Newsletters - INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION

Search

2019 Newsletter

Statement from the Secretary-General

I hope you have had a productive 2019 as we did at the International Economic History Association (IEHA). My apologies for sending this newsletter so late in the year, but I wanted to wait to see if we could have more resolution surrounding the Covid-19 epidemic.
This newsletter contains a report of the Executive Committee’s (EC) actions last year, since we want to keep our members informed of our activities. And I would cordially ask for responses from the national (and other) organizations that you have received this information, i.e. to acknowledge it with a reply to yours truly. Also, we are now actively looking for replacements for those EC members whose terms are up (see below for details). Finally, we are featuring an obituary of Richard Sutch, who was an influential figure in the field of economic and social science history, as well as IEHA.
I also wanted to provide a quick personal statement relating to international events, especially since we are a truly global organization. In fact, globalization and international collaboration are the very reasons for the IEHA’s existence, and we will try to honor those principles in our activities. We will do our utmost to make sure this continues. Scholarly networks and collaboration makes our profession better every day. Unfortunately, the current epidemic makes our interactions much harder, along with a lot of potential grief and misery. I hope you are all safe and healthy, first of all. Second, as you have seen, many conferences and university activities have been cancelled or put online. Sadly, things are not likely to improve in the short run, so we have to be patient. Third, on a related note, many pre-conferences and events that could have hosted such sessions have been cancelled – however, many people are meeting online to continue their session preparations.
With the XIXth World Economic History Congress (WEHC) (Paris, July 25–30, 2021) one year and a half away, I am pleased to inform you that the preparations are proceeding well. The first round of proposals were accepted in November 2019, and you will find the 2nd round of Call for Papers here again. The deadline for proposals is June 30, 2020. Also, you will find details on the posters and dissertations below. The deadline for those proposals are as follows: December 1, 2020 for dissertations, and January 31, 2021 for posters. Please pass along this information to your colleagues, students, and among your personal scholarly networks. Moreover, we are now actively soliciting bids for the 2024 World Congress, and I am aware of several efforts in this regard. However, please get in touch with me about 2024 (or future dates) if you have ideas for bids.
For me, IEHA stands for collegiality, international collaboration, global unity, and interdisciplinary openness. I think we are doing well in this vein, and we will certainly keep these principles alive going forward, especially during such challenging times. Please keep your colleagues and friends in your thoughts, and let’s hope this epidemic passes soon.

Here’s to a productive and healthy year for all of us!

Jari Eloranta, Secretary-General of the IEHA

IEHA MATTERS

Session proposals

We are very pleased that the first call for session proposals in 2019 has brought in a very large number of proposals. A record of 210 proposals were submitted covering a diverse range of themes, approaches and geographic coverage. In addition to a strong showing of submissions from Western Europe and North America, similar to Boston and Kyoto, we are very heartened by many good quality proposals (and expected participation) from Asia, notably from Japan and China, as well as Latin America. 96 session proposals were accepted, and 45 recommended for resubmission in the 2nd round. In total, 69 proposals were rejected.

IEHA Executive Council Deliberations in Boston

Here you can find a summary of the actions the Executive Council took in their meetings on November 7-9, 2019 in Paris, at the Campus Condorcet.

First, the EC approved the minutes of their previous meetings in Boston in 2018. Then the EC reviewed candidates for Jari Eloranta’s successor as Secretary-General as well as successor for Marjolein t’Hart as Treasurer. Leigh Gardner (London School of Economics) was selected as the SG and Jeroen Touwen (Leiden University) as the Treasurer from 2021 Paris meeting onwards. After lunch, the EC was treated to a tour of the Campus locations. This was followed by reports from the various IEHA officials, discussion of future WEHC locations, and a report by President Anne McCants on the Boston congress. The meeting concluded with the first part of the review of the panel proposals.

During the second day, the EC deliberated on the session proposals, and made the decisions on which to approve, which to recommend for resubmission, and which to reject. The final events of the day were papers delivered by Dan Bogart and Jochen Streb.

