SOURCE: "Myth and Measurement: The Innis Tradition in Economic History," in Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Vol. 12, No. 5, Winter, 1977, pp. 96-105.

Most people past middle age would probably agree, if they look back on their early years, that there were a few individuals who, without ever intending to do so or being conscious of having done so, exercised a decisive influence on their later thoughts and attitudes. The effect of such people is, as it were, accidental; they transform without intent. Harold Innis played such a role in my life, as in the lives of many other scholars now in their fifties and sixties. I am sure that he never thought of me as in any sense "his" student. If, during my one year as a graduate student in economic history at Toronto, I was under the wing of any particular faculty member, it was Tom Easterbrook's, not Harold Innis's. Any suggestion to Innis that he was somehow responsible for the later trend of my thoughts and interests would have evoked from him no more than some characteristically acidedged piece of ironic self-depreciation. Yet I am convinced that it was so. I suspect that Thorstein Veblen played a similar role—perhaps all great teachers do. North American scholarship is full of people who came under Veblen's influence, either personally or through his writings, and were irreversibly changed by the experience. But Veblen would not have taken kindly to any suggestion that he had been "influential" in a person-to-person sense. Influence of that kind carries with it an implication of responsibility. Veblen would have repudiated with scorn the suggestion that he was personally responsible for anyone's destiny other than his own; and I suspect that Innis's reaction would have been no different.

The comparison between Veblen and Innis is appropriate in another respect. In both cases one is conscious of tremendous intellectual power. This consciousness necessarily evokes respect, even when one disagrees with particular assertions. But this respect in both cases is time and again inter-mixed with what one must candidly call exasperation. In Veblen what exasperates is the deliberate search for paradox, the patent glee with which he turns convention on its head, the wilful contrariness of the man. With Innis it is the obscurity, the consistent refusal to write clearly and plainly, the shrouding of meaning in a fog of allusions and implications. At its worst this trait—in lectures and in writings—could be infuriating. One became infuriated because, in the last analysis, one was being asked to believe that, behind the ambiguity and imprecision there was profound meaning. What was required was, as Coleridge put it in another context, a willing suspension of disbelief. To be taught by Innis and to learn from Innis called for an act of faith. You had to believe that there was something really important there. Grains of doubt crept in from time to time—can anyone honestly deny it? Perhaps the Emperor had no new clothes after all.

It is very hard to find in Canadian scholarship today any serious criticism of Harold Innis. There has developed a kind of "cult of personality" rather like the mystique that now surrounds the Annales school of historians in Europe. There are interesting parallels between the two cases. Innis is known mostly for his work in the "staples theory" of Canadian history and for the later grand-scale extension of that theory to the "staple" of communications and the rise and fall of empires. The staples theory, it is now generally agreed, is not testable. It provides a framework for research, but no one can state what propositions one is required to accept or reject in order to qualify as a staples theorist. Melville Watkins, Gordon Bertram, and Kenneth Buckley have each in their own way gone as far as anyone can in the attempt to transform the staples theory into an operational model of development, but they would be the first to admit that their versions of the thesis—testable and quantifiable though they may be—fall far short of the rich suggestiveness of Innis's approach. Similarly with the Annales school. What is their method? What hypotheses are they testing? What assumptions are we asked to accept or reject? No one can say for sure. And so authority takes over where the logic of empiricism fails, and we have the cult of academic heroes. In the French case there is at least a line of succession: Febvre, Bloch, Braudel. In Canada no economic historian since Innis has come close to matching his reputation or his influence.

