TOWARDS A WORLD WIDE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ECONOMIC-HISTORICAL RESEARCH?

Two Round Tables on the future of the Internation Economic History Association (IEHA)
at the XIII World Congress in Economic History, Buenos Aires 2002

After the reforms of the 1998-2002, the executive committee of the IEHA may consider taking up the discussion again of the future role of the organization in promoting economic history. It is clear that we should continue to organize the World Economic History Congress, but should we also develop new plans and programmes?

A starting point of a new debate on this may be that the IEHA is the only truly global organization in the field of economic history. This simple fact may lead to two different ways to look at the role of the IEHA. One is that we should concentrate on organizing an optimal global infrastructure for economic historians. In particular the internet has changed the way we can exchange information in such a radical way, that we should perhaps think of ways to improve the already excellent infrastructure that is at present provided by the Eh.net. This part of the programme I would like to call the WWI: the creation of a world wide infrastructure for economic-historical research (ROUND TABLE 1)

Another consequence of the fact that the IEHA is the only global organization in its field may be that we might play a role in supporting the development of economic-historical reserach and education in the regions in which our specialism is still rather weak and not/under-organized. There are a number of core regions in which research and education in economic history is concentrated and organized quite well: Europe, the US, Japan in particular, but also in Australia, in parts of Latin America, China and India. But there are also clear gaps in this map: Africa (apart from perhaps the South), Eastern Europe (where is has been on the decline) and South-East Asia (with the exception of South-Korea) are the most obvious 'weak spots'. Is there a role to play for the IEHA in this respect? This part of the programme I would like to call WWT: the creation of World Wide Training Courses in Economic History (ROUND TABLE 2)

ROUND TABLE 1. WORLD WIDE INFRASTRUCTURE

Let me begin by stating that the EH.Net is an excellent organization that is obviously doing a lot in organizing a world wide infrastructure for economic-historical research. Any initiative in this field will have to be cooperate with the EH.Net. But perhaps we can try to do a bit more, and profit even more from the world wide web.

What I would like to suggest is the following. Increasingly, economic-historical researchers use large databases that are constructed by themselves or by other scholars. Data on historical national accounts, wages and prices, historical-demography, monetary phenomena (interest rates, money supply, exchange rates), heights (from ancient skeletons to 20th century recruits), governments expenditures and taxation, international trade and capital flows etc. in many ways form the solid basis for our kind of research. The creation of a database often is the most labour intensive part of a project, and its quality to a large extent determines the quality of its outcomes. Yet, after the publication of the results of a research project, most databases tend to be neglected, and remain the sole property of the scholar who has constructed it. Some scholars tend to monopolise access to their data - or even worse, prefer to throw the data away after finishing the project, or store them in such a way that they are inaccessible for other researchers. This makes it often very difficult to do international-comparative research, or more in general to build upon the work that often have done.

One example of how it can be organized differently. Angus Maddison has and still is the focal point of the economic-historical research on (historical) national accounts. He knew everyone working in this field - from India to Chili - stimulated this kind of reasearch enormously (as a true leader he might ask you: what did you to for GDP this week?) - he collected the results of the work of all these scholars himself, compared them internationally, and published the results of this endeavor once every ten years or so. This gave an enormous impuls to this kind of research, and created a framework for international comparitive work which is - in my not very impartial view - among the strongest sub-disciplines in our field. It is not clear how long Angus will be able to continue this kind of work. Moreover, given the possibilities of the internet, one may even think of other, even more transparant way to bring these data together and publish international-comparative results.

Another example, from a more distant past, is the work done by the International Scientific Committee for on Price History, which already in the 1930s created a framework for the international comparative study of wages and prices. Their efforts to foster international comparative research into this topic has resulted in a large number of important studies in this field, which use more or less the same methodology to publish data of wages and prices in Europe in the period before the Industrial Revolution.

Given the internet, we can perhaps try to realize the same objectives in the following way: we need central hubs in the networks of ecnomic-historical research which concentrate - as Angus Maddison did - on the collection, storage and publication of relevant data bases. This means, to begin with, that we have to introduce the rule that researchers make their databases accessible to others (after the most important publications based on them have been published). They either do this on a site at their own research institute (with a hyperlink to the relevant 'hub'), or send the data, and a description of the way in which they are collected and constructed, to the 'hub', which then makes this informatiopn accessible to all (see for an example the publication of the results of the project on the reconstruction of the national accounts of the Netherlands in the 19th century on http:\\nationalaccounts.niwi.knaw.nl).

This 'hub' may be a group of scholars who specialize in this field - for example the 'pupils' of Maddison at Groningen University - who organize workshops and conferences on the topic, and publish once every fice or ten years a review of the state of the art of the discipline (much like Maddison has done). On the one hand this means a large investment in maintaining and extending the data bases, and publishing the results of their comparative work, but the benefits of being such a hub are also substantial, especially when their publications are going to be considered the standard of this specialism (again, think of the influence of the work of Maddison). For individual scholars this would mean that via the internet they would get access to the data bases in a particular field, which would enhance the prospects of international-comparative research enormously. Of course, the success of such a new infrastructure would depend a lot on the willingness of scholars to accept the new rule that data bases have to be stored and made accessible to others. Perhaps one might even consider that journals introduce this rule as a precondition for accepting papers which are based on new data bases, after all, the principle that it should be possible to repeat and test research is at stake.

I can think of the following clusters of data which might lend themselves to this kind of organization:

At ROUND TABLE 1 in Buenos Aires (on Wednesday, 14.00-1545, room Sauce) this idea will be discussed. Perhaps we can form a working group to organize the establishment of such hubs.