Must-Read: Neville Morley: When It Changed

Must-Read: As I wrote in reply to Neville Morley, in the twentieth century the pace of explosion in humanity’s technological capabilities and material wealth has been so great that the economic-technological strand of history is profoundly and substantially determinative of all other aspects of human history. Before 1700, however, the economic is the largely-static background against which history takes place: only in the [longue duree][] does economic history become a character in any narrative. And from 1700 to 1870? Let me turn the mic over to John Stuart Mill (1871):

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. [And] they have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But…

Then Mill goes off into the necessity for conscious and artificial–and mandatory–fertility control to dismiss the Malthusian Devil. But the point–that up until 1870 the world was still profoundly pre-industrial in its bulk–is inescapable.

Neville Morley: When It Changed: “Eric Hobsbawm[‘s]… short twentieth century… [an] idea… found in Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern…

…and the 21st Century began in 1989 with the collapse of Soviet communism…. DeLong starts with the question of whether the economic history of the 20th century is better organised around the ‘short’ (1914-1989) or ‘long’ (1870-2012) version, arguing for the latter on the basis of jumps in Total Factor Productivity and on the demographic transition; as he notes, the case for the short C20 is founded on (a) the idea that the crucial part of the Industrial Revolution had long since taken place and (b) the dominance of Marxism-Leninism and ideological struggle (which is of course Hobsbawm’s main focus). Milanovic’s response is essentially to re-assert the characterisation of the twentieth century in terms of the struggle between capitalism and an alternative political-economic philosophy, which naturally leads him back to Hobsbawm.

As both note, what’s really driving this difference of opinion is a different choice of subject matter… with a certain hint that some approaches are more significant than others, at least when it comes to characterising the Twentieth Century as a period…. Periodisation… is always silly. But it also seems to be inevitable. As DeLong noted on Twitter, we’re story-telling apes, making sense of the world through a [rocess of selection, simplification, juxtaposition and connection…. Why centuries? I would speculate that part of the reason is the shift from understanding the past in terms of the regnal periods of monarchs or dynasties (‘the Elizabethan Age’; ‘the Victorian Era’), as a move to a… less overtly Great Man orientated view…. Gibbon’s… (allegedly) most fortunate period in history, “the period which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”, has changed its label from ‘the Age of the Antonines’ to the Second Century… plac[ing] increasing emphasis on systematic explanations–with the stability of the Second Century doomed to be shattered not by the moral failings of Caracalla but by the Antonine Plague and the Third Century Crisis….

A century is longer than a normal lifespan, but a short enough period of time to be humanly comprehensible…. Where this becomes trickier… is the subtle shift from centuries as a framework within which we locate events and developments… to centuries as a means of conceptualising and even explaining…. Defining the 20th Century… in terms of, say, the struggle between capitalism and communism, privileges certain sorts of historical development… implies that they are the driving force behind events more generally, smuggling in interpretation in the guise of chronological arrangement…. Unless you do assume that one strand of historical development–changes in productivity, or technology, or ideology–is determinative of all the others, then there’s no particular reason to assume that everything will change according to the same chronological pattern…. Our desire for narrative coherence wants moments… to offer a definitive ending, or at least a new chapter; history goes on resisting such simplification.