The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History ...

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THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVEI Iexceptions to the rule. <strong>The</strong>se procedures have undoubtedly improvedthe logical power and persuasiveness <strong>of</strong> historical argument. Nor isthere any disagreement that whenever it is appropriate, fruitful andpossible from the surviving records, the historian should count.<strong>The</strong>re is, however, a difference in kind between the artisan quantificationdone by a single researcher totting up figures on a handcalculatorand producing simple tables and percentages, and the work<strong>of</strong> the cliometricians. <strong>The</strong> latter specialize in the assembling <strong>of</strong> vastquantities <strong>of</strong> data by teams <strong>of</strong> assistants, the use <strong>of</strong> the electronic computerto process it all, and the application <strong>of</strong> highly sophisticatedmathematical procedures to the results obtained. Doubts have beencast on all stages <strong>of</strong> this procedure. Many question whether historicaldata are ever sufficiently reliable to warrant such procedures; whetherteams <strong>of</strong> assistants can be trusted to apply uniform coding proceduresto large quantities <strong>of</strong> <strong>of</strong>ten widely diverse and even ambiguous documents;whether much crucial detail is not lost in the coding procedure;if it is ever possible to be confident that all coding and programmingerrors have been eliminated; and whether the sophistication <strong>of</strong> themathematical and algebraic formulae are not ultimately self-defeatingsince they baffle most historians. Finally, many are disturbed by thevirtual impossibility <strong>of</strong> checking up on the reliability <strong>of</strong> the finalresults, since they must depend not on published footnotes but onprivately owned computer-tapes, in turn the result <strong>of</strong> thousands <strong>of</strong>privately owned code-sheets, in turn abstracted from the raw data.<strong>The</strong>se questions are real and will not go away. We all know <strong>of</strong>doctoral dissertations or printed papers or monographs which haveused the most sophisticated techniques either to prove the obvious orto claim to prove the implausible, using formulae and language whichrender the methodology unverifiable to the ordinary historian. <strong>The</strong>results sometimes combine the vices <strong>of</strong> unreadability and triviality. Weall know <strong>of</strong> the doctoral dissertations which languish unfinished sincethe researcher has been unable to keep under intellectual control thesheer volume <strong>of</strong> print-out spewed out by the computer, or has spent somuch effort preparing the data for the machine that his time, patienceand money have run out. One clear conclusion is surely that, wheneverpossible, sampling by hand is preferable and quicker than, and just asreliable as, running the whole universe through a machine. We allknow <strong>of</strong> projects in which a logical flaw in the argument or a failure touse plain common sense has vitiated or cast in doubt many <strong>of</strong> the conclusions.We all know <strong>of</strong> other projects in which the failure to recordone piece <strong>of</strong> information at the coding stage has led to the loss <strong>of</strong> animportant result. We all know <strong>of</strong> others where the sources <strong>of</strong> informationare themselves so unreliable that we can be sure that little confidencecan be placed in the conclusions based on their quantitativemanipulation. Parish registers are a classic example, upon which a
12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 85gigantic amount <strong>of</strong> effort is currently being spent in many countries,only some <strong>of</strong> which is likely to produce worthwhile results.Despite its unquestionable achievements it cannot be denied thatquantification has not fulfilled the high hopes <strong>of</strong> twenty years ago.Most <strong>of</strong> the great problems <strong>of</strong> history remain as insoluble as ever, if notmore so. Consensus on the causes <strong>of</strong> the English, French or Americanrevolutions are as far away as ever, despite the enormous effort putinto elucidating their social and economic origins. Thirty years <strong>of</strong> intensiveresearch on demographic history has left us more rather thanless bewildered. We do not know why the population ceased to grow inmost areas <strong>of</strong> Europe between 1640 and I 740; we do not know why itbegan to grow again in 1740; or even whether the cause was risingfertility or declining mortality. Quantification has told us a lot aboutthe what questions <strong>of</strong> historical demography, but relatively little so farabout the why. <strong>The</strong> major questions about American slavery remainas elusive as ever, despite the application to them <strong>of</strong> one <strong>of</strong> the mostmassive and sophisticated studies ever mounted. <strong>The</strong> publication <strong>of</strong> itsfindings, far from solving most problems, merely raised the temperature<strong>of</strong> the debate.12 It had the beneficial effect <strong>of</strong> focusing attentionon important issues such as the diet, hygiene, health and familystructure <strong>of</strong> American Negroes under slavery, but it also divertedattention from the equally or even more important psychologicaleffects <strong>of</strong> slavery upon both masters and slaves, simply because thesematters could not be measured by a computer. Urban histories arecluttered with statistics. but mobilitv trends still remain obscure.Today no one is quite sure whether English society was more open andmobile than the French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,or even whether the gentry or aristocracy was rising or falling inEngland before the Civil War. We are no better <strong>of</strong>f now in theserespects than were James Harrington in the seventeenth century orTocqueville in the nineteenth.It is just those projects that have been the most lavishly funded, themost ambitious in the assembly <strong>of</strong> vast quantities <strong>of</strong> data by armies <strong>of</strong>paid researchers, the most scientifically processed by the very latest incomputer technology, the most mathematically sophisticated in presentation,which have so far turned out to be the most disappointing.Today, two decades and millions <strong>of</strong> dollars, pounds and francs later,there are only rather modest results to show for the expenditure <strong>of</strong> somuch time, effort and money. <strong>The</strong>re are huge piles <strong>of</strong> greenish printoutgathering dust in scholars' <strong>of</strong>fices; there are many turgid andexcruciatingly dull tomes full <strong>of</strong> tables <strong>of</strong> figures, abstruse algebraicequations and percentages given to two decimal places. <strong>The</strong>re are also'2 R. W. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston, Mass., 1974);P. A.David et al., Reckoning with Slavery (New York, I 976); H. Gutman, Slavery and theNumbers Game (Urbana, Ill., 1975).
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