Esse est percipi: the strange case of early American Economic History.

TO START A REVIEW ESSAY IN EARLY MODERN ECONOMIC HISTORY WITH A phrase associated with Bishop George Berkeley, one of that era's foremost immaterialists, is both ironic and depressing. But this phrase, esse est percipi--to be is to be perceived--captures well the present predicament economic historians of that period face. (1) Although some excellent work is still being done in the field of economic history, it is little appreciated, indeed, little read. (2) With a nod to the bishop, we might even ask: If an economic historian writes an article in the Journal of Economic History or in Explorations in Economic History, and no one reads it, did he or she really write it? Esse est percipi.

To be sure, there have been some positive developments in recent years, slivers of optimism, causes for hope. The ever-increasing availability of primary sources online and the development of new and/or improved data sets such as the wonderful Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and the enlarged section titled "Colonial Statistics" in the recently released millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States make it easier to study the early American economy. (3) The publication of impressive scholarly syntheses such as the colonial volume in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States and the relevant volumes in The Oxford History of the British Empire, among others, is well worth noting, too. (4) The rise of Atlantic history has generated more interest among scholars in flows of one type or another, including at times flows of labor, capital, and commodities. Cathy Matson's energetic leadership of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia has raised the profile of economic history a bit and thereby paid some dividends, so to speak. The interests of social, environmental, cultural, and even intellectual historians sometimes bleed, and occasionally even hemorrhage, into the economic realm, which raises the possibility of new alliances. Still, economic historians, particularly those of a quantitative ilk, are for the most part off in the corner counting by themselves.

Why is this the case? There are a number of reasons for the isolation, if not out-and-out quarantine, of economic history and economic historians from the scholarly mainstream in recent decades. The so-called cultural turn in historical circles in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in large-scale flight from what some call QUASSH--quantitative social science history--if not from the material world altogether. (5) For their part, economic historians, increasingly trained in departments of economics, looked to more "rigorous" scholarly audiences and venues, both because of their conversance and comfort with theory and formal methods and because traditional historical approaches and explanations--and perhaps historians as well--seemed to them (the Few, the Proud, the Numerate) so squishy, soft, and gelatinous. Moreover, some economic historians have eschewed clear, jargon-free prose accessible to those not mathematically inclined.

If economists doing economic history--or historical economics, as the most ardent regrettably tried to rename the field--were a bit bumptious and presumptuous about their more humanistic peers, traditional historians often set themselves up for such treatment. Since the 1980s, traditional historians have beat a fast retreat from what seventeenth-century political arithmetician Sir William Petty referred to as "number, weight, or measure," and most graduate admissions committees have looked at quants in the applicant pool as quaint, their 780 quantitative scores on the Graduate Record Examinations akin to artifacts in Little Nell Trent's grandfather's curiosity shop, or at best as atavisms associated with the deviant behaviorism "plaguing" the profession in the 1970s. (6) "Numbers just don't do it for me," a graduate student once told me, explaining why he skipped over any and all tables, figures, and graphs that appeared in any historical text he was assigned. (7) Tables, figures, and graphs, oh my!

Early in 2005 I asked Robert B. Townsend, Assistant Director for Research and Publications of the American Historical Association (AHA), to provide me with some data--the plural of anecdote, as some sardonically put it--to corroborate the argument above. He did so at the time in private communications and has recently formalized his findings in a very interesting piece in the AHA's Perspectives. According to Townsend, the percentage of history faculty members listing a specialization in economic history in that organization's annual Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians fell from 5.1 in 1975 to 2.3 in 2005 (this decline, broken down by five-year intervals, was linear). Among listing departments--and almost all schools with more than a handful of historians list--the percentage of departments reporting a faculty member with a specialization in economic history fell from 54.7 in 1975 to 31.7 in 2005. (8) The same pattern holds true, not surprisingly, in hiring, panels at scholarly meetings, and space in scholarly journals as well. Economic historians just don't figure any more--at least not very frequently or visibly!

