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The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

Debating the promises and limits of the "new economic history," seventeen economists and economic historians look at Great Britain, from the peak of her industrial dominance in 1840 to her eclipse by the surging economies of Germany and the United States. Their discussion brings a new methodological challenge to the field of economic history and a new interpretation of the British economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Originally published in 1972.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905

The usual picture of the medieval peasantry is based on nineteenth-century scholarship, which has proven difficult to dislodge from educated minds. This article continues the revision of an important detail in the picture, the scattering of plots in open fields. Some recent work on the subject by Robert Allen and Gregory Clark is midly disputed, and new evidence is presented that risk avoidance is the key to understanding peasant behavior. The reason for the scattering was not sentiment or socialism. Peasants were not perhaps rational in every detail; but they were prudent.