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The Committee on Research in Economic History was established in 1940, more than a generation ago. Most of those who were active in its creation and administration have died or retired from active academic life; and surely a fresh direction of internal evolution has altered, at least in important ways, the objectives of the discipline. Accordingly, it appears appropriate to set down here an account of what were the hopes and intentions of those especially active in its initiation and early planning, and to record its more obvious achievements. Members of ensuing generations will have time in their later lives to pass judgment on the intellectual value of this particular effort at academic improvement and intellectual growth. Indeed, I propose to close my survey with the transmogrification of the Committee into the Council—an event of the mid-1950's, at a point in time already far enough removed to offer a considerable perspective.

The American people have usually been regarded as forward-looking and progressive, willing frequently to move their activities from one place to another to attain their hopes and inclined to be impatient with the heritage of the past. But there seems to have been, almost from the beginning, a minority of people in this country who found pleasure in looking back over the road that they and their forebears had traveled and in encouraging a scholarly chronicling of such progress. Perhaps the fact that so many early immigrants came from western Europe, with its much longer high-ways of economic and cultural advance, had something to do with this. But there was also the circumstance that the early settlers in America, as well as many later migrants to our West, were a Bible-reading people. The Bible is, after all, a record of movements among peoples through the centuries, and the duty placed on members of Protestant churches to become thoroughly familiar with their source of divine guidance could well have implanted a bias toward, or a fondness for, historical ideas and writings. And the citizens of a new country, it may be suggested, could hardly fail to be conscious of change through time as a true fact of life.

Every well-bred economist knows that a man named Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy in 1723, published a somewhat notable book in 1759 entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and in 1776, when he was fifty-three years old, produced an extraordinary pair of volumes called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Most young economists nowadays, I fear, do not read either work of the great Scotsman as we all once did—in the days when one could still take time to enjoy also the leisurely pace of Thackeray and Dickens, even Scott. Students who just skim the Wealth of Nations, or parts of it, would surely miss what has attracted my attention; and even scholars interested in Smith's economic principles would hardly perceive what I have in mind, namely, that he was noteworthy for his "unbounded benevolence," as one near-contemporary described him, and that he was "slow to think evil" as a recent biographer alleges.Apparently it was out of this abounding good nature that Smith alluded to "the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects"; that he took opportunity to mention "the conveyances of a verbose attorney"; and that, with a more sweeping serenity, he recorded an observation of "the over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities."Biographers of Smith have been led to state that perhaps he was not as obviously religious as some of his contemporaries. He was perhaps a deist, even if he was a philosopher and a friend of Hume. John Rae reported that Smiths "opening prayers" at Glasgow were thought to "savour strongly of natural religion," and occasioned no little shaking of heads. Perhaps, then, one might expect Smith to have been somewhat less charitable toward wearers of the cloth than he was toward other groups.

Economic and business literature has hitherto served restricted purposes, although by no means unimportant ones. Chiefly it has been called upon to explain specific events or trends, from the issuance of assignats to the decline oflaissez faire, or it has been surveyed to reveal the emergence and evolution of certain concepts significant for economic theory or economic analysis. Business literature has been especially neglected, unless one includes within that term writings on behalf of the East India Company on economic policies or unless one remembers the books and pamphlets utilized by historians of the East India and other such enterprises in the compounding of their volumes. By and large it is accurate to assert that parts of the literature have been used, but the whole has been overlooked.