Best of XVth World Economic History Congress

I agree with the folks from the Economic History Blog that the XVth World Economic History Congress in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was overall a very pleasant experience. Most sessions were interesting and featured at least one captivating speaker. Daron Acemoglu opened the meeting with a keynote address on "The Historical Roots of Poverty", which he identified as lying in skill-biased technological change, unfavourable institutional settings, and the abuse of political power. He repeated his claim made in this 2009 paper that radical political reform, if done rightly, can be a significant boost to economic development (I was unfamiliar with the article until then and found it a fascinating, if at times unconvincing read). Equally fascinating was the final debate between Bob Allen and Joel Mokyr on the causes of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Allen regards the high labour/capital cost ratio in eighteenth century Britain as the primary reason for a rapid shift towards capital-intensive means of production, whereas Mokyr favours a broader cultural explanation (unfortunately, I could not hear him out as I had to rush to the train station in the middle of the debate).

Here is a short list of my personal conference highlights, which hopefully provides a sense of how wide-ranging the discussions were:

Oscar Gelderblom and Regina Grafe: The Rise, Persistence and Decline of Merchant Guilds. Re-thinking the Comparative Study of Commercial Institutions in Pre-modern Europe (session: "The role of trust in the development of finance and commerce").
--> Gelderblom and Grafe construct a new data-set with observations on merchant organisations in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bilbao and Bruges for benchmark years between 1300 and 1800. Investigating the conditions under which merchants delegate control to external bodies, they classify the data into five categories: individual agents (self-responsible merchants with no control delegated), informal constraints (merchants are constrained in their decision-making by certain social or religious norms prevalent in their community), political representation (merchants choose to be represented in front of other groups or political authorities), internal discipline (merchants delegate enforcement of rules to officials elected by the community), and power of exclusion (community is granted the power to exclude both insiders and outsiders from its commercial privileges). Using maximum likelihood estimation, Gelderblom and Grafe reappraise a number of recurring themes in institutional history, such as the significance of merchant guilds with respect to political protection, the sanctioning of cheating, and the facilitation of trade in small markets.

Kurt Dopfer and Werner Scheltjens: Why is Economic History not an Evolutionary Science? (session of the same title)
--> The methodological dichotomy between Economic History and Economic History (i.e. between "positivist-quantitative" and "subjectivist-qualitative" approaches) appears to be an everlasting trauma of the discipline. Enter Dopfer and Scheltjens, who make yet another attempt to overcome this curious divide. Their solution: Evolutionary Realism. Based on a historical case study, they demonstrate how quantitative and qualitative analytical methods can be synthesised by adopting an evolutionary perspective on (measurable) economic institutions.