Mind you, because I entered graduate school the year Time on the Cross was published, when the attacks on it were pouring forth from some of my own teachers, I’m as aware as anyone of the hubris that some econometric historians brought to the study of slavery. And recent essays by Richard Sutch and Eric Hilt demonstrate both the achievements as well as the limitations of cliometric history. One the one hand, some basic issues about profitability, productivity, slave diets, and a few other aspects of the cotton economy have been settled. There is now something of a consensus among economic historians that in the eighteenth century slavery and the slave trade were integral to the economic development of Great Britain during the critical early decades of the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, there are plenty of important questions that econometric history alone is not adequate to address. Most economic historians don’t deal in terms like “capitalism,” and so have not been as fully engaged as others — David Eltis, Joseph Miller and Robin Blackburn, for example — with the critical question of the relationship between capitalist development and slavery in the modern world. And that’s OK. Cultural historians don’t calculate GDP or productivity increases, and that’s OK too.
But the difference doesn’t have much to do with some eccentric penchant for counterfactual claims among economic historians. Max Weber pointed out long ago that all causal historical claims contain implicit counterfactuals. When I first started giving talks about the antislavery project that provoked secession I was invariably asked, “Would the project have worked without the Civil War?” A counterfactual question. And when I answer that the Civil War was a necessary but not sufficient explanation for the abolition of slavery in the United States, I am implicitly saying: “Take away the Civil War and slavery would not have been abolished in 1865.” Here’s another example. Caitlin Rosenthal notes that planters developed the most sophisticated accounting procedures for calculating depreciation in antebellum America, but that they were not the precedent for the more enduring accounting techniques developed by northern manufacturers after the Civil War. We can reframe that insight as a counterfactual: The later methods of depreciation would have developed even without those earlier slave depreciation calculations. This is not fundamentally different from saying: “Take away slavery and the Industrial Revolution in England would still have happened, only more slowly.” When economic historians tell us this, they do not mean that slavery and the slave trade were not integral to the Industrial Revolution.
The problem arises when historians claim that all the wealth of advanced capitalist nations depended on slavery or that industrialization could not have happened without slavery. Not only do such statements imply strong counterfactual claims, but they are also dependent on implicit theories of capitalist development. And this is where the question of definitions and theoretical premises comes into play.
As Rosenthal points out, the New Economic Historians have been taken to task for claiming to write about “capitalism” without telling readers what they mean by the word. But for me, the problem is not that historians should define their terms. The problem is that the historians who claim to be studying capitalism “on the ground” are, unavoidably, already defining the term in the very process of choosing which “ground” they look at. I don’t think its possible to say you’re studying capitalism without defining the term, whether explicitly or implicitly.