Proposal for a Round Table for the 2005 Social Science History Meetings

November 4-7, 2005, in Portland Oregon

Philip T. Hoffman (Division of Humanities and Social Science, Caltech; pth@hss.caltech.edu)

Gilles Postel-Vinay (Laboratoire d’Economie Appliquée, INRA, Paris; gpv@ens.fr)

Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (Department of Economics, UCLA; rosenthal@econ.ucla.edu)

We would like to propose a round table discussion on collaborative research that draws on our own experience in several large projects which lie at the interface between several areas of social science history: economic history obviously, but also social history, demographic history, and global and political history too. The goal would be make connections between research projects that up until now have remained separate and show how collaborative research makes such interdisciplinary connections possible. If possible, we would try to enlist other researchers too; together we should be able to address a number of the questions related to the theme of “Big Social Science History”.

The collaborative research projects the three of us are or have been involved in (both with one another and with other researchers) include:

• a study of the political economy of credit in Paris from 1660 to 1870 that links political, social, and economic history
• a comparative analysis of the political economy of financial crises around the world, from the sixteenth century to the present
• a project to collect historical prices and wages in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas and study their implications for consumption and economic growth between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century
• a team project to analyze the health, wealth, education, family structure, and social and geographic mobility of a sample of the population of France between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries
• a long run study of the evolution distribution of wealth in France
• a comparative historical analysis of corporate governance in Europe, Africa, and the Americas and its relationship to politics, legal history, and economic growth

The round table would give us a chance to link these projects together; if other researchers participated, they could do the same with their own work too. We would also try to address the following issues:

• how collaborative research makes possible projects and interdisciplinary collaborations that would otherwise not be feasible
• how changing costs and methodological tools are facilitating collaborative research and making it easier to establish links between fields such as economic history and political or social history
• what opportunities we see for collaborative research in the future.