Such an outcome would have been anathema to Innis himself. No one could castigate monopolies of knowledge more vigorously than he. But we are discussing here his influence, not his intentions, and the fact of the matter is that, in Canadian economic history, Innis still dominates the field. In my personal judgment his influence has not been all to the good. Elsewhere, the last decade and a half in economic history has been one of the most exciting periods ever experienced in the history of the profession. Not so in Canada. There have been, it is true, a few echoes of the revolutionary experiments in methodology going on south of the border. John Dales and others have pointed out where the conventional wisdom is sadly in need of rethinking. And the statistical underpinning of the field is now in much better shape. But a reconstruction of the standard interpretation of Canadian economic history is still a long way off. That standard interpretation, enshrined in monographs and textbooks, is an interpretation on the Innis model. It is no compliment to Canadian scholarship that now, twenty-five years after his death, it still monopolizes the field.

The man's influence, it is clear, was powerful—perhaps more powerful than he knew, more powerful than he would have wished. Wherein did that power lie? Perhaps my own experience, as a professional economic historian who once passed through the field of influence of Harold Innis, can give some clues. When I came to Toronto in September, 1947, it was no part of my intention—nor of the intentions of my sponsor, the Hudson's Bay Company—that I should study economic history, far less specialize in it and make it my profession. Nevertheless, that is the way it turned out. And I have often tried to reconstruct the events and experiences that made it turn out that way. It is not easy. There was certainly the assumption—unspoken but powerful—that only an idiot would be a graduate student in economics at Toronto and fail to take at least one course in economic history under Harold Innis. But this explains only one's initial introduction to the subject. It does not explain how at Toronto, and under Innis, the idea of economic history could reach out and take hold of a not-too-impressionable young man, and leave him convinced that, "Yes, certainly: this is what I want to do with my life."

The reason cannot have been that Harold Innis was, in any conventional sense of the word, an inspiring teacher. I can still recreate, in my imagination, the picture of that tall, stooped figure lecturing in the main auditorium of the old building on Bloor Street; just as clearly as I can hear the streetcars screeching down the tracks outside. And the truth is that, in his lecture courses, Harold Innis was often extraordinarily dull. And the same was true of his graduate seminar, in which indeed he spoke only infrequently, preferring to sit quietly in his chair in the corner, an inscrutable but somehow awe-inspiring figure.

No: it was not the teaching style of the man that inspired. It was the excitement of the ideas themselves. I had learned, as an undergraduate in Scotland, to conceive of economic history as a record of past economic activity—a record that it was the duty of scholars to make as comprehensive and accurate as possible, but nevertheless no more than a record. There was little there to inspire, little to elicit a commitment from students. What I got from Innis was something quite different. It was a sense of economic history as an enterprise, an exploration into the unknown. And in that enterprise a man's best aid came not from conscientious, careful diligence—though that was indispensable—but from the force of his ideas. The lectures indeed might seem dull and flat; the man himself clearly made no effort to entertain or amuse—to "relate to his students," as the cant phrase of today has it; but what was happening in Harold Innis's classes was that students were being introduced to the contest of ideas. And to those who had the native wit to sense what was going on, it was an exciting experience.

I have often been asked during my career, as all professors have, to make a judgment as to what is and what is not good teaching. Indeed, we have to make these judgments every day; because, although we may pride ourselves on our research and tell ourselves that research is the "really important" thing we do, nevertheless what we do most of the time is teach, and that is what we are mostly paid to do. I have been fortunate to have worked under some great teachers. Of these Harold Innis was the first. At Toronto I should also mention Tom Easterbrook. And later at Harvard there were men like Joseph Schumpeter and Leland Jenks. If I ask myself what these great teachers had in common, it was no particular quirk of personality, no gimmick of style or presentation. It was the power of their ideas—an almost uncanny ability, in lectures or in conversation, to throw out the ideas that, for their students, suddenly made everything they were learning make sense, so that all the particular things that were known suddenly fitted into a design. If this has ever happened to you, you will understand what I mean. It is not a matter of rhetoric; it is not something that a teacher can achieve by careful preparation and practice. It is an ability to make students see meaning in previously disjunct and disorganized data. The great teachers are those, I believe, who can give vision in this way.

