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To the distinguished economic historian Jonathan Hughes, the ambiguous outcomes of attempted deregulation signal America's urgent need to probe the origins of our vast and chaotic maze of government economic controls. Why do government restrictions on the economy continue to proliferate, in spite of avowed efforts to allow the market a freer rein? How did this complicated network of nonmarket economic controls come about and whose purposes does it serve? How can we render such controls less destructive of productivity and wealth-creating activity? While exploring these questions, Jonathan H

To the distinguished economic historian Jonathan Hughes, the ambiguous outcomes of attempted deregulation signal America's urgent need to probe the origins of our vast and chaotic maze of government economic controls. Why do government restrictions on the economy continue to proliferate, in spite of avowed efforts to allow the market a freer rein? How did this complicated network of nonmarket economic controls come about and whose purposes does it serve? How can we render such controls less destructive of productivity and wealth-creating activity? While exploring these questions, Jonathan H.

The Program Committee for the thirty-seventh annual meeting of the Economic History Association was formed in late November 1976, ten months before the convention. The Committee selected the participants whose papers are published in this issue after a comprehensive consultation procedure with a large and wide-ranging sample of members of the Association. The basic guidelines followed by the Program Committee may be briefly stated. First, it was felt that the session topics should pertain to past achievements in the field, as well as reflect issues relevant to the 1970s. Hence, it was decided to include a "summing up session," in which the importance and achievements of three influential schools in economic history could be evaluated. The three other sessions, as well as the majority of workshops, dealt with issues which were felt to be of considerable interest to scholars at present and in the foreseeable future.

If we are successfully to relate our work with the main body of Economic History, we must be able to show the fundamental relationship between quantitative analysis and more conventional methods of economic historians. The historian reconstructs events of the past, and with them attempts to understand the institutions and modes of behavior associated with those events. He seeks to construct a consistent story revealing the fundamental nature and meaning to us of the past, thus creating insight into the past and understanding of it—something considerably beyond a mere account of what probably happened. However, this story must be based upon, and be consistent with, the reconstructed events of the past, "what probably happened."