When we think of archives, we tend to think of them as either physical spaces or collections of documents – both of which they are, of course. But archives are also historical records in their own right: the archive doesn’t just contain evidence, it is evidence. The relative abundance of documentation in archives for, say, … Continue reading Archives as Evidence
I’ve recently taken on a project that has required me to revisit some earlier work on the Russian rural commune. (That's actually one of the reasons I wanted to do it.) It’s been interesting to discover how my thinking about it has evolved since then and to consider new ways to approach the subject. This … Continue reading Revisiting the Russian Rural Commune
Formal mechanisms for the enforcement of property rights and the resolution of disputes are thought to be essential to long term economic development and political stability. But how do these get established and what makes people in a society willing to use them? More recent attempts to create such mechanisms in places like post-Soviet eastern … Continue reading The Demand for Extra-Local Forms of Dispute Resolution
Until fairly recently, history was written primarily with a focus on the state, using sources generated by states (or early versions of states). Historians' views of how past societies worked came from sources that actually told us more about how societies were governed or how those in government thought their societies worked (or ought to … Continue reading Serfdom, the State, and the Problem of Enforcement
Historians interested in Russia and Germany face some similar challenges. In both cases it is difficult to see past the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Bolshevism and Nazism tend to attract more researchers than earlier periods and they cast a long shadow: it is all too easy to view earlier developments in these countries … Continue reading Fortune Favors the Bold
There is a trade-off between depth and breadth. I have extolled the many virtues of depth in earlier posts about history and the way historical societies were organized and functioned at a local level. But in order to dig deeply into past worlds, historians incur a certain number of start-up costs early in their research … Continue reading 1066 And All That
It was easy to imagine, before the pandemic arrived, that societies today would handle an epidemiological challenge much better than those in the past had done. And in many ways that’s proven to be the case. Scientific knowledge and advanced technology have made it possible to quickly identify viruses and their mutations, to generate and … Continue reading Quarantine in History: No Easy Way Out
In recent years, social scientists have started taking on board the idea that cultural norms, attitudes, and beliefs are important determinants of behavior. A growing body of work theorizes about their origins, considers their relationship to institutions, and explores their significance for important questions in economics and political science. Since I am a historian, and … Continue reading Beliefs and Behavior in the Past
It has been over 50 years now since John Hajnal first pointed out the existence of a “European Marriage Pattern” (EMP). Who’d have thought that behavior most often associated with modern societies – late age at first marriage, neolocality (the formation of a separate household at marriage), and large proportions of never-married persons – could … Continue reading The Medieval Church and Western European Marriage Patterns
Many of us who study institutions are convinced they matter because we can see them. We observe the obstacles they create for people trying to improve their lives. We can document the ways in which they restrict choices, create opportunities for rent-seeking elites, and deprive many people of formal recourse against the predatory practices of … Continue reading A Good Institution Is Hard To Find