I have spoken of the "power of their ideas" as one of the elements that made these men great teachers, and I mean by that not only explanatory power in the sense in which any scientific theory has explanatory power. I mean also the power to engage the imagination, the power to energize the often dull and tedious work of scholarly research and convert it into an exciting enterprise. It is no coincidence that each of the four master teachers I have mentioned was working out of a system of ideas which had this energizing power. For Innis it was originally his "staple thesis" of Canadian economic growth, broadening out at the time I first knew him into a comprehensive theory of the relationship between communications media and the rise and fall of empires. For Easterbrook it was his theme of enterprise and bureaucracy as the two basic organizational forms of economic life, each of them requiring a particular set of security conditions for its origin and survival. For Schumpeter it was his theory of the entrepreneur and his role in business cycles and economic development. And for Jenks it was Parsonian sociology, a conceptual apparatus of formidable complexity but also one of extreme comprehensiveness. Each of these men—and I think the same could be said of all good teachers—was teaching and thinking and writing out of a particular "idea-system." And it was the power of the idea-system that caught and held the attention of the student.

These "idea-systems" are what I have referred to, in the title of this article, as myths. And I think it will be clear that I am using the word in a particular, almost technical, sense. In popular usage, to refer to a system of beliefs as a myth is to sneer at it, to imply that it is somehow unworthy of the attention of the educated mind. This is not, I believe, a view that serious students of myths, be they anthropologists or theologians, are likely to accept, for they know very well that it is by their myths that men live; that men depend on myths to give meaning, significance, and purpose to their lives; and that cultures are formed as much by myths as by artifacts. Myths, in short, are important; they are functional; they have to be taken seriously. And if this is the view of the serious student of myth, it is also the view of those who create our myths: the poets and artists; the politicians; and, not least, some historians.

In the particular sense in which I am using the word, and with particular reference to economic history, I intend to distinguish between myths on the one hand and theories or hypotheses on the other. The basis for the distinction is simply that myths, as such, are not susceptible to disproof. They cannot, that is to say, be subjected to operational verification. And consequently they cannot be, in the positivistic sense, either true or false. To a logical positivist this would mean that myths have no meaning; they are made up of metaphysical statements. Within his system of definitions, this is undeniable. The position I wish to defend is simply that—whether or not they can be empirically tested, and perhaps even because there is no way in which they can be proved or disproved—myths are necessary for creative scholarship. Even more particularly, they are necessary for good teaching.

Let me illustrate my meaning by reference to a Canadian example: the so-called "staples approach" to Canadian economic history associated with the name of Harold Innis. Three points can be made:

1. There is no way in which the staples approach can be proved right or wrong. This is why one hesitates to refer to it as the staples theory or the staples hypothesis. These words seem too confining. We prefer the phrase "staples approach" precisely because it suggests not a series of testable propositions but a frame of reference, a point of view, a perspective, a way of seeing the data. One can, of course, reasonably discuss the usefulness of this point of view—and Canadian scholars have done so—suggesting that in certain phases of Canadian history the staples approach helps one to see what is really going on, while in other periods it obscures more than it illuminates. But, when we do this, we are discussing the instrumental value of the approach, not its empirical verifiability.

2. Nevertheless, even though not itself testable, it can be and in fact proved to be the source of a multitude of particular theories and hypotheses which could be and were tested. It provided, as it were, a frame of reference within which problems could be seen, and in terms of which hypotheses could be stated. Each of the individual theories or hypotheses is, so to speak, a translation of the myth into one possible testable form. But the particular hypothesis could fail without necessarily causing loss of faith in the myth itself.

3. The vitality of the myth, the power of the ideas that it contains, is shown precisely by its ability to call forth an outpouring of creative research activity. This is why the statement of a powerful myth is typically followed by a flowering of scholarship, a burst of creativity that sometimes makes one feel as if an obstacle to vision has been removed. And similarly, one evidence of the power of a myth is its ability to attract new talent into a field, as new possibilities become evident and new horizons opened up. As an example, we may recall the golden age of Canadian economic history that accompanied the statement and elaboration of the staples theme. Earlier, in the United States, much the same thing had happened after Frederick Jackson Turner's statement of the "frontier theory." And, on a much more modest scale, I was associated with something of the same kind at Harvard, in the pioneering days of research in entrepreneurial history.