Not that the field's problems begin and end with demographics. The range of sources available for quantitative analysis of the colonial period, though growing, is not nearly so great as the range available to economic historians of the data-rich middle period, much less the twentieth century. In this regard, my late colleague Robert E. Gallman, arguably the most distinguished empirical economic historian to have worked in the past half century, argued in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1999 that early American economic historians will probably never be able to get really reliable estimates of colonial Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because of data limitations. According to Gallman, the best we can probably hope for are estimates of early American capital stock, and even these would be difficult. (9) Ironically, though, another possible problem may relate to the field's traditional focus on GDP, capital stock, and other cold and sterile statistical measures derived from 1930s-vintage national income accounting. Such measures, of course, have long repelled traditional humanists, who consider them soulless, as well as many on the left, who, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, believe that such statistical representations drown all human sentiment "in the icy water of egotistical calculation." (10) Even among the few students for whom numbers do "do it" today, broader measures of material well-being are often more appealing, measures relating to consumption patterns, to nutrition and what some development economists refer to as the physical quality of life, and to "basic needs" (infant mortality rates, literacy levels, life expectancy, and the like). (11) Also appealing are still broader measures of well-being such as happiness and even psychic income. Part of the problem, in other words, may derive from the poverty of our own imaginations.

Then there is an additional "problem" in the form of an eight-hundred-pound scholarly gorilla that has dominated the field for over twenty years: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard's classic 1985 book, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789. (12) Although the book appeared as part of the [Omohundro] Institute of Early American History and Culture's Needs and Opportunities series, so authoritative was it that in the two decades after its appearance many scholars apparently interpreted this to mean: "If I want a scholarly opportunity, I need do something other than early American economic history, particularly the kind of economic history done by McCusker and Menard." Talk about the anxiety of influence! A comment made by McCusker himself in an essay in a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly in 1999 titled "The Economy of British North America"--the article by Gallman mentioned above appeared in the same issue--lends further support to this interpretation. In his essay a bemused McCusker registered his surprise that in the years since the publication of his and Menard's study, few of their central findings had been seriously challenged, much less contravened. (13) Two years later David Hancock and I made much the same point in separate presentations at a conference organized by PEAES entitled (what else?): "The Past and Future of Early American Economic History: Needs and Opportunities." (14) What goes around comes around, plus ca change, etc., etc.

Notwithstanding the disciplinary retreat (at the margin!) from the material world, dispiriting demographics, data limitations, impoverished imaginations, and eight-hundred-pound gorillas, let me at this time return to the point with which I began this essay: Some excellent work is still being done in the field of early American economic history. It is to such research that we now shall turn.

First of all, let me say that most of this work is being done by historians without much formal training in economics. Indeed, this work would not always be considered economic history per se by scholars trained in economics or, for that matter, even by the scholars who produced it. That is to say, seldom in these studies do we find the analytical trappings of the "new economic history"--e.g., explicit use of theory, straightforward, potentially falsifiable hypotheses being tested, sophisticated quantification and statistical measurements, and explanatory parsimony. Rather, such work is largely descriptive, based on empirical induction, non/a/anti-theoretical, and extravagant, if not luxuriant, in the (unweighted) explanatory variables invoked. To characterize the work in this way is meant in no way to deprecate or belittle it, merely to represent it accurately and to situate it in the methodological landscape. (15)

Most of this new work, moreover, has not followed the path tread by McCusker and Menard in that most of it has not focused explicitly on the central problem mainstream economic historians of early America have traditionally dealt with, to wit: the overall relationship between markets and economic growth, particularly the manner in which the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the former led, however haltingly and unevenly, to the institutionalization of the latter. (16) Furthermore, even within the relatively small cohort of scholars interested in markets and growth in early America, the topics chosen for study have largely diverged from those of McCusker and Menard. (17) If McCusker and Menard were interested in the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of both international and domestic factor and product markets, their emphasis, generally speaking, was on the international dimensions of such markets. And within the international realm, McCusker and Menard, not surprisingly, given their focus on growth, were rather more concerned with markets relating to the great commercial staples (particularly important in a developmental sense in the southern colonies) than with those relating to lesser articles of production/trade.

