The Institutional Approach to Economic History: Connecting the Two Strands

Richard Langlois

No 2013-33, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in history – the scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolution – to shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these episodes, economic "just-so" stories advanced our understanding of history. What animated intellectual innovation in both cases was a bold conjecture about the raison d’être of a puzzling institutional structure. But what ultimately enriched our understanding was the process of conjecture and revision those conjectures set off. In both episodes, the revised conjectures that best withstood criticism and revision were those that saw the phenomena not as static snapshots of economic agents confronting an economic problem but rather those that embedded the phenomena within a larger economic problem and within a process of economic change. In the end it is an account of institutional change – what I call the good old New Institutional Economics – that connects the use of institutional economics to explain puzzling historical phenomenon with the role of institutional economics in addressing the big questions of economic growth.

Keywords: institutions; institutional change; transaction costs; open-field system; factory system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 D02 D23 N01 N53 N63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2013-09, Revised 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2013-33R.pdf Full text (revised version) (application/pdf)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2013-33.pdf Full text (original version) (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2013-33

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics University of Connecticut 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McConnel ().