Harold Innis was a great scholar and a great teacher because his myths had the power to energize, to inspire, to make one see meanings in history that one had not seen before. I make no distinction, in this respect, between the early and the late Innis. Whether he was writing about the fur trade or about the power of empires to control time and space, his technique was essentially the same. And this helps us to understand, also, the deliberate obscurity and difficulty of his writing. One does not expect the makers of myths to follow the canons of logical positivism. Indeed they cannot, for their myths are suggestive precisely to the extent that they lack identifiable operational meaning. The most precise language of all is mathematics; it can attain that level of precision because it is a purely formal language, devoid of content. One gains precision by losing the suggestibility, the ambiguity, the aura of associations and allusions that are characteristic of myth. Abandon these features of myth, and you may then hope to work comfortably with numbers, operational definitions, and precise measurement. But it is not possible to work in both modes simultaneously.

This is what I have referred to in the title of this article as the difference between myth and measurement. The terms are no more than convenient tags for different styles of historical writing, different techniques, if you will, of attaining historical plausibility. I do not mean to suggest that they are polar opposites. There are those, indeed, who would say that belief in measurement as a means of gaining understanding into the processes of history is the greatest myth of all. And Innis himself was never averse to using measurements to garnish his history, when measurements were available. But the difference is, nevertheless, real and important. It is a difference in the strategy of writing and teaching history, a difference between those who hold that truth can be found by counting and those who do not. Innis belonged to the latter way of thinking. And to be a historian in the Innisian mode is necessarily to lean toward myth rather than measurement.

If I am correct, developments in Canadian economic history over the last decade and a half—or rather, the relative lack of developments—become more readily understandable. For this has been a period in which the pendulum of style in the writing of economic history has swung decisively toward measurement. And the new modes of analysis, the new methods, have not proved easy to graft onto the main stem of the old myths. The puzzling question is why these myths have been so resistant to change in Canada, while in the United States most of them have proved vulnerable. The strength of the Innis tradition may be one explanation.

In the United States, the last fifteen or sixteen years in economic history have been a strange and somewhat paradoxical period. It has been a period of intense research activity, of very high productivity, of great excitement and change in the profession. And yet it has been a period in which the major thrust of work has been critical and revisionist—directed toward the destruction of old myths rather than the statement of new ones. In this period we have seen the birth of the new economic history, or what is now called cliometrics; and we have seen this movement transformed from a strange innovation into an accepted body of techniques and objectives. Its advocates, originally a small minority of scholars of the younger generation, are now the leaders of the profession, a new establishment if you will. And their view of the nature and purpose of economic history—what it should try to be, and how we should undertake to do it—has, in the United States at least, come to be the majority view of the active members of the profession. As all who have lived through it will agree, these years have been years of great excitement and interest. It may be an overstatement—indeed, I am sure it is—to refer to this period as constituting a revolution in the methods and philosophy of economic history. But is is unquestionably true that there have been very substantial changes concentrated in a relatively short span of time. Indeed, so substantial have been these changes that it has been a matter of surprise to some of us that the professional structure of economic history, and in particular its Association, has held together over this period, and that the formation of splinter groups and new forms of association has been held to a minimum. There has been more continuity in organization and in the spirit of the profession than one might have expected.

At this point it is necessary for me to give a brief sketch of the new economic history and to give some idea of what the advent of this new intellectual style in economic history has meant. Many readers may already be familiar with this information—from them I ask indulgence. But others may not be, and for them a few words of explanation are appropriate. I should make it clear, to begin with, that I do not consider myself to be one of the new economic historians, and I do not believe that anyone else considers me to be one of them. I am, however, in considerable sympathy with most of their objectives; and I am greatly impressed with the sense of new vigour and excitement that they have brought into a somewhat staid branch of scholarship. In particular, they have been responsible for an influx of talent into the field that is truly remarkable. But I cannot claim to be one of that number.