In contrast, in recent years many scholars interested in the early American economy--again, speaking generally--have questioned whether it is proper to organize one's thinking around markets in the first place, proposing instead organizational alternatives such as the household or the local community. Moreover, among those who do prefer the market scheme, many have begun to devote more attention to the domestic sector and to continental--as opposed to overseas--markets. Thus we now have exciting, if preliminary, estimates of the size, orientation, and performance of the Native American economy in parts of North America--the lower South, most notably--and more complete documentation on and more sophisticated interpretations of the workings of both the formal and the informal sectors of the domestic economy. (18) Among the topics in the informal sector coming in for treatment is the internal economy of slaves, including the manner in which the slaves' economy articulated with more formal markets. Straddling the formal/informal categorization is work being done on the economic organization and functioning of early American households, including infrahousehold analyses of one sort or another, focusing attention on women or children, for example. A different sort of formal/informal straddling has also occurred on blue water, what with the many recent studies on "outsider" groups and activities--pirates and piracy, smugglers and smuggling, and the like. (19) In a sense, what we see happening is the transfer to the economic realm of some of the concerns of postmodern cultural studies: movement away from grand narratives, centers, and normative groups, statuses, and behaviors, and movement toward the personal and toward margins, the liminal, the interstitial, and occasionally even the transgressive.

In addition to the above developments--indeed, partially because of such developments--we have witnessed other trends in recent years: much greater interest in consumers and consumption patterns, fewer macrostudies on the early American economy, more microstudies, and more attempts at economic gap-filling. In the last regard we find, for example, many works on individual commodities, products, trades, industries, and even sectors; studies on targeted populations in specific areas (merchants in X, artisans in Y); works on people in specific social categories, if not in coherent classes, or even groups (paupers, widows, femme sole traders, tavern-keepers, etc.); studies on discrete commercial practices and institutions, including, perhaps most notably, institutions relating to commercial communications; and work on less well known economic regions (particularly backcountry, frontier, and "middle ground" spaces on the mainland, in the Caribbean, and even around the entire Atlantic world). (20)

Much of this work is stellar, by which I mean outstanding rather than astral, as are some of the studies done in recent decades in the related field known as the history of economic thought. But little of this work has transfixed early Americanists generally, much less transformed the early American field.

Fair enough. Maybe we should not be expecting so much. But some other work being done--and approaches employed--by economic historians just might transfix and transform, if only it were perceived by more early Americanists. At least eight lines of research easily come to mind: (a) the sizable body of work that has emerged in the field of anthropometric/bioarchaeological history; (b) scholarship, falling under the rubric of the "new institutionalism," exploring the manner in which institutions, broadly conceived, have shaped and conditioned, if not determined, economic growth patterns over time and across space; (c) studies rejecting (or at least relaxing) the neoclassical assumption that economies can somehow free themselves from the shackles of history (these studies instead explicitly pursue historical, path-dependent/path-influenced approaches); (d) studies employing so-called endogenous growth models to explain technological change and economic development; (e) work drawing from theoretical developments in microeconomics over the past generation, particularly in the economics of (imperfect) information; (f) work incorporating various approaches derived from game theory into their analyses of human behaviors; (g) approaches drawing on developments in geography, statistics, and computer science to create new spatial analyses and models of economic phenomena; and (h) work embedding economic developments in early America not in a truncated Atlantic frame but in global economic history.

