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War and Cliometrics: Adventures in Economic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2006

ROGER L. RANSOM
ROGER L. RANSOM
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor of History and Economics; Department of History; University of California, Riverside; Riverside, CA 92521-0204. E-Mail: roger.ransom@ucr.edu.
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Extract

The theme of the 2005 annual meetings of the Economic History Association has been War and Economic History: Causes, Costs and Consequences. In this essay I will address this theme by briefly examining the ways in which cliometricians have viewed one particular conflict—The American Civil War—over the past four decades. The first part of my essay deals with the attack, which began at the end of the 1950s, mounted by a group of “New Economic Historians” on the existing explanation of the war; the second part deals with my own adventures as I try to make sense of the economic and political factors that produced the conflict we call the Civil War.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 271 - 282
Copyright
© 2006 The Economic History Association

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