Notes on the Madrid Conference

The preparatory workshop was designed to facilitate the questions, themes, approaches and methods that could inform a collaborative and comparative investigation into the long term economic outcomes that flowed from a major conjuncture in European and global economic history. That famous conjuncture was marked by revolutions in France and other countries, interludes of disorder and instability and above all by 23 years of geopolitical warfare and was formally terminated by a far reaching peace settlement at Vienna in 1815. 

Our papers and discussion concentrated upon conceptual and theoretical literature from the social sciences concerned with outcomes for long term economic growth that  flowed from the engagements of states and their economies in early modern warfare, references to analyses of economic effects pertaining to previous wars and to 20^th century conflicts among the European states and comparisons and contrasts from engagements in revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that can be found in historical literatures of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal and the Americas. Our stated and underlined aim is to ascertain what is accessible in secondary sources that address the question of outcomes for particular countries and for the international economy as a whole. We agreed that our separable but comparable contributions for an edited publication finds a model in the recently published volume of essays on the history of capitalism by Neal and Wiliamson for CUP.

 

Networking 

Networking will take several forms. 

1. Regular communications by email among all members of the team 

2. The maintenance of the “Waterloo” website that will display:

                a) the network’s mission;

                b) the contact addresses of participants;

                c) draft papers written by the team and its corresponding associates

                d) an annotated bibliography of useful publications concerned with
                     connexions between war and economic development

                e) references to academics working on comparable themes and problems

                f) reports of bilateral visits among core members of the network

                g) plans for the Lisbon workshop and London conference

 

3. The Lisbon Workshop

Coordinated by Jaime Reis (and Loraine Long) the second conference has, by agreement, been scheduled for Thursday 07 and Friday 08 April, 2016.  The provisional programme includes the presentation and discussion of pre-circulated draft papers dealing with national case studies for Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the international economy for the Thursday; for the Netherlands, the Americas, Germany and the UK on the Friday, when the workshop will close by 18.00.

Sessions designed to optimise feedback and debate will last for 90 minutes.  They will follow the model of a 15 minute presentation followed by 15 minute critiques by two preselected respondents for each paper. 

4. The London Conference

The final conference (coordinated by Patrick O’Brien and Loraine Long) is currently scheduled for two days during the summer before the closing date of the Network’s programme (01 September 2017).  The London Conference (held at LSE) will be attended by the Network participants, nominated associates and stakeholders, invited experts and representatives from CUP and the BBC.  Penultimate drafts for chapters will be presented and discussed.  Hopefully a manuscript prepared for publication will be with a / the Press by 01 May 2018.

 

Report on the Madrid Workshop

Steve Broadberry’s opening presentation based upon his expertise on 20th century warfare was entirely heuristic, outlining a national accounts framework, relevant theory and a useful vocabulary required to analyse national contrasts in the immediate and longer term impact of warfare.  His presentation (available on the website) is very helpful for the formulation of guidelines for a coherent volume of case studies that aims to exemplify insights for reciprocal comparisons and contrasts.  Some parts of his presentation may not, however, be either viable or relevant for this war.  For example, similar bodies of official or reliable date are not widely available for 1789-1819.  For how may cases can we construct estimates for incremental expenditures on armed forces, for the net costs of capital and natural resources destroyed and depreciated by warfare, for net losses of human capital as well as for such denominators as (GDP, GNP, agricultural and industrial production, etc., and a theoretically plausible exchange rate) required to compare relative fiscal and financial levels / burdens incurred for engagements in warfare.

Furthermore these direct costs, as represented by Bogart, are in no way transparent.  Expenditures on the early modern armed forces (dominated by food, clothing, shelter and wages) depicted as “direct costs” could be represented as necessary outlays made by states upon a public good, namely “defence” against aggression in order to avoid predictable reductions in a nation’s potential for long term growth.