The best way to convey an idea of what the new economic history is may well be by the "way of negation"—that is, to describe what it is not. Let me begin, then, by stressing that it was not the creation of any one individual, or even of a small number. There have been leading figures, of course, and certain universities have from time to time enjoyed the reputation of being its spiritual home. But this was not a matter of a "school" forming under the influence and leadership of a great scholar. It was much more like a general movement within the profession, and specifically a movement of the younger members, almost a matter of generations. In some respects, indeed, it was a radical movement in economic history very characteristic of the climate of the 1960s; and just as disturbing to the morale and self-confidence of those of us of the older generation as were the radical movements in student politics to some conservative faculty members. Its earliest advocates were young doctoral candidates, instructors, and assistant professors, entering economic history from departments of economics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. What they brought with them into economic history was the desire to use, and the conviction that they could use, for purposes of historical analysis, the theoretical and computational skills that they had acquired during their graduate training as economists.

Now, this was a desire that others before them had had. The difference was not the desire to use theory in economic history but the confidence that it could be done and some advanced ideas as to how it could be done. The theory that they brought with them was, for the most part, modern neoclassical partial equilibrium theory. Supplementing this was usually a thorough training in statistics, econometrics, national income analysis, and in some cases skill in the handling of large masses of data by computer. If I had to specify the two most salient characteristics that all the early members of the new economic history had in common, I would say that they were all very good theorists, and none of them had any doubts about his ability to handle quantitative evidence on any scale that the historical record might provide.

The new economic history is sometimes referred to as quantitative economic history. It is true that its techniques are quantitative. It is not true that this is enough to define it. Quantitative research has always been characteristic of economic history; and even within the last fifteen years there has been much quantitative research done in economic history—for example, by Kuznets and his students—which is not part of the cliometric movement. No: it goes deeper than this. What is characteristic of the new economic history is the use of quantitative evidence to test hypotheses derived from theory and stated in terms of theoretical concepts. It is this blending of theory and measurement that is the defining characteristic. The theory has been neoclassical partial equilibrium theory, with some admixture of development theory; the techniques have been derived from statistics and econometrics.

This blending of theory and measurement has given the new economic history one of its characteristic techniques: the counterfactual hypothesis. A counterfactual hypothesis usually derives from the attempt to estimate the historical significance of an event by assuming the absence of that event—that is, something contrary to fact—or its change in some specified way, and asking what difference that would have made to the outcome. This is the kind of thing we do every day in a non-systematic way when we ask, "I wonder what would have happened if . . . ?" It is not a technique much approved by respectable historians. But it has become one of the hallmarks of the new economic history. Thus we find them asking, "What difference would it have made to 19th century economic development in the United States if the railroads had not been built? What difference would it have made to the standard of living of American colonists if the Navigation Acts had been repealed? If Southern slaveowners had not invested their money in slaves, what would they have invested in, and would they have earned a higher or a lower rate of return? If slavery had been abolished in the United States in 1789, would the rate of economic development in the American South, or in the nation as a whole, have been higher or lower?" And so on. These are the kinds of questions the new economic historians ask. And not only ask, but also answer quantitatively, and in a way that, they believe, can convince the skeptic. It is the audacity with which such questions are asked, and the confident quantitative way in which they are answered, that have made the work of the new economic historians so controversial, and so intellectually stimulating.