The rise of anthropometric history--the systematic study of human height, stature, and other correlates among human populations--is arguably the most important development in the field of economic history over the past generation. Employing a variety of anthropometric strategies, creative cadres of economists, historians, human biologists, physical anthropologists, and auxologists (specialists in growth) have searched for, found, manipulated, and analyzed biometric data for an ever-growing range of historical populations and, in so doing, have in many cases drastically revised conventional notions about material living standards in the past. A number of their findings are relevant to historians of the early modern South: the tremendous variation in health levels of pre-Columbian populations in the Americas, the impressive physical stature of white southern males in the eighteenth century, and the relatively robust biometric status of African American slaves in the same century come immediately to mind in this regard. Unfortunately, these findings have not become widely known, much less appreciated by early American historians. (21)

The "new institutionalism" refers broadly to various approaches in the social sciences unified in their attempt to explain human institutions--the family, government, laws and legal systems, and, most recently, even religion--through recourse to analytical tools and methods developed originally by economists working in the neoclassical tradition. In the field of economic history, the new institutionalism is associated most closely with Nobelist Douglass C. North, who has articulated a general model of economic development--applicable among other places to Britain/British America in the early modern period--based largely on a few key variables relating to transaction costs and property rights. (22) In another application, North, working with political scientist Barry R. Weingast, wrote a piece in the Journal of Economic History in 1989--on "credible commitments" and constitutional development in seventeenth-century England--that is one of the most stimulating, influential, and most-cited works of economic history in the literature of the historical social sciences, if not in history per se. (23)

Ever since the mid-1980s, when Paul A. David developed the idea of path dependency from the field of evolutionary economics and applied it to history in his now iconic QWERTY pieces, numerous economic historians have utilized the central insights of the approach--the idea that history does in fact matter in institutional development and that institutional developments, once in place, tend to be self-reinforcing. (24) Many economic historians have employed the approach fruitfully in working on the early American economy, most notably Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff in their ongoing project on comparative economic and social development in the Americas over la longue duree. Whether or not one agrees with Engerman and Sokoloff's approach, all early Americanists would benefit from grappling with the pair's (path-influenced) environmental institutional interpretation of the reasons for differential developmental trajectories in the Americas. (25)

If one key implication of Engerman and Sokoloff's approach and argument is to turn culture and cultural factors into endogenous variables, other economists and historians have done extremely useful work along parallel lines, few more so than Paul M. Romer and Luis A. Rivera-Batiz, whose trailblazing work has similarly made the hitherto elusive process of technological change into an endogenous factor; Jan de Vries with his brilliant "industrious revolution" conceit; and, most recently, Eric L. Jones, who has incorporated culture's "ghostly transit through history" into his analytical model. (26) The works of these scholars (among others) are extremely relevant to early Americanists interested in economic history, for we still lack satisfactory, much less satisfying, explanations for many expressions of technological change in British America, and invocations of culture in rather free-floating ways are, alas, still quite common among historians attempting to account for societal differences all around the Atlantic worlds. (27)

Scholars employing tools associated with the so-called new micro-economics have made some exciting research findings as well. Several have used contract theory--work relating to incomplete contracts and contract enforceability, to be more specific--to discern new patterns in indentured servitude and mercantile behavior. Others, myself included, have employed tools from the literature on the principal-agent question (a literature that goes back to Adam Smith) to explore old questions in new ways, in my particular case, the origins and evolution of the task system of labor organization in the rice industry of the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry. (28)

Then there is game theory, which economist Avner Greif, a new institutionalist, has employed brilliantly in a series of articles and now a new book to explain premodern mercantile behavior in various settings. Would that early American economic and business historians interested in merchant groups would employ the same ideas to help explain the behavior of their subjects. And this is but one example: Think of how much the political history of early America--a rather dreary field at present--could be brightened up if more scholars employed the tools and insights developed by Greif et al. in the highly influential study Analytic Narratives. (29)

No social science has been more energized in recent years than geography. Although a number of fine historical geographers have worked on early America--including the southern colonies--over the years, few have employed methods and insights from the new economic geography, utilized spatial regression analysis (sometimes known as spatial econometrics) in their work, or even taken advantage of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. In some ways, literary historians of all people have trumped others in this regard, a case in point being Stanford University's Franco Moretti, whose 2005 work Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, however confounding, combines QUASSH, geography, and evolutionary theory in bold new ways to recast the way we think about the production and dissemination of literary works (even as he attempts to unveil hidden semiotic structures and patterns informing the same). (30) Early American economic historians, take heed!

