica and Cuba, 1807-54,” Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 2. (May, 1976), pp. 236-257 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0117%28197605%292%3A29%3A2%3C236%3A%22MTSCO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Comments on Goldin and Lewis

Claudia D. Goldin and Frank D. Lewis (1975), "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications," Journal of Economic History, Vol. 35, No. 2. (Jun., 1975), pp. 299-326 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28197506%2935%3A2%3C299%3ATECOTA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6

Comments on Temin "Labor Scarcity"

Peter Temin (1966), “Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Sep., 1966), pp. 277-298 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28196609%2926%3A3%3C277%3ALSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U.

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Some interesting questions raised and points made:

• Is it really the case that it was easy and straightforward to transfer technologies from Britain to America and back? (Yen-Ju Lai)
• Doesn't it look more as if Americans were doing things that Britons simply didn't know how to do, rather than just being wasteful of raw materials? (Jerry Hong)
• It is the economist's way to look first at the different situations in which people are placed and the different incentives they face before resorting to explanations based on the "energy of the American people" or the ignorance of the British people (Lara Palanjian)
• Isn't Temin's definition of "technology" simply bizarre? (Wei Shao)
• Is it fair for Temin to narrow the debate to the "labor scarcity" issue, since Habakkuk deals with so much more? (Aseem Padukone)

Comments on Nelson "Alexander Hamilton"

John R. Nelson, Jr. (1979), “Alexander Hamilton and American Manufacturing: A Reexamination, “Journal of American History,” Vol. 65, No. 4. (Mar., 1979), pp. 971-995 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28197903%2965%3A4%3C971%3AAHAAMA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z.

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Some interesting questions raised and points made:

• If Nelson is right, where did the historical view of Hamilton as being the “foremost advocate of American manufacturing” came from? (Breana Pennington)
• Hamilton's foremost intentions were national security and paying off the war debt. American manufacturing took a backseat to this. (Chung Leung)
• Hamilton was not a believer in laisse-faire: hee urged the members of the Constitutional Convention to assume individual states’ debts, sought “a stable environment for economic activity and growth,” and favored the “monied men” rather than the “mass of the people.” (Lauren Tombari)
• Nelson’s article about Hamilton is really about today's question: should the government be involved in the economy by protecting domestic markets and creating regulations, or should it rather limit itself to enforcing contracts and protecting private property so that the free market economy can take its own course? (Anna Romanowska)
• Nelson seems to portray Hamilton as a politician with a secret agenda who disregards the interests of the people. But Hamilton won his political struggle with Madison and other politicians--people did agree with Hamilton, although the article makes it seem that Hamilton only looked out for the interests of a very small percentage of the population. (Sumana Maitra)

Comments on Diamond, "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently...?"

Jared Diamond (2000), "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?" http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html).

Comments on Diamond, "How to Get Rich"

Jared Diamond (2002), "How to Get Rich" http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p1.html.

Comments on Mann, "1491"

Charles Mann (2002), "1491," Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann.

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I found Grace Park's comment thought provoking: how should we evaluate Amerindian fire-setting in order to create the American countryside that they wanted? It's a good question. I don't have an answer. Sarah Lim laments the cruel irony of history: it was the corn developed by the Amerindians that saved the Pilgrims, and the diseases brought by the Pilgrims that killed the Amerindians.

Lauren Tombari asks a good question about relatively slow technological development: "does this imply that domestic animals and uniform agricultural climates are more important in determining development rates than population size?" I think it does. I think this is something that Diamond doesn't qite grasp.

Other comments I found especially interesting include John Janda, who starts well--saying that the article is "quite interesting although a bit biased"--but then, alas, doesn't tell us how it is biased. And Kristin Rose puzzles over why work done in the 1960 hasn't yet filtered down to America's elementary schools...

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And Charles C. Mann emails:

Dear Prof. DeLong,

While ego-surfing last night I came across your class page devoted to comments about my article. Needless to say I was quite flattered that you'd taken the time to inflict my work on your students.

In the spirit of keeping a discussion going, I thought I'd respond to some of your students' questions. If this isn't useful, please feel free to ignore.

