Suchergebnisse

SUMMARYFirst the article points out the excellence and the limitations of Professor Ashton's volume of a new economic history of England and gives his definition of its task: to find answers to the questions which economists ask or should ask of the past. What are these questions and can they be answered for England in the eighteenth century? The problems of economic growth: An adequate treatment of these would require a fuller picture and a more complete analysis of English society between 1700 and 1800 than Professor Ashton permits himself. The structure of the book tends to lean towards questions of economic organisation without much reference to long‐term change and recent controversies among economists. The social consequences of industrialization are of much interest to the general historian and the politician, but they are similarly handled with a marked economy of discussion. The old melodramatic history of the Industrial Revolution is discarded here, but the picture of a society in process of violent economic change remains undrawn; this is perhaps to be done in a later volume.Professor Ashton's book represents a reaction against old general views but avoids the substitution of new ones. The present position of economic history calls however not only for a critique of interpretations, but also for reinterpretation. The special difficulty of economic history lies in the need somehow to reconcile the economist's and sociologist's need to analyse in terms of general concepts with the historian's duty to recreate from original sources the unique historical situation which it is his wish to narrate and to explain.