While considering spatial matters, let us talk about metageography--our mental constructs regarding space--as well. The most significant metageographical change among early American economic historians in recent decades has been the shift to an Atlanticist perspective. (31) With this shift, many, if not most, scholars, particularly younger scholars, are coming to consider Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas sufficiently integrated in the early modern era (circa 1500-1800 C.E.) to merit treatment (for many purposes) as a single unit. This perspective has proved quite beneficial in many ways to early American economic history in general and to the economic history of the southern colonies in particular. Many economic questions relating to production, consumption, technology, trade, and finance look very different once one changes the level of scholarly refraction. Although I myself have taken the Atlanticist bit at times, I am nonetheless increasingly convinced that for economic historians the idea--and related "continental" and "hemispheric" concepts--although improvements on narrower approaches, still suffer inherently or congenitally from what might be called analytical truncation. Simply put, the economic trajectories of neither the Atlantic world nor the North American continent nor the Western Hemisphere can effectively be separated during this period from the economic trajectories of other parts of Afro-Eurasia. I have made this case elsewhere, as have numerous (as yet unindicted) co-conspirators coming from various methodological/ideological camps: global history, world-systems analysis, and certain strands of neo-Marxism, most notably. As of yet, however, early American economic historians, by and large, have resisted the global contagion, which is unfortunate in my view. (32)

Not that my view or anyone else's on the early American economy matters very much to very many people these days. In 2005 I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the OAH on this problem. I called that paper "The Glass Quarter Full." In the paper--as in this one--I mentioned some really exciting "stealth" developments in the field but lamented the fact that few people noticed. In closing, let me again invoke the title of this little piece: Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. And for a really dispiriting denouement: Remember that in a strict sense Bishop Berkeley, an immaterialist, did not believe that there was any material world out there in any case.

(1) George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, edited by Jonathan Dancy (Oxford, Eng., 1998), 21-22, 104, 198-99n25. The first edition of the Principles was published in 1710.

(2) On the present state of economic history, see also Peter A. Coclanis, "The Puzzling State of Economic History," Historically Speaking, 1 (March 2000), 1-2, 4; Coclanis and David Carlton, "The Crisis in Economic History," Challenge, 44 (November-December 2001), 93-103; and Coclanis, "The Glass Quarter Full: The Present State of Economic History" (unpublished paper, presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians [OAH], April 2, 2005, San Jose, Calif.).

(3) David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York, 1999); Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present (millennial edition, 5 vols; New York, 2006). The section titled "Colonial Statistics," edited by John J. McCusker, appears in volume 5, pp. 627-772.

(4) Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Vol. 1: The Colonial Era (New York, 1996); Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, Eng., 1998); P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Eng., 1998). Another very useful source for economic historians is the recently released John J. McCusker, ed., History of World Trade Since 1450 (2 vols.; Farmington Hills, Mich., 2006).

(5) Note that at a session entitled "At the Shrine of the Bitch-Goddess: The Future of Quantitative History," at the 2006 meeting of the Social Science History Association (November 3, 2006, Minneapolis, Minn.), several presenters, particularly Steven Ruggles and Leah Platt Boustan, made the point that quantitative studies of the past are being produced in significant numbers fight now, but mostly by historically minded social scientists rather than by historians. Certainly, over the past few years the leading economics journals--the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, most notably--have been publishing more historically oriented papers.

(6) Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetick, or A Discourse Concerning, the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings ... (London, 1690), preface (n.p.).

(7) Peter A. Coclanis, "History by the Numbers: Why Counting Matters," Magazine of History, 7 (Fall 1992), 5-8 (quotation on p. 5).

(8) Robert B. Townsend, "What's in a Label? Changing Patterns of Faculty Specialization since 1975," Perspectives, 45 (January 2007), 7-10, esp. pp. 7-8.

(9) Robert E. Gallman, "Can We Build National Accounts for the Colonial Period of American History?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd sen, 56 (January 1999), 23-30.