Breana Pennington correctly observes that I "barely mentioned the horrible [e]ffects of the wars that went on between the whites and indians." This is because I was writing about demography and demographically they didn't amount to much. By the 18th century, disease had already wiped out 75-95% of the native population of the Americas. Indian warfare, awful as it often was, simply piled on another few percentage points to the mortality count.

In reference to Richard Schimbor's comment, David Thomason is spot on. Incidentally, I don't think this mode of argument gets the Europeans morally off the hook. It seems to me that you could make the argument that attacking the relatively few survivors of once- thriving peoples is morally worse than attacking healthy populations. But I'm not trained in moral philosophy, and so I stayed clear of an area that could really be a swamp. My focus, as I said in the piece, was less on how many died than how many had lived.

David Aviles, Ian Ebert and Lauren Tombari all ask (to quote Mr Aviles), "If [Indians] had such a large population, why hadn't they developed as much as other countries?" The answer to this very important question is complicated, but part of it surely is that evaluating relative levels of technological development is not so easy, and that it isn't at all clear that native peoples were less developed in this area than Europeans or Asians. As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

In addition -- sorry to go on at such length, but I think this is interesting to think about -- many European innovations were directly related to the existence of domestic animals. At the time of its construction, the Roman highway system had no direct equivalent in the Americas. Paved roads are obviously a sign of technological development, because you need them for large-scale transportation, right? But it would have been nuts for Indians to have built such roads, because they didn't have wheeled vehicles. And they didn't have wheeled vehicles (except as toys) because they didn't have horses, and they evidently calculated that the small gains in efficiency for human-powered vehicles was not worth the large costs in labor and materials to build highways, especially when rivers were an attractive alternative. (Compared to Europe, much of the Americas is river-rich.) So does this mean that Native America was less developed?

Lauren Tombari asks, "Wouldn´t there be some evidence of the many towns Desoto saw? Would there be ~100 million graves from the 95% death rate?" She will be happy to learn there is lots of evidence of the many towns seen by DeSoto. Although it is inexplicably absent from US history textbooks, there were literally thousands of mound cities and towns in the US Southeast and the Mississippi valley. Many have been destroyed, but my book, 1491, has a map of some of the main sites that remain. About the graves: the answer is no. In epidemics, people generally aren't buried, but left to die where they fall. The vast majority of those skeletons simply vanish. An example of this is the slaughter of the buffalo. We know from abundant historical records that less than 150 years ago hunters killed millions of bison in the Great Plains. Yet if you drive around there now, you don't see heaps of bones. The same, alas, happened to Indians. Of course it didn't happen to every Indian -- and there are many, many known Indian graveyards, so many that the federal government has passed special legislation to protect them.

John Janda would like to see "further explanations about how such [death] rates were determined." The original article contained more material, but it was cut by the editors, who were facing the task of fitting a very long article into the magazine. I subsequently published a bunch of the details and more material in Chapters 3 and 4 of my book.

Finally, Anna Romanowska says that Indians had no way to defend themselves from forced labor. Actually, this seems not to be the case. Remember, we're talking about 16th century Europe here, not today's Europe. The Europeans arrived at the end of a very long and unstable supply pipeline. In almost every case, natives pushed away early attempts to settle. Only when disease altered the equation were Europeans able to shoulder their way in. In this country, the French, Spanish, Dutch and English made more than 20 attempts to found colonies before the Pilgrims. All but one of them failed. The exception was Jamestown, in which almost 5 out of 6 colonists sent in the first 15 years died -- something that most people would regard as a failure. (St. Augustine, in Florida, was founded before Plimoth, but it was abandoned for years before being resettled, so I would count it as a failure, too.) Then comes the epidemic in New England, and suddenly, beginning with the Pilgrims, almost every English colony survives and thrives.

Hope this is interesting,

CCM

Charles C. Mann

Comments on Yeager

Timothy Yeager (1995), “Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America.” Journal of Economic History 55 (December 1995): 842-59 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199512%2955%3A4%3C842%3AEOSTSC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9.