Suchergebnisse

This paper is concerned with the old economic history which developed in Britain before World War I. It would be more appropriate to call it "the very old economic history," to distinguish it from "the old economic history" of the inter-war years and beyond, and "the new economic history," a fragile offshoot of American enterprise only now being propagated successfully. To avoid terminological clumsiness, and to indicate clearly that the history of economic history in Britain divides into three stages, I will refer throughout this paper to Economic History I (EH I), Economic History II (EH II) and Economic History III (EH III), stages which divide chronologically at 1910–1920 and 1960–1970, and which are characterized by quite distinctive methodological features. My particular aim will be to show that EH I seems to the economist, and to the new economic historian, to be modern in content and method compared with EH II. In particular EH I had a major interest in the conditions of freedom and restraint, especially those embodied in legal institutions controlling property rights, which limited individual economic action, and devoted much effort to investigating the origins of property rights and the development of custom and law as they affected property rights. EH I, also, was more strongly motivated than EH II, both because of a belief in the power of "the historical method" for the understanding and analysis of social processes, and of participation in the great socio-economic debates of the day, especially that which attempted to define the role of the state in economic life. In contrast, EH II seems to have had no particular methodological bias, and, although often politically motivated, was not involved in contemporary debate or in the determination of current policy.

In dem Beitrag wird ein Überblick über die Forschungsgeschichte der industriellen Revolution gegeben, um die Unterschiede in der Interpretation der Industrialisierung zu erklären. Verschiedene Interpretationsansätze werden vorgestellt. Es wird gezeigt, daß den negativen Interpretationen, die von der These von der Verelendung durch die Industrielle Revolution ausgehen, sofort mit Gegenthesen widersprochen wird. Es wird gefragt, ob und, wenn ja, wie diese Divergenzen zu erklären sind. Drei Phasen der politischen Verzerrungen der Interpretation werden herausgearbeitet: eine erste zeitgenössische Phase wird gekennzeichnet durch die Kontroverse zwischen Liberalen und Konservativen; in der zweiten Phase entfachte der Streit zwischen den Progressiven und den Distributionisten; in der dritten, modernen Phase wird Angriff durch die Marxisten verstärkt. Es wird deutlich, daß der Dissens vor allem auf unterschiedlichen Einschätzungen der sozialen Auswirkungen der Industrialisierung beruht. Als Hauptgrund des Interpretationsstreites wird allerdings der herausgearbeitet, daß Historiker unterschiedliche Bezugsgruppen zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten untersucht und aus unsachgemäßen Vergleichen wertlose Ergebnisse gewonnen haben. Ausgehend von diesen Erkenntnissen wird gefragt, wie die Widersprüche in den Interpretationen gelöst werden können. Die Möglichkeiten der Forschung durch eine verstärkte Beschäftigung mit wirtschaftlichen Wachstumsfragen werden erörtert. (KW)

Perhaps the most important methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence, often have markedly different interpretations of a particular historical event. Why, for example, in a world in which there is almost unquestioned belief, even by Marxist historians, that industrialization is the grand remedy for the economic and social ills of poor and underdeveloped countries, do some historians, and especially the Marxists, still argue about the goods or ills bestowed on the worker by the first great experiment in industrialization, the industrial revolution in England? The expected economic dividend of modern industrialization is undoubtedly a higher standard of living, and the occasional opponents of such development base their opposition not on this indisputable material advance but on the "moral risk" involved in the transformation of life by industrialization.1The historians, however, while concerned also with this possible moral risk, are not all certain that the industrial revolution in England before 1850 did cause the average standard of living of the worker to rise. This uncertainty might be resolved by finding out what actually happened, but in the meantime interpretations differ, and have differed, on the basis of some evidence, of much confusion, and of differing value judgments. It is the specific aim of this article to give a history of the interpretations of the industrial revolution, and to explain them.