Call for New Executive Council Members

The following EC members have now served two terms and are not eligible to serve further: Marco Belfanti, Stephen Broadberry, Latika Chaudhary, Les Oxley, and Sandra Kuntz-Ficker. We are asking for nominations from the national and other organizations to replace them. Typically EC members are active international scholars that are willing to represent their national organizations within the IEHA. The committee that will deliberate on the selections includes Jari Eloranta (iehaofficial@gmail.com), Marjolein t’Hart (marjolein.thart@huygens.knaw.nl), and Anne McCants (amccants@mit.edu). Nominations and questions should be directed to the committee members. The deadline for nominations is August 1, 2020. Moreover, their term would begin at the Paris meeting in 2021.

CALL FOR PAPERS, POSTERS, AND DISSERTATIONS

Call for Papers: 2nd Round

WEHC 2021 Second (FINAL) Call for Proposals
19th World Economic History Congress in Paris, 2021

A first round of session proposals for the 19th gathering of the World Economic History Congress (to convene July 25–30, 2021 in Paris, France have been accepted and posted to the WEHC2021 website. The Executive Committee of the IEHA encourages all individuals with an interest in participating to consult the list of accepted sessions, especially as many of them are still accepting additional paper presenters and other participants. The Executive Committee is also pleased to announce that it will consider additional session proposals submitted before June 30th 2020 from all members of the international economic history community, as it seeks to complete its program. We especially invite submissions that complement the sessions already in place with topics, regions, or time periods not yet well represented. This will be the last opportunity to propose sessions for the 2021 Congress.
The 19th World Congress marks the return of IEHA to France, which has a long history with the economic history discipline. We invite you to join us in Paris to consider the many ‘Resources’ that have enabled the industrial revolutions and fostered the trade connections globally. We invite you to join us in Paris to discuss the many ‘Resources’ which are and used to be a stake in economies, societies, cultures and environment. Within the notion of resources, we consider natural and modified, renewable and non-renewable, material, immaterial and energetic resources, as well as their discoveries, exhaustion, recycling, constraints and limits. We also include the part of labor involved in their exploitation, the institutional dynamics and the involvement of scientific, technical, financial and digital knowledge. Over times, the finding, supply and circulation of resources has been an incentive for construction of spaces, occupation of territories, imperialism and emerging of new patterns of development and organizations. The challenges of our modern world require a common reflection on the political economy of resources. While seeking proposals for sessions that explore aspects of this broad theme, we also welcome submissions on the economic and social histories of all places and periods, on the exploration of varied sources and methods, and on the theory and the uses of economic history itself. We also invite members to employ and analyze diverse strategies for representing the past.
Organizers are strongly encouraged to consult the list of already accepted sessions, with the goal of adding to the breadth of the Congress program, as well as to find models of successful proposals. As before, we will continue to welcome innovation in the format of individual sessions as appropriate for the topic, the methodologies employed, and the participants invited. The format of the scientific program of the Paris Congress will be organized on the same principles as past world congresses. The 5-day meeting will have approximately 180-200 contributed sessions, with each day divided into four time blocks of 90 minutes each. Many sessions will occupy either a full morning or afternoon of two such blocks, but some 90-minute blocks will be reserved for smaller sessions.
Individual proposals to join already accepted sessions should be directed to the organizers of those sessions. Proposals for full sessions in the second (final) call should be submitted at the WEHC2021 website prior to June 30th 2020. You can submit your proposals here: https://www.wehc2021.org/

Call for Poster Submissions

PhD students and junior postdoc researchers in economic history are invited to present their ongoing research to an international audience with a poster at the World Economic History Congress in Paris July 25–30, 2021. We welcome historical applications in any field of economics or cognate social sciences, business history, demographic history, environmental history, global and world history, social history, urban history, methodological approaches to historical research, history of economics and economic thought, and other related fields. Digital posters will also be considered, pending space constraints. Posters will be selected on a competitive basis, and the best posters will receive an award (in three categories: ancient/medieval/early modern; the long 19th century; and 20th century). The deadline for submission is January 31, 2021. Selections will be announced by March 1, 2021. Further information will be available on the WEHC web site: https://www.wehc2021.org/