(10) Coclanis, "Why Counting Matters," 8; Coclanis, "Glass Quarter Full"; Coclanis, "History by the Numbers," 7, 8n13; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore (1848; New York, 1964), 62 (quotation).

(11) On these measures and others, see, for example, Richard H. Steckel, "Nutritional Status in the Colonial American Economy," William and Mary, Quarterly, 3rd ser., 56 (January 1999), 31-52 (quotation on p. 33).

(12) John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985). Note that the volume was reprinted with a supplementary bibliography in 1991.

(13) John J. McCusker, "Measuring Colonial Gross Domestic Product: An Introduction," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd set., 56 (January 1999), 3-8, esp. p. 5.

(14) Revised versions of these papers were later published. See Peter A. Coclanis, "In Retrospect: McCusker and Menard's Economy of British America," Reviews in American History, 30 (June 2002), 183-97; and David Hancock, "Rethinking The Economy of British America," in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, Pa., 2006), 71-106.

(15) For a fuller discussion of these differences, see Coclanis and Carlton, "Crisis in Economic History."

(16) For classic examples of the "traditional" approach to early American economic history, see Stuart Bruchey, The Roots" of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861: An Essay in Social Causation (New York, 1965), 16-73; and Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (1980; 2nd ed., New York, 1988).

(17) For notable exceptions to this generalization, see the following provocative--and controversial--pieces: Peter C. Mancall and Thomas Weiss, "'Was Economic Growth Likely in Colonial British North America?" Journal of Economic History, 59 (March 1999), 17-40; and Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, "Conjectural Estimates of Economic Growth in the Lower South, 1720 to 1800," in Timothy W. Guinnane, William A. Sundstrom, and Warren Whatley, eds., History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demographic Change (Stanford, 2004), 389-424.

(18) See, for example, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, "Indians and the Economy of Eighteenth-Century Carolina," in Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia, S.C., 2005), 297-322. A number of scholars have been at work on the domestic sector of the southern economy in the colonial period, particularly the domestic sector in the Chesapeake colonies. For an introduction to this literature, see, for example, Laura Croghan Kamoie, "Planters' Exchange Patterns in the Colonial Chesapeake: Toward Defining a Regional Domestic Economy," ibid., 323-43; A. Glenn Crothers, "Banks and Economic Development in Post-Revolutionary Northern Virginia, 1790-1812," Business History Review, 73 (Spring 1999), 1-39; and John C. Coombs and Jean Elliott Russo, "The Chesapeake Without Tobacco? Slavery and Peripheral Economies in Early Maryland and Virginia" (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Minneapolis, Minn., November 3, 2006).

(19) See, for example, Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London, 1991); Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, 2000), 203-54; John E. Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon, "Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship," Journal of Economic History, 62 (June 2002), 356-82; Kristi A. Rutz-Robbins, "'Divers Debts': Women's Participation in the Local Economy, Albemarle, North Carolina, 1663-1729," Early American Studies, 4 (Fall 2006), 425-41; Kathleen Fawver, "Gender and the Structure of Planter Households in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: Harford County, Maryland, in 1776," ibid., 442-70; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (New York, 1987); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners', and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004); Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648-1795 (Leiden, 1998); April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004); and Hatfield, "Dutch and New Netherland Merchants in the Seventeenth-Century English Chesapeake," in Coclanis, ed., Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 205-28.

(20) For excellent historiographical discussions of much of this work, see, for example, R. C. Nash, "The Organization of Trade and Finance in the British Atlantic Economy, 1600-1830," in Coclanis, ed., Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 95-151; Cathy Matson, "A House of Many Mansions: Some Thoughts on the Field of Economic History," in Matson, ed., Economy of Early America, 1-70; and Hancock, "Rethinking The Economy of British America.'" For some fine examples of such work, see the essays collected in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, Eng., 2000). Also see Cathy Matson, "Women's Economies in North America before 1820: Special Forum Introduction," Early American Studies, 4 (Fall 2006), 271-90; and Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, eds., Class Analysis in Early America and the Atlantic World: Foundations and Future (Durham, N.C., 2004), which is derived from a special issue of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, I (November 2004), 7-108. On backcountry/frontier areas specifically, see, for example, Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York, 1999); and Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006). On consumers and consumption patterns, the work of three scholars in particular should be singled out: Timothy H. Breen, Carole Shammas, and Lorena S. Walsh.