Although the destruction of capital goods and natural resources can be clearly represented as “costs” the economic meaning of human casualties from warfare are far more complex to define and almost impossible to measure.  Casualties from engagements in battle clearly represent losses of productive potential.  The magnitude or significance for economic growth of such losses depends on the annual values of the output that casualties (dead and wounded men) might counterfactually have produced over the span of working lives, plus the loss of their reproductive capacity, minus the costs of inputs consumed to maintain their productivity at constant levels.  Clearly we need to converse further about the significance for long term growth that could be attached to statistics that may or may not be available for recorded direct costs and for the destruction and depreciation of human capital imputable to warfare?  We should consider the flow of gains that accrued to economies from an upswing in the accumulation of durable military and human capital in wartime.

Several entirely interesting and potentially relevant questions and topics emerged in presentations and discussions at Madrid that I propose to list as “tangential” to our agreed concerns with connexions between this “conjuncture and the long term development of European economies.

1. The role and weights accorded to the volume of resources mobilised compared to military tactics, strategy, technology, climate, etc., etc., in defeating the geopolitical ambitions of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
2. The different institutional methods and relative levels of efficiency achieved by Europe’s “contractor states” in mobilising resources for engagements in conflict.
3. Detailed year by year, cycle by cycle indices for the movements of familiar macro or micro economic indicators over the period 1789 to a selected post war year when a national economy could be represented as “demobilized” and as a vantage point from which perspectives could be derived on the range and significance of outcomes for long term economic growth that could be plausibly connected to the sequence of exogenous political, military and geographical events that occurred between the French Revolution and the Treaty of Vienna.  For example, a  counterfactual for the UK would exclude outcomes that flowed from other exogenous events such as several harvest failures that occurred during and in immediate post war years and Cort’s discovery of the puddling process for the iron industry but not its rate of diffusion.  We agreed to ignore questions that preoccupy military and diplomatic historians concerned with the causes of war and explanations for defeats or victories and concentrate upon the specification and (if possible) the measurement of connexions between engagement in warfare, with a protracted exogenous sequence of geopolitical events and with territorial and peace settlements at Vienna that impacted upon a familiar set of economic, demographic, political, institutional, cultural and other variables conditioning an economy’s pre war and no war potentials and prospects for long term development.  Drawing lines between pre and post war levels of real GDP per capita is of some interest but it evades rather than confronts the problem of how the conjuncture 1789-1815 might be included as cycle / chapter in analytical narratives for long-term growth.  Such chapters could help to confront the currently fashionable style of cliometric history that proceeds on the assumption that the pace and patterns of very long run growth across Eurasian economies was path dependent, linear and above all explicable with help from statistically weak but accessible proxies for an entirely parsimonious range of macro instrumental variables.

That asserted, we can now sum up some major conclusions that emerged from the first round of presentations and discussions at Madrid. 

• We are engaged in an exercise in reciprocal comparisons in order to contribute to an analytical narrative concerned with outcomes for long term economic growth that flowed from the revolutions, disorder, warfare and geopolitical settlements that occurred during a conjuncture in global economic history between the French Revolution and the Treaty of Vienna.
• Our case studies will need to specify and where possible measure the trajectories for economic change that countries were on before 1789.
• Our analyses will try to specify how and (again, if possible) measure to what degree engagements in warfare, including the peace settlement, pushed economies onto different and more or perhaps less promotional trajectories for long term economic growth.
• The list of variables that came into our discussions included
  • The direct costs of mobilizing resources for warfare which are complex to define and quantify
  • The losses minus the gains from the destruction, depreciation and reallocation of physical and human capital
  • The costs minus the gains from the loss of territories and capital overseas
  • The gains and losses from increased or reduced access to markets overseas
  • Benefits from the formation of more efficient states, public administrations with improved capacities for the maintenance of external defence and internal security that were induced or reduced by engagements in warfare
  • Potential improvements to the range and effectiveness of national institutions for the promotion of economic growth
  • Discoveries, diffusions and adaptations of technologies for warfare that embodied potential for post war development
  • Cultures of patriotism, identity and collective cohesion conducive to growth
  • The rise and decline of countries, regions and cities 

Above all and because the network shares a discipline we agreed to stay focused on long run outcomes.