Call for Dissertations

Students who have completed their dissertations between June 2017 and August 2020 are encourage to submit their theses for the dissertation panel/competition. Dissertation will be shortlisted and considered for awards in three separate categories: Ancient/medieval/early modern period; the long 19th century; and 20th century. The three finalists in each category will be invited to present their work in the dissertation panel. Theses written in languages other than English will also be considered, although the abstract needs to be in English. The deadline for electronic submissions of the theses, along with information on past and current affiliation of the student, advisor, 500-word abstract, and any other pertinent information is December 1, 2020. All materials should be sent by email to: iehaofficial@gmail.com. All submissions will be acknowledged by a reply email. Selection of finalists will be announced by March 1, 2021.

OBITUARY: Richard Charles Sutch, 1942-2019
Sandra Batie, Susan B. Carter, Roger Ransom
Richard Charles Sutch, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Economics, University of California Riverside and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, died peacefully on September 19, 2019 at his home in Kensington, California. The cause of death was merkel cell carcinoma. He was 76 years old.
Sutch will be remembered as a gregarious, exuberant, creative, hardworking, and witty person filled with love for family, colleagues, and friends.   He loved to gather people together for evenings of his wonderful gourmet meals punctuated with good wine and great conversation. When traveling he always knew the best restaurants and would frequently include a side trip to a unique food-oriented site—such as an oyster shucking plant. He will be missed by many.
Professor Sutch made enduring contributions in a variety of fields. As a high school student he was a founding member of the Richland (WA) Rocket Society, the first amateur group in the nation to launch a documented, two-stage rocket. It reached an altitude of over a mile. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington he wrote a senior thesis on the profitability of slavery that was published in the Southern Economic Journal and reprinted several times. As a graduate student at MIT, he wrote a thesis on the term structure of interest rates and co-authored articles with Franco Modigliani that have garnered more than a thousand citations. As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley he collaborated with Roger Ransom to form the Southern Economic History Project in 1969. The SEHP was responsible for publication of several articles dealing with slavery, emancipation, and the rise of debt peonage in the postbellum South. The project also supervised the collection of data on Southern farms in 1860, 1870, and 1880 that formed the basis for their book, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation which was published in 1977. The book, now in its second edition, remains in print after 42 years and has been cited over a thousand times. In the early 1990s, in collaboration with Ransom and Susan Carter, he launched the Historical Labor Statistics Project to collect, code, and harmonize the many state labor bureau worker surveys conducted in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In the late 1990s he spearheaded an effort on behalf of the academic community to compile a new edition of Historical Statistics of the United States, a core reference work that had not been updated in over 30 years. The effort culminated in the publication of a 5-volume work providing a comprehensive compendium of statistics drawn from over a thousand sources and recording every aspect of the numerical history of the United States. In addition, he made notable contributions on such diverse topics as immigration, wealth inequality, saving and retirement, the economics of John Maynard Keynes, and the adoption and diffusion of hybrid corn. He was an institution-builder, playing a pivotal role in the founding of the All-University of California Group in Economic History in the 1970s, a restructuring of the Economic History Association in the late 1980s, and the reform of the International Economic History Association in the early 2000s.
Among his many honors were a Ford Faculty Research Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Distinguished Teacher Award; Clio Award for Exceptional Support to the Field of Cliometrics; the Arthur H. Cole Prize for best article in the Journal of Economic History; President, Economic History Association; Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and Distinguished Lecturer; President, International Economic History Association; Japan-US Friendship Commission Visiting Distinguished Scholar; Fellow, American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Thomas Jefferson Prize from The Society for History in the Federal Government; Fellow, Cliometric Society; Distinguished Alumnus, Economics, University of Washington; Edward A. Dickson Distinguished Emeritus Professor, University of California Office of the President; Founders Prize for best article in Social Science History; and numerous research grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Aging, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