Hypothetical history of this kind is not, as I have indicated, in much favour with respectable historians of the traditional school. What is it that makes the new economic historians believe they can execute it? It is precisely the marriage of economic theory and econometric technique to which I have just referred. Economic theory makes it possible to define the characteristics of a counter-factual situation—to define them so that "not everything is possible" once one departs from historical reality. Statistics and econometrics make it possible to estimate what difference such a counterfactual change would cause—if not one precise measure, at least an order of magnitude, an upper and lower bound. This is possible because economics has a developed body of theory with predictive power, so that it can be used by economic historians in a way that, so far, political or social theory cannot.

It is not measurement alone, then, that characterizes the new economic history, but measurement inspired by theory and guided by theory. The strengths of the new economic history, its impressive achievements, have been in those areas where economic theory has provided strong support. Its weaknesses and failures have been where the supporting theory has been weak, or where it has been called upon to serve purposes it is inadequate to serve. "The common thread running through the New Economic History is a commitment to the efficacy of theory in specifying useful counterfactuals, and to quantitative methods in implementing them." (Fishlow)

The adoption of this philosophy of research and of these techniques of enquiry has generated, over the last fifteen years, one of the most remarkable outbursts of productive activity in the history of our discipline. It is true that most of this activity has been critical in nature: a matter of questioning accepted myths and revising accepted interpretations rather than propounding new ones. And it is also true that, when one stands back and considers the end-result, many of the old interpretations have withstood the critical attack rather well. We now have to be more careful to say exactly what we mean; we have to be on guard against the dangerously dramatic phrase—the takeoff, the revolution, the indispensability of this or that—that says more than we are entitled to say. This is good for our souls, and the whole episode has had a pronounced cleansing and astringent effect on the discipline. It has also added very substantially to our factual knowledge of the past. And, perhaps most important, it has attracted into the discipline a cadre of highly intelligent and highly trained economists who, in all probability, would otherwise never have considered becoming economic historians.

All this is to the good. And yet the success has not been unqualified. And it seems now as if these qualifications are becoming apparent.

Neoclassical economic theory was a system of ideas designed to show the principles by which scarce resources are efficiently allocated among competing uses. As we all know, to elucidate these principles it considered the implications of incremental changes at the margin; and its typical device, particularly in its Marshallian form, was to consider only a single change at a time, all other factors in the situation being held constant. Consider for a moment what neoclassical economic theory was not, and what it was not intended to be. It was not a theory of long-run economic change. It was not a theory of non-market behaviour. It was not a theory of discontinuous change—"Nature makes no jumps," said Marshall. And it was not a theory of social institutions; in particular it had no theory of the state, and therefore was, strictly speaking, inapplicable to any problem in which the survival or growth of the state was a prime consideration.

In view of these rather obvious facts, it is remarkable that the new economic historians have been able to make such effective use of neoclassical economic theory. This may prove, as my friend John Dales has often said, that in economic history just a little theory will carry you a long way. Or it may be a tribute to the skill and ingenuity of the new economic historians in converting into a form with which neoclassical theory could come to grips, problems originally of a quite different nature: that is, converting general equilibrium problems into a partial equilibrium form; converting discontinuities into continuities; and conceiving of long-run development in terms of short-run shifts at the margin. The degree of success is still remarkable; for the problems the new economic historians have chosen to deal with—the influence of the railroads, the effects of slavery on long-run growth, large changes in government policy such as the dismantling of a mercantilist empire, and so on—are far distant indeed from any problems that neoclassical economic theory was designed to deal with.

It has been, I say, remarkable. And you will notice that I use the past tense. The reason for this is that there are clear signs of growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the new economic history as it has been carried on so far. These limitations have been the limitations of the underlying theory; and they have been responsible for the often rather strained forcing of historical problems into a form with which an essentially ill-suited theory could deal. This dissatisfaction is being voiced most strongly, not by outside critics, but by the leaders of the movement themselves. What they are calling for is not abandonment of the commitment to theory and measurement that has inspired their work for the last decade and a half. What they are calling for is the statement of theories that will be less restrictive. This is why I think we may be at some kind of a turning point in the history of economic history at this moment: a shift (in the terms I have been using in this paper) away from the phase of myth-destruction and myth-criticism that has occupied the last fifteen years, and towards a new phase of myth-statement and mythcreation.

It will be interesting to watch how this new phase develops. The characteristic techniques of the new economic history have involved an insistence on the explicit statement of theoretical models and on the quantitative testing of hypotheses. These techniques have been excellently adapted for the tasks of critical revision which have so far been the principal occupation of the movement. It remains to be seen how far they can be reconciled with the demands of myth-creation, which may involve a much looser use of concepts and the postulating of relationships that may be hard to test empirically.

Do I exaggerate the indications that a change of this kind is taking place? I think not. I turn to the pages of the Journal of Economic History, and I find a presidential address by William Parker of Yale entitled "From Old to New to Old in Economic History." In it he very appropriately commends the achievements of the new economic history (to which he has himself contributed in no small way), calling it "a gigantic test of the hypothesis of economic rationality," or alternatively, "A kind of hymn to what really happened . . . justifying the ways of the price system to man." But then he turns to what he calls the second great truth that modern economic history can teach us; and here the new myth enters. This second great truth turns out to be the Truth of the Recurring Opportunity, the truth of "the invisible hand which . . . within some societies . . . appears to have contrived their whole structure .. . in such a way as to create and refresh the stream of growth opportunities to which their economies can respond." And within a few pages we find him calling for a redirection of work, so that we may increase our understanding of "how social organizations are created through human action and how in turn they mold and channel human action."

Or alternatively we turn to the presidential address of Douglass North, long one of the most eloquent advocates of the new economic history, and we find him, in the March 1974 issue of the same journal, not listing its achievements but itemizing its limitations: its destructive thrust; its concentration on specific issues or institutions rather than long-run processes of change; its neglect of the role of government and of the "overwhelming percentage" of economic decisions that have always been made "outside the market"; and—this I find particularly significant—the fact that North finds the new economic history "curiously unteachable at the undergraduate level"—that it "leaves students frustrated" because of its failure to "provide any integrated explanation of man's economic past." This is clearly related to what Albert Fishlow of Berkeley has called the "dedramatizing" influence of the new economic history—what I would call its demythologizing influence—but North gives more emphasis to its failure to grapple with the dynamics of change. "If we have found slavery profitable," he writes, "railroads less than essential, and the burden of the Navigation Acts 'light,' we have not said what did make the system go." And, in pursuit of this goal of understanding "what did make the system go," North's own work has recently taken a decided turn toward the analysis of institutional change over the long run.

The clearest demonstration of my point, however, comes from the recent work of two scholars who are commonly regarded as among the leading exponents of the new economic history. I refer, of course, to Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman and to their recent study of American slavery, Time on the Cross. I have no desire to add my quota to the intense controversy that the appearance of this book has aroused—controversy entirely typical of the forceful statement of a new myth. I ask you only to consider the authors' stated objectives. Chief among these objectives is "the recovery of black history": that is, its recovery from the racist interpretations promulgated by previous white historians, including particularly liberal white historians. Fogel and Engerman are concerned to present to the black man an image of his past in which he can take pride; and it is to the creation and elaboration of that image that all the quantitative calculations which fill the pages of Time on the Cross are directed. Their purpose is to destroy an unacceptable and, in their view, indefensible myth and replace it with one more acceptable and more defensible. Indeed, they are quite candid in stating this purpose. Here is the concluding paragraph of their text:

Time on the cross did not come to an end for American blacks with the down-fall of the peculiar institution. For they were held on the cross not just by the chains of slavery but also by the spikes of racism. It is one of the bitterest ironies of history that the antislavery critics who worked so hard to break these chains probably did as much as any other group, perhaps more, to fasten the spikes that have kept blacks in the agony of racial discrimination during their century of freedom. The spikes are fashioned of myths that turned diligent and efficient workers into lazy loafers and bunglers, that turned love of family into a disregard for it, that turned those who struggled for selfimprovement in the only way they could into "Uncle Toms." Three hundred and fifty years on the cross are enough. It's time to reveal not only to blacks but to whites as well, that part of American history which has been kept from them—the record of black achievement under adversity.

