The Economic History Review 

About: The Economic History Review is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0013-0117. Over the lifetime, 7272 publications have been published receiving 164602 citations. The journal is also known as: Economic History Review & Economic History Society Review.

The Making of the English Working Class

Abstract: A real confrontation aity open conflict between scholars is a purgative experience', according to the Times Literary Supplement.2 Purgative perhaps, especially for the contestants, but also enlightening, especially for those who try to assess the evidence used and conclusions established in the confrontation. The two most interesting, lively and probably most important recent debates among British historians are those concerned with the gentry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and with the labouring poor during the industrial revolution. This latter debate, also, has spilled over into economics where a main pre-occupation is economic growth (of which the English industrial revolution is an interesting example), and into 'the new history' with its interests in social and cultural change, stimulated by Marxism, sociology and a revolt against the dullness and irrelevance of much traditional history. Some of the main controversialists in 'the standard-of-living debate' have come from the fringes of the established academic world, from areas remote from agreed courses and acceptable topics; their work, criticized as polemical, is certainly spirited, even aggressive. And although for scholars passion is not necessarily a good master, it is a great inspiration. Mr Thompson has been inspired to write a big book widely acclaimed by reviewers and already the subject of serious academic discussion. This review of the book does not aim to cover all the issues raised by Mr Thompson, but examines his main theses, his use of evidence, his theories of class and revolution and his analyses of Methodism and the standard-of-living, and tries to assess his importance in the historiography of the English industrial revolution.

The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History.

Abstract: A radically new interpretation, offering a unified explanation for the growth of Western Europe between 900 A. D. and 1700, provides a general theoretical framework for institutional change geared to the general reader. North and Thomas seek to explain the \"rise of the Western world\" by illuminating the causal importance of an efficient economic organization that guarantees a wide latitude of property rights and both incentives and protection for economic growth. Although they pay homage to both Marxian and neoliberal theory, they take a theoretical middle ground that privileges the sociopolitical backdrop of economic affairs (as opposed to solely private or class-based activity) and in doing so identifies the roots of modernization as far back as the 10th Century. To justify the novelty and originality of this approach, they write that most analysts have misidentified the symptoms of modern economic growth (technological change, human capital, economies of scale) as the causes. In doing so, previous scholars have failed to answer the question \"if all that is required for economic growth is investment and innovation, why have some societies missed this desirable outcome?\" (2). Their answer is that some societies (England and the Netherlands) were better than others (France and Spain) at providing an efficient economic organization that could guarantee conditions favorable to per capita economic growth among a rapidly growing population.