The question that springs to mind at the start of this brief résumé of my career is, how did I come to be employed by the British Economic and Social Research Council, when my research training seemed so much against it? Memory is at best a fallible guide, but, as I remember, 1965 saw the appearance of The World We Have Lost, by Peter Laslett, which sought to describe the structure of English society before the Industrial Revolution. I had known Laslett as a lecturer in the Cambridge History Faculty who gave a course of general lectures on the history of political thought in the ancient world; he was also more generally known as the man who had researched the late-seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. But here he was, writing a different kind of book altogether, with a first chapter called “The Passing of the Patriarchal Household: Parents and Children, Masters and Servants,” and further chapters on such topics as whether the peasants really starved. What was this political analyst up to? Not to anything good, or so I was told in a leading article in the Times Literary Supplement for 9 December 1965. In a scabrous attack entitled “The Book of Numbers,” E. P. Thompson (for it was he, hiding behind the cloak of anonymity that was generally assumed by the authors of leading articles) did everything to undermine Laslett’s version of the new history. “It is to be hoped that the cause will survive Mr Laslett’s advocacy,” he concluded. He succeeded with me; I let the book pass me by on the other side.

Population growth has always been a politically loaded object of inquiry. From the debate sparked by Malthus’s classic Essay to the still present apocalyptic warnings about overpopulation or the declining birth rate, demographers and statisticians have worked in troubled waters, where progressively more sophisticated quantitative techniques have sometimes gone hand in hand with dubious social philosophy. In her recent survey of post-1930 American demography, Susan Greenhalgh (1996: 30–31) argued that the institutionalization and professionalization of this field as an academic discipline required scholars to draw “sharp boundaries between themselves and activists,” such as those involved in the promotion of objectives like birth control, eugenics, or immigration restriction. A detailed inquiry into the origins of the Population Association of America (PAA) has shown that up to the 1930s the study of population attracted more activists than social scientists and that the two types could coexist quite happily within the same organization (Hodgson 1991). Greenhalgh added (1996), however, that despite the efforts expanded in its quest for scientific status, this field of study has remained quite open to ideological influence, fundamentally Eurocentric and devoid of reflexivity. The polemic that stirred the French Institut national d’études démographiques in the early 1990s shows that the demarcation lines can easily get blurred and that the simultaneously cognitive and political dimensions of population study can reappear with utmost clarity (Le Bras 1991).

One person, one vote. With this principle, the Court permanently changed representation in the United States. Equal population requirements changed the face of legislative redistricting in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court applied it to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), and to state legislatures in Reynolds v. Sims, 84 S. Ct. 1362 (1964). Equality in district population was valued not only as instrumental to other goals but also for itself, as Justice Black explained in Wesberry: “As nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s. . . . To say that a vote is worth more in one district than another would . . . run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.”

As Justice Brennan made clear, the Court based its decision in large part on a particular understanding of the historical meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and of article 1, section 2, of the Constitution. And as widely accepted as this principle has come to be, it has been subject to severe historical criticism, criticism that has never been resolved. For example, Berger (1977) claims that malapportionment was historically present and accepted before and during the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence that the equal protection clause could not have implied the equal population principle (from chapter 5): “Certainly there was no disclosure that such intrusion [on apportionment] was contemplated; there is in fact striking evidence that malapportionment was an accepted practice.”

Studies of decision making on the modern Supreme Court have drawn on readily available empirical data to explore the details of how the Court conducts its business (Segal and Spaeth 1993; Spaeth 1995). Sadly, however, such empirical studies have not been plentiful for periods of the Court’s history before the appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Some discussion has occurred dating from the chief justiceship of William Howard Taft beginning in 1910, but these studies have limited scope (Bowen and Scheb 1993; Leavitt 1970; Pritchett 1948; Renstrom 1972; Slotnick 1979; Tate and Handberg 1991). The result is a plethora of studies concerning the modern Court and a dearth of systematic information on earlier Courts (Aliotta 1988; Brenner and Spaeth 1995; Epstein and Kobylka 1992; George and Epstein 1992; Handberg 1976; Schubert 1965, 1974; Segal 1984; Tate 1981; Ulmer 1970). The picture we do have concerning earlier Courts is largely drawn from biographical or doctrinal studies. While both of these enterprises are immensely useful, they lack the systematic quality of an empirical analysis that considers all cases (not just the important ones) and all justices (not just the intellectual or social leaders). We seek to create an empirical context out of which those outstanding justices and decisions arose. Our study allows confirmation of findings of previous studies of individuals and doctrine and provides a more complete picture of the Court during a tumultuous time in its history.

Given the importance of draft animals—horses, mules, and oxen—in the development of the American economy, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to their contribution. Moreover, this is not, in most cases, attributable to a lack of empirical evidence; the vast majority of the work on draft animals to date is found in oral history and folklore literature. While this literature delighted in presenting the sentiments and personal stories of a few rather than attempting to provide a broader perspective, it does provide valuable historical information. Not surprisingly, however, the sentiments of a few, perhaps sometimes embellished, occasionally led to conclusions that are not consistent with predictions. For example, recent evidence supports the superiority of mules over horses and oxen in southern agricultural production, which refutes the notion that southerners used the mule for cultural reasons (Garrett 1990; Kauffman 1993). As Rockoff (1991: 243) states, “One of the main functions of the economic historian, from the point of view of economics, is to examine the foundation of these myths.”