For the intellectual audacity that inspires these ventures—both those of Fogel and Engerman and the types of work now projected by scholars like North and Parker—I have the highest respect. I do not wish to leave the impression that I regard them as in any way misguided. The only point I wish to make is that this kind of work is a far cry indeed from the explicitly specified models and quantified variables that were the standard fare of the new economic history in its earlier critical phase. And it is a fair question whether the techniques—and perhaps also the attitude of somewhat Puritanical self-righteousness—that characterized the earlier phase will also serve in the second. We are no longer tearing down myths that an older generation of economic historians created. We are creating myths of our own—ones that in time will no doubt be subjected to the same kind of radical criticism that has been the stock in trade of the new economic history in the past fifteen years.

Predicting the future course of fashion is no less hazardous in scholarship than in more commercial endeavors. As regards research and writing in U.S. economic history, however, the odds seem very high that the next fifteen years will prove at least as interesting and active as the last fifteen have been. The pendulum has begun its reverse swing; the urgent need for what I have called myths—for generalizations on a broader and more ambitious scale—is coming to be recognized; and the profession is now staffed by cadres of young scholars of exceptional technical competence. It will be an interesting period to watch.

But what of Canadian studies? The cliometric revolution south of the border has not been entirely without its "ripple effects" in Canada. There have been annual conferences, attended mostly by younger scholars who received their graduate training in the United States. One can cite a baker's dozen of Canadian cliometric contributions, each of them valuable but of limited scope. And there has been a healthy growth of dissatisfaction with economic history's conventional wisdom. None of this, however, has added up to the reconstruction of Canadian economic history that is now overdue by at least a quarter of a century. The traditional interpretations are still taught in classrooms across the country. A textbook written in the most conventional of "staples approach" modes still, wonder of wonders, retains its hold on the market. Only the most incurable of Pollyannas could discern symptoms of a creative stirring, far less of a new synthesis, in Canadian economic history at the moment. And this in Canada, which once under the leadership of Harold Innis, could make a fair claim to world eminence in the field.

Personally, I lean toward optimism. After all, why not? Any other attitude inhibits one's own work and stifles that of one's students. For economic history in general the omens look good. With the close of the initial phase of critical revisionism and myth-destruction, economic historians are once again starting to reach out toward those larger idea-systems that have the power to excite the imagination and elicit the kind of commitment to scholarship that Harold Innis could draw from his students. For economic history in Canada even more may be hoped, for here the reaction against the inherited truths has been muted and delayed, and the new synthesis, when it does come, may be more dramatic and more revolutionary than in the United States. The Innis tradition, after all, is a resource as well as a constraint, for no Canadian historian can afford to forget the courage, the audacity, the sheer power of Innis's ideas at their best. And there are broader issues at stake. If we can lift our eyes for a moment from purely academic concerns, we may remind ourselves that historical myths are important not only for the narrow fraternity of scholars but also for the larger community of which they are a part. What we teach in our lecture rooms and graduate seminars today is what will be taught in the high schools of the next generation—and what will be taken for granted as "what everyone knows" in the generation after that. It is the myths that are remembered by students long after the measurements are forgotten. And these myths are important because the way a people thinks of its past is important: important to the way it regards itself in the present and to what it thinks is possible in the future. The staples thesis, in the hands of Innis and his school, provided a rationale for the existence of the Canadian nation. It helped to make what had happened understandable and what existed acceptable. It placed Canada in historic time, so that you could see it whole and believe that you comprehended it. That myth has now lost its power, as all myths eventually must if they are not continually refreshed and reinterpreted. What takes its place is a matter of some importance, to Canadians and to all who wish them well.