FOREWORD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Books v. Books<\/a>* IN 1946, cigarettes became the measure of everything. On the war-ravaged Continent, they enjoyed currency as a means of payment\u2014a more stable store of value than even the dollar. In Britain, where they were expensive but not rationed, they found their way as unit of account in George Orwell’s little essay “Books v. Cigarettes,” which appeared in the Tribune and today is the lead essay in an eponymous collection published by Penguin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though many readers may be familiar with it, probably not all are, for it is hardly Orwell’s most famous or highly esteemed piece. For example, it is deemed “relatively inconsequential fluff” by “The Narratologist,” who gives the Penguin essay collection four stars out of five and rates “Books v. Cigarettes” the “least interesting piece” in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The financial crisis of 2007-2008, which I insist on calling a \u201cpanic\u201d for reasons that this article explores, can only be understood with an interdisciplinary approach that combines history and economics. For the last forty years, I have studied financial crises from both vantage points. In this brief memoir, I provide an overview of my path through these disciplines and relate it to financial crises, as well as some controversial episodes in both history and economics, including macroeconomics and cliometrics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n THE BALANCE SHEETS OF CAPITALISM<\/strong> Capitalism when Labor was Capital: Slavery, Power, and Price in Antebellum America<\/a> The new historians of capitalism have been reluctant to define \u201ccapitalism,\u201d warning that a narrow definition could artificially constrain our analysis of the system on the ground. But, as the field matures, thinking more about what capitalism is can help both to clarify cross-disciplinary debates and also to offer a deeper theoretical understanding of the relationship between slavery and capitalism. This paper unfolds in two parts. First, I explore the problem of defining of capitalism, offering one possibility based on the commoditization of labor as it results from the distribution of capital. Such a definition attempts to reconcile understandings of capitalism that focus on wage labor with the circumstances of slavery. The second half of the article considers late antebellum American slavery through the lens of this proposed definition, asking to what extent enslaved people and their labor were \u201ccommoditized.\u201d To do this, I explore four genres of valuation in which slaveholders graded and priced enslaved people: inventories, the system of fractional hands, price circulars, and finally, negotiations over manumission. Planters\u2019 calculations reflect their efforts to understand the infinite variety of enslaved lives as abstract, measurable units of human capital. They enjoyed the power to shift among different modes of valuation to answer different questions, and when it served their interests they abandoned the language of commoditization altogether. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Naturalizing Inequality: The Problem of Economic Fatalism in the Age of Piketty<\/a> Using the unprecedented 2014 Science<\/em> special issue on inequality as a conceptual guide, this article examines the recent return of an assortment of fatalist arguments which claim that high levels of economic inequality are a natural, inevitable, and basic characteristic of human civilization and that, therefore, it would be incredibly difficult and damaging\u2014if not impossible\u2014to significantly reduce such income and wealth gaps. Classifying these varying arguments into four natural \u201claws\u201d of inequality\u2014mathematical, neoclassical, historical, and genetic\u2014this article seeks to unpack the internal logic and external politics of such claims by placing them in their broader historical context. In so doing, this article will also show how certain aspects of Thomas Piketty\u2019s earlier work played a key\u2014albeit unintended\u2014role in the recent renaissance in naturalizing inequality. In conclusion, this article reflects on other aspects of Piketty\u2019s analysis that can be used to \u201cdenaturalize\u201d inequality and reveal its highly contingent, political, structural, and institutional basis. Finally, the article will end with a call for historians of capitalism to pick up the denaturalizing mantle and seek to explicitly disprove and challenge the contention that high levels of inequality are all but inevitable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Decoding the Balance Sheet: Gifts, Goodwill, and the Liquidation of the League of Nations<\/a> This paper asks what we might learn about the \u201cgrammatical structures\u201d of capitalism by \u201creading\u201d the balance sheets of nonprofit organizations. To those ends, it turns to the appraisal and liquidation of the League of Nations\u2019 assets at the time of the organization\u2019s dissolution in 1946. Rather than describing the whole process, the paper narrows in on the liquidation board\u2019s decision to price a valuable collection of gifts and historical objects as zero in the final financial calculation. Drawing on theories of gifts and symbolic exchange, the paper asks what the history of that non-price tells us more broadly about the pecuniary role of what accountants call goodwill not only in the workings of international organizations, but also in relation to both the tangible and intangible nature of modern capital itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Money Doctors of Seventeenth-Century Naples*<\/a> A collection of texts printed in early seventeenth-century Naples exemplifies the intersection between economic history and the history of thought. A slowly worsening monetary situation led authorities, unsure of what they could and should do, to solicit diagnostics and cures. The unfolding debate is challenging to analyze: participants viewed events through the lenses of their background, training, and interest. Merchant experts competed with university graduates and technical officials. These texts offer us a rich but contradictory set of observations and interpretations in what constitutes an early attempt at applied economic analysis and policy advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years, a wave of celebrated books by historians has explored the role of slavery in the development of American capitalism. Some of the new works make arguments that resemble those of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman\u2019s 1974 book Time on the Cross, yet they do not engage with the debates surrounding that book or the extensive literature that followed its publication. This paper revisits those debates and discusses subsequent works that have changed how economists analyze slavery in order to make the literature more accessible to non-specialists. The discussion highlights criticisms of Time on the Cross by both economists and historians that remain relevant to the new works on slavery and capitalism.
Marc Flandreau<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
BY INVITATION<\/strong>
On the Panic of 2007: My Journey from Economics to History and Back Again<\/a>
Gary Gorton<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Caitlin Rosenthal<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eli Cook<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
C. N. Biltoft<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fran\u00e7ois R. Velde<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
ESSAYS AND INTERTEXTS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Revisiting Time on the Cross<\/em> After 45 Years: The Slavery Debates and the New Economic History<\/a>
Eric Hilt<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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