(21) See Steckel, "Nutritional Status in the Colonial American Economy"; Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor, "The Early Achievement of Modern Stature in America," Social Science History, 6 (Autumn 1982), 453-81; John Komlos, "The Height of Runaway Slaves in Colonial America, 1720-1770," in Komlos, ed., Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History (Chicago, 1994), 93-116; Richard H. Steckel and Jerome C. Rose, eds., The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (Cambridge, Eng., 2002): and Peter A. Coclanis, "Tales from the Crypt," Historical Methods, 39 (Fall 2006), 147-54.

(22) See, for example, Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, Eng., 1990); and North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, 2005).

(23) Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England," Journal of Economic History, 49 (December 1989), 803-32. On the high ranking of this article in the Social Science Citation Index, see Robert Whaples, "The Supply and Demand of Economic History: Recent Trends in the Journal of Economic History," Journal of Economic History, 62 (June 2002), 524-32, esp. p. 527.

(24) For his first formulation of path dependence, see Paul A. David, "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY," American Economic Review, 75 (May 1985), 332-37. For a formalization of the theory, see, for example, Kenneth J. Arrow, "Path Dependence and Competitive Equilibrium," in Guinnane, Sundstrom, and Whatley, eds., History Matters, 23-35.

(25) See Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States," in Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914 (Stanford, 1997), 260-314; and Engerman and Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies," Economia, 3 (Fall 2002), 41-109. For another (path-influenced) analysis of southern economic development, see Peter A. Coclanis, "The Paths before Us/U.S.: Tracking the Economic Divergence of the North and the South," in David L. Carlton and Coclanis, eds., The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville, 2003), 12-23, 180-82.

(26) See, for example, Luis A. Rivera-Batiz and Paul M. Romer, "Economic Integration and Endogenous Growth," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106 (May 1991), 531-55. On the theory itself, see Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, Endogenous Growth Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). On the intellectual history of the idea of endogenous technological change, see David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (New York, 2006). Jan de Vries's basic argument is articulated fully in "The industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution," Journal of Economic History, 54 (June 1994), 249-70. Eric L. Jones lays out his argument on culture and cultural change in Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture (Princeton, 2006), 199 (second quotation).

(27) For one notable exception, see Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2003). It is interesting and apropos, given my argument about the efficacy of global approaches to early American history, that Lakwete correctly connects American gins to much earlier gins in China and India.

(28) Farley Grubb, "The Statutory Regulation of Colonial Servitude: An Incomplete-Contract Approach," Explorations in Economic History, 37 (January 2000), 42-75; Avner Greif, "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders' Coalition," American Economic Review, 83 (June 1993), 525-48; Peter A. Coclanis, "How the Low Country Was Taken to Task: Slave-Labor Organization in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia," in Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Fedeger, eds., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (Charlottesville, 2000), 59-78. Adam Smith's prescient discussion of the basic principal-agent problem appears in Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan (1776; New York, 1937), Book 5, Chap. 1, Part 3, pp. 699-700.

(29) Avner Greif, "Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders," Journal of Economic History, 49 (December 1989), 857-82; Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (New York, 2006); Robert H. Bates et al., Analytic Narratives (Princeton, 1998).

(30) Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps', Trees': Abstract Models for a Literary History (London, 2005). For introductions to the so-called new economic geography (sometimes called geographical economics), see Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); and J. Vernon Henderson and Jacques-Francois Thisse, eds., Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Vol. 4: Cities and Geography (Amsterdam, 2004).

(31) For a succinct introduction to Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). For several recent assessments of the field, see the forum "Beyond the Atlantic" in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (October 2006), 675-742.

(32) Peter A. Coclanis, "Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (October 2006), 725-42.

MR. COCLANIS is the Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Economics and associate provost for international affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.