[I found this file on my OSU floppy so I must have written it during the 1996-1997 academic year while I had a post-doc at The Ohio State University. (I learned in Columbus that you had to say “The” as if there might be another one!) I can’t imagine who the intended audience was that I would have given two chapters of my dissertation to read in preparation for “a quite informal meeting”! Anyway the talk is interesting in tracing the origins of my dissertation at William & Mary and the University of Florida.]
Since this is a quite informal meeting and hopefully you have all had a chance to take a look at the two chapters from my dissertation, I thought I would kick off the discussion by giving you a brief background into how I became an historian and how I happened into tackling such controversial issues for my dissertation.
My background is quite different from that of most historians. I didn’t come to a real interest in history until I was in my 30s. I was raised in an environment which stressed mathematics and the hard sciences and poohpoohed mushy subjects like history. I was pretty good at it too. I was the top science student in the state of Texas my senior year in high school. I zipped through my undergraduate years in three years, working during the summers in a refinery to pay my way through school, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Texas A&M University with a degree in Chemical Engineering. I was a pretty good engineer too. I worked three years in a refinery in Houston as a specialist in energy conservation and two years up in Alaska in long-range computer planning and working week-on, week-off up at Prudhoe Bay.
But you know I never really liked engineering. It was just my ticket to economic independence. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life but I knew it wasn’t working as an engineer for some large corporation. So at age 25, having stashed away quite a bit of money, I called it quits. Mostly what I wanted to do was to travel and study. I spent the next few years traveling around the world and the United States, including a wonderful year in England, and taking courses in whatever subjects I felt like taking at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Over time I became more and more interested in the subject of history. Seeing all these places where the history I had been forced to take in school had actually taken place was something of a mystical experience. Along the way I also caught the genealogy bug and began the search for my family roots. In the winter of 1988 my wife and I were living in Newport News, Virginia where she was a Montessori teacher and I was spending most of time scouring 17th century Virginia records for the origins of some of my Southern roots. Getting more and more frustrated with the regular disappearance of whole families in the 17c and thinking it high time that I got back to doing something more serious with my life, and intuitively feeling that I belonged in academia, I decided I would see if I could make a career out of my new love of history.
I went to the History Department of William & Mary, where John Selby was chair then, and he gave me permission to sit in on his seminar on colonial American history. Having little understanding of what professional historians did, I was not certain what I would do but after Professor Selby introduced me to the “new social history” I knew immediately that was the type of history I wanted to do because it would allow me to draw upon my engineering background, my knowledge of many of the primary sources from my genealogical work, and a strong desire to understand what made my ancestors tick, people whom I only knew through official records. In trying to come up with a research topic that would show off my skills and carry a master’s thesis, I hit upon the idea of making a computer data base out of the 17th century Virginia land patent records which I had often pondered over during my genealogical work.
With my computer background working up the data base was a snap. The only thing I lacked was an interesting “historiographical” question to ask it. I was lucky enough to be taking in Fall 1988 an economic history course from William J. Hausman in the Economics Department and I asked him what kind of question I could ask my data base. He pointed me to an article by Stanley Lebergott employing staples theory and econometric analysis of land acquisition in the antebellum South that was in our course packet. I realized immediately that I could do everything that Lebergott did, knew from perusing McCusker and Menard that the staples model was an important topic among both historians and economists, and quickly whipped out a term paper which confirmed the validity of the staples model in the colonial Chesapeake. On that basis Professor Hausman kindly agreed to direct my thesis.
Seeking other people for my committee, I gave the paper to Kevin Kelly at Colonial Williamsburg who was disturbed that I had not considered other factors, especially demographic factors in land acquisition. I realized he had a point and in thinking about how to operationalize his suggestion I went back to McCusker and Menard and started tracking down the whole debate between the staples and Malthusian-frontier models. Running my computer analyses again, but this time incorporating Malthusian factors and with a greater knowledge of econometrics, I reversed my conclusions from the term paper coming down firmly in support of the Malthusian-frontier model. However, additional analyses of data on population growth, tobacco prices, and the immigration of indentured and unindentured servants suggested to me that neither model provided a sufficient explanation of the complexities of economic-demographic development in the colonial Chesapeake and that was how I concluded my thesis.
Leaving such loose ends bothered me a bit. In particular I was disturbed by a finding that the immigration of servants to the Chesapeake might be negatively correlated with tobacco prices, a view contrary to both staples and Malthusian models suggesting that planters perhaps sought to expand production when times were bad and vice versa. But I had no intention at the time of pursuing the issue any further because for my doctoral dissertation I wanted to undertake a subject I knew much more about from my genealogical research and for which there was an abundance of evidence: an analysis of migration across the lower South beginning in 18c Virginia and ending in Texas in the 1850s.
I continued my research as a doctoral student in History under Darrett B. Rutman at the University of Florida, intent on studying antebellum Southern migration. However, in seeking to develop a suitable social science framework for analyzing migration I kept coming back to all of the unanswered questions I had left unresolved in the colonial Chesapeake. Consciously and unconsciously I was always looking for an explanation for the type of behavior I thought I had observed in the colonial Chesapeake. In my search I ranged indiscriminately across disciplines and across the ages for possible insights. Eventually I hit on the the theoretical framework that I call the “necessity synthesis” that I introduce in Chapter 8. Well armed I started reworking my econometric analysis of the elasticities of tobacco supply, demand for labor and demand for land in the 17th century Chesapeake. I wasn’t at all surprised when the findings fully confirmed the necessity synthesis.
Ever since I have been trying to float these ideas by historians and, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence in support of the necessity synthesis, have found very little enthusiasm for such a theoretical framework among historians, economists, and other social scientists. The problem seems to be that such a framework confronts head-on two pervasive ideas in the social sciences: on the one hand, the Marxian-Weberian idea that based on their economic ideology or behavior one can readily divide people into two camps: traditional or modern, pre-capitalist or capitalist, or what have you. This is an antithesis at the heart of historiographical debates about the market revolution, the transition to capitalism, the republican synthesis and the rise of liberalism, but an antithesis that I see rooted more in nineteenth-century American and Western exceptionalism than in hard empirical evidence. On the other hand, my research also challenges the idea espoused by neo-classical economists that people at all times and places are maximizers, maximizing some sort of utility function. I find that both these dubious ideas not only distort our ability to understand other peoples past and present, but also our ability to understand ourselves today.
As you can see it was not my original intention to take on such a grandiose agenda. I began with a problem and in an effort to solve that problem I kept getting pushed into tackling bigger and bigger problems. I must admit that because of my background I brought certain pre-conceptions and interests that are different from the vast majority of historians. I approach history like an engineer tackles problems. As a problem solver thoroughly convinced of the power of the scientific method I seek continuities, commonalities. I think this puts me in a much better position to understand discontinuities, differences. When I have traveled to foreign countries, I am certainly well aware of differences in culture. But as I try to understand these people, what strikes me even more is what we all share in common: we are all trying to make a living, to raise a family, to get by, etc. We all face different cultural constraints and opportunities and measure against different cultural standards. But in the end, if you can recognize the commonalities, the differences are understandable. To me history is very much the same, traveling through time to visit and try to understand people who are similar yet different.
With that brief background I’ll open up the floor to your questions.