A “New” Business History? A Commentary on the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics

The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.