CALL FOR PAPERS WEHC Kyoto 2015 – DEADLINE abstracts 25 August 2013 Please email your Word document (maximum 500 words) to bert.demunck [at] ua.ac.be.
Human capital formation compared: knowledge investments in different regions before and during the industrial revolution
Organizers:
Annelies De Bie (Centre for Urban History – University of Antwerp) Bert De Munck (Centre for Urban History – University of Antwerp) Patrick Wallis (Department of Economic History – LSE)
Fascinated by the diversity of economic development, historians have tried for decades to understand its origins and causes. Recently, human capital was introduced in the debate as a crucial building block for economic development, the seeds of which would have been sown in the late middle ages (van Zanden 2009). As a consequence, historians increasingly examine contexts in which public investments in schooling and vocational training were of minor importance. Most of them are looking for correlations between, on the one hand, investments in human capital and, on the other, economic growth – using proxies such as literacy and numeracy (De Moor & van Zanden 2008).
However, solid proof of a positive correlation is still lacking, which is to a large extent due to these proxies being partial at best. After all, given the importance of practical, empirical and hands-on knowledge and of learning on the shop floor in the early modern period (De Munck & Soly 2007; Smith & Schmidt 2007), a focus on literacy and even numeracy is far from obvious.
Conversely, it remains to be seen whether investments made in training, schooling and education can be explained from an economic perspective exclusively. Which contextual factors determined investments in training in the first place? Historians have recently focused on the relationship between the number of children and the quality of education and training (Klemp & Weisdorf 2011), but there are of course other factors, such as real income, economic prospects, technological evolutions, social inequality, etc. Some of the factors involved may even have been largely unrelated to economic reckoning, let alone economic growth.
There is thus an urgent need for a comprehensive and integrated approach in which 1° different types of youths (some subject to deskilling, while others embodying new theories and techniques) and different types of knowledge (theoretical as well as practical) are distinguished and 2° knowledge investments are linked to economic changes, socio-demographic factors (the number of children, age, birth order, etc.), the role of institutions (including guilds, art academies etc.), cultural factors (the importance of Latin and the humanities), and the emergence of a global division of labour in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The aim of this session is to compare and contextualize the investments in human capital in the preindustrial and early industrial period from a household perspective across different regions. The following perspectives may be relevant:
- How much did households invest in human capital and in what type of knowledge did they specifically invest (reading and writing, learning on the shop floor, vocational training in schools, bookkeeping, languages, humanities, etc.)?
- Which family members obtained which types of training and education (i.e., gender differences, distinctions between firstborns and others, etc.) and at what age?
- What were the causal factors involved (the availability and price of capital, the economic and institutional context, the cultural climate, etc.)?
The ultimate goal is 1° to enhance our understanding of (the) (pre)industrial learning market(s) and the impact of the economic, institutional and cultural environment, and 2° to gain better insight in the variety of growth paths. We therefore invite case studies from different regions across the globe.
Selected bibliograhy
- De Moor, T. and J.L. van Zanden, “Van fouten kan je leren: een kritische benadering van de mogelijkheden van ‘leeftijdstapelen’ voor sociaal-economisch onderzoek naar gecijferdheid in het pre-industriële Vlaanderen en Nederland”, Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis, 5/4, 2008, 55-86.
- De Munck, B. and H. Soly, “‘Learning on the shop floor’ in historical perspective”, in: B. De Munck, S.L. Kaplan and H. Soly (eds.), Learning on the shop floor: historical perspectives on apprenticeship, New York/Oxford, Berghan Books, 2007, 3-32.
- Klemp, M. and J. Weisdorf, “The Child Quantity-Quality Trade-Off during the Industrial Revolution in England”, working paper, 2011.
- Smith, P.H. and B. Schmidt, “Introduction: knowledge and its making in early modern Europe”, in: P.H. Smith and B. Schmidt (eds.), Making knowledge in early modern Europe: practices, objects and texts, 1400-1800, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 1-18.
- van Zanden, J.L., The long road to the Industrial Revolution: the European economy in a global perspective 1000-1800, Leiden, Brill, 2009.
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Annelies De Bie
Centre for Urban History - University of Antwerp
[Cross-posted, with thanks, from EH-Net]