Program committees, like the parents of adolescents, must at last stand aside, overcome by a sense of powerless responsibility, as their creation begins to speak, act and sin for itself.

The program for the Twenty-ninth Meeting of the Economic History Association, held August 28–30, 1969, at Rrandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, was generated under the title: The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution. The first two sessions bore the subtitle: Precapitalist Forms, and the second two sessions, the subtitle: Capitalism Revisited.

The first president of our Association, Edwin F. Gay, remarked to me as he was pondering the subject of his presidential address that presidents of learned societies should present in their messages to their scholarly colleagues the results of their current research. This seems to me to be a capital idea, but, as I look back upon the speeches of my predecessors, I discover how few have followed the counsel of our wise and esteemed forebear. Even Gay himself, in his command performance, failed to adhere to his own precept. Most of our presidential addresses have been devoted to making suggestions for research (mostly to be undertaken by others), to delineating the broad “tasks” of economic history, to defending the kind of work in which the speaker has been engaged, and to advocating some particular methodology in our discipline. In the course of time, our presidents have exposed a variety of positions, have espoused a multitude of causes, and from time to time have excited controversy. They have created a tradition that presidential addresses should be homilies and exhortations.

The purpose of this paper is to present, or more correctly, to revive, a hypothesis regarding the causes of agricultural serfdom or slavery (used here interchangeably). The hypothesis was suggested by Kliuchevsky's description of the Russian experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it aims at a wider applicability.

This paper uses a simple physiocratic model to examine forms of economic organization prevailing in Ghana before it was incorporated into the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. It is divided into three parts. The first analyzes the village subsistence economy and suggests that the egalitarian nature of the land-tenure system prevented the emergence of a land-owning class and the appropriation of an economic surplus. This led to an economic structure characterized by a low level of material production and a low degree of specialization and exchange. The second part analyzes forms of economic organization associated with long distance trade: that is, the very old northern trade with other parts of Africa, and the southern coastal trade with Europe which began in the fifteenth century. It argues that foreign trade not only expanded the consumption possibilities of the society, as predicted by the theory of international trade, but also introduced a new class structure and greater income inequality, since it allowed a small group to appropriate a surplus for its own use. The third part discusses the relevance of Pre-Colonial forms to twentieth century economic development.

This paper endeavors to explain the economic and social forces underlying the economic transformation of three Southeast Asian countries from agrarian societies to commercial ones. In particular, a model is used to explore this historic behavior over the period 1870 to 1938 for Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand. It is also suggested that the varying economic consequences of the model were dependent on the respective pre-colonial history and the type of colonial or governmental rule.

The theme of this conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” implies a concern for specifying the limits of the applicability of classical and neo-classical economic theory. Presumably because we sociologists have been in the forefront of those who insist on the recognition of these limits, I have been asked to present a paper from the viewpoint of historical sociology. Now I suppose that your field and mine are alike in at least one respect: the infrequency of finding any one view on a broad and significant question. I am sure you will understand, therefore, my concentration on some lessons to be learned from the work of one of the heroes of my discipline, Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber, as you may know, was, among his other titles, a professor of economics and avoided the epithet of “sociologist.” Yet because sociology has changed since his day, largely under his influence, and because he was also a professor of law and of political science, we sociologists have now claimed him. Nevertheless, many of the issues that informed his massive scholarly research were and are issues central to both your field and mine.

It is indeed a pleasure to be invited to address economists and economic historians regarding the dynamics of peasant economic integration into a national economic system. The particular subject of these meetings, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and their Evolution,” is an appropriate one for us since, as anthropologists, we are generally interested in the “Evolution of the Organizational Forms of Life.” Today we will examine the organizational form of peasant economic life in Brazil in an effort to develop a fuller understanding of the socio-economic transactions which take place within this traditional—better, transitional—agrarian society.

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.

This paper attempts to provide an explanation of the formation and mutation of economic institutions. It is specifically concerned with that process as it has developed over the past one hundred and seventy-five years of American history, but with appropriate changes the model might be used to predict institutional change in the future and to explain institutional change in other nations and in other eras. Like more traditional theory, the model has been formulated in a manner that makes it in principle operational, although we admit that it predicts relatively little. Profit maximization is the motivating force, and in this sense too the model fits into the stream of neo-classical economics, although like the macro models of Keynes its subject has not traditionally been considered a part of that discipline. Finally, we admit that the theory is at some points woefully weak and the explanations at times incredibly simplistic. The work, however, does, we feel, represent a first step towards a useful theory of institutional change.

I Was assigned for this occasion a rather substantial—one might almost say grandiose—subject. I would not deny responsibility, because I accepted it. But in view of its scope I should first explain how I have tried to render it manageable, with respect to both theoretical structure and mode of exposition.

Scholars interested in modern industrial economies have for years devoted substantial attention to the growth and performance of large-scale organizations. Many of their studies have been the intellectual heirs of Max Weber's brilliant analysis of bureaucracy, for it is the bureaucratic structure of authority which most often characterizes such organizations in the modern period. Economists, historians, and sociologists are all in debt to Weber for the basic ideas which have made the analysis of large-scale organizations so fruitful.

It is a commentary of some sort on the blurring and shifting of disciplinary lines that I should have been asked to talk on the psychology of capitalism, and should have accepted. Though during the past fifteen years I have had a good deal of exposure to the body of theory of social and personality psychology, I have no formal training in psychology. And I am not a professor of business management. My field of specialization is economic development and social change in the low income countries—which, I think, does make me an economic historian. If I have any individual specialization, it is on the emphasis that I insist must be given to the technical study of personality formation if we are to gain a full understanding of either economic development or social change. This interest in turn is related to the psychology of capitalism. One of the simpler things that this personal history symbolizes is that old disciplinary Lines are giving way, as scholars shift their analysis to new explanatory variables. The old lines of demarcation between sociology, anthropology, and political science are becoming obsolete, all of these disciplines are nibbling away at the domain of history, and personality theory is intruding into the domain of all four.