Richard Charles Sutch was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota during the early years of America’s involvement in World War II. His father was a psychiatrist who was serving as a Colonel on the Western Front. His mother was a registered nurse visiting hospitals throughout the Midwest, preparing them for a possible polio outbreak which authorities feared could demoralize the nation. She was also a psychiatric nurse for many years. After the war and at the conclusion of his father’s psychiatric residency, the family moved to Richland, Washington, the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project, an American-led effort to develop an atomic bomb. It employed many of America’s top scientists and engineers and Richard’s father was one of the few psychiatrists with the high-level security clearance required to minister to the mental health needs of those engaged in this top-secret work. The concentration of scientific expertise meant an excellent public schools and strong support for the creative learning and experimentation of young people. As the teenage Sutch told a reporter for American Modeler, “Because of the number of scientists in the area [the Richland Rocket Society was] able to obtain expert advice on almost any phase of science or engineering.” At the same time, Richland was a dangerous place to live. It produced plutonium, the dirtiest input into the manufacture of nuclear weapons. During Sutch’s youth, the Hanford Site expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium-processing plants. He would later learn that those plants released more than 200 million curies of radioactive debris into the surrounding water, air and soil —more than twice that released in Chernobyl.
Sutch attended the University of Washington in Seattle, beginning as a physics major but quickly shifting into economics. His undergraduate advisor, Douglass North, directed his senior thesis on the economics of slavery and sparked what would become a life-long interest in economic history. It was also at the University of Washington that Sutch developed a love of cooking and entertaining. Living off-campus and facing a limited budget, he enrolled himself and his roommates in a USDA program designed to assist low-income households. Creatively converting his monthly allotment of beans, dried milk and cheese into chili, he hosted regular weekend parties for which the price of admission was beer, meat or vegetables, Sutch and his roommates lived well and made friends.
Sutch did his graduate work in economics at MIT, a leader in theoretical economic science. Under the direction of Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, and Paul Samuelson, he worked on topics such as saving behavior, interest rates, and macroeconomic modeling. He helped pioneer the development of computer-based approaches to economic analysis and modeling including the Time Series Processor (TSP) statistical package and the MIT-PENN forecasting model. He nourished his love of economic history by taking graduate classes at Harvard under the direction of Alexander Gershenkron, meeting fellow students who would remain colleagues and friends for his entire life.
He joined the faculty at the University of California Berkeley in 1967 where he became a popular teacher of the introductory undergraduate course, Econ 1. He regularly taught over a thousand students at a time in the campus’s performance space, Zellerbach Auditorium, a number he believed to be the largest undergraduate class in the country outside of mandatory chapel at West Point. Long after he stopped teaching that he course he was regularly stopped by seeming strangers who remembered him as their Econ 1 professor and thanked him for a memorable experience. He received a courtesy appointment in Berkeley’s History Department in 1987 and one in the Demography Department in 1991. In addition to his teaching and research, Sutch served in a number of administrative posts including Dean of Special Curriculum, Chair of the Academic Senate, and Director of the Institute for Business and Economic Research. In 1998 he left Berkeley to become Director of a new Center for Economic and Social Policy at UC Riverside, where he remained until his retirement in 2009.
In 1968 he married Susie Olive Speakman who uses the name Susie S. Sutch. They separated in 1995 and later divorced. He married Susan Boslego Carter in 1997. She survives him. In addition, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Cordelia S. Nickelsen; two step-sons, Sean Michael Carter and Sasha Peter Carter; a sister, Sandra Batie; two grandsons and numerous nieces and nephews. Contributions in Sutch’s memory can be made to the Social Science History Association at https://ssha.org/donate/.

Newsletter Archive: