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Economic History and Economic Growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Barry E. Supple
Barry E. Supple
Affiliation:
McGill University.
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Extract

Professor Goodrich had indicated that my function is to discuss the relevance of the concept of economic growth to the tasks of the economic historian. But I hope I may be forgiven if I touch incidentally on other sensitive and overworked areas—notably the relationship between theory and quantity on the one hand and history on the other. If the study of economic growth still meant what it did in Adam Smith's day there might be no need to be so cavalier—there might even be no need to hold this session. But a good number of intellectual bridges have fallen into the water since 1776 and it is surely necessary to examine this new construction with an eye not only to its permanence but to its utility.

Type
Temporal Aspects of Economic Change
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1960 , pp. 548 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1960

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References

1 Quoted in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (N. Y., sixth edition, n. d.), p. xxiv.

2 Journal of Economic History, XVII, 4 (Tasks of Economic History, December 1957), 552Google Scholar.

3 Business Cycles (New York, 1939), I, 18Google Scholar.

4 Loc. cit., 553. Of course, even when Professor Kuznets' problem has been satisfactorily solved, another one arises: relating the concepts of economic analysis to the important and realistic factors in history.

5 For an example of how a conceptual framework which might be forbidding to many historians can be supplemented by more purely historical techniques in order to produce a stimulating analysis of the rhythm of nineteenth-century growth, see Alfred H. Conrad, “Income Growth and Structural Change,” in a collaborative work on American Economic History edited by Seymour E. Harris and to be published by McGraw-Hill in 1961.

6 M. M. Postan, “Note” to article by Robinson, W. C., “Money, Population and Economic Change in Late Medieval Europe,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., XII, 1 (August 1959), 79–80Google Scholar.

7 Fisher, F. J., “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History?” Economica, N. S., XXIV (February 1957), 17Google Scholar.