Research
My
primary research fields are modern German history, especially the German
Empire (1871-1918), the history of economic thought and economic and
social history. Most recently I have been working on the role of German
economists in naval expansion and colonial empire before the First World
War.
My first book, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform (Oxford University Press, 2003), grew out of a doctoral dissertation that sought to fill in three historiographical gaps: the thought and milieu of the economist and social reformer Gustav Schmoller, the origins of German social reform, and the development of the social sciences in Bismarckian Germany. It was explicitly a work of revision in that it sought to correct a number of persistent misconceptions in the history of economic thought about Schmoller and the so-called “German Historical School.”
Questioning the rubric “German Historical School” associated with Schmoller, I reveal the European context of his thought and the influence of empiricism, statistics, and advances in the natural sciences in his choice of methods. By exploring the social context in detail, I demonstrate how the nexus of young scholars around Schmoller fundamentally reshaped German economics into a tool of social reform of direct relevance to the many “social questions” raised by rapid industrialization and urbanization in Germany in the 1860s, changes which culminated in the creation of the Association for Social Policy in 1873. Novel in these reform efforts was the idea that inequality and poverty were ills emerging from the division of labor which society had an obligation to remedy. Consequently, an awareness of the social implications of individual economic action emerged which proved remarkably useful for the development of social policy. While the dissemination of this reform message influenced public opinion and put social reform on the political agenda, my book shows that Schmoller and his colleagues nevertheless remained a beleaguered group subjected to persistent attack from all political directions. My investigation brings the fissures within German liberalism into sharp relief, revealing the persistence of a potent ideal of a classlessness that fundamentally shaped German social policy. More broadly, Schmoller and his colleagues initiated a program of research which proved remarkable fertile for the development not only of German sociology and economics after the 1890s, but the social sciences in Europe, America and Japan in the twentieth century.
Since completing my book, my research and scholarship have moved in three broader directions: German imperialistic politics as this involved economists and other social scientists; the impact of interpretations of German history on Asian historiography; and the activity of the liberal statistician Ernst Engel and his influence on Prussian and German politics.
The first
area I have been working in seeks to extend my study of Schmoller and
his colleagues into the realm of German imperialistic politics between
1897-1917, notably the politics of the High Sees Fleet and African
colonization. This project will also analyze Schmoller’s role in shaping
prewar public opinion, his involvement in wartime planning and strategy,
as well as his enmeshment in a number of pol
emics during these years.
Unlike my first book, which focuses on the organization and execution of
scholarship as it related to social reform, this second book project
will explore the relationship between scholarship and advocacy,
highlighting both the opportunities this offered entrepreneurial
scholars and the many problems this created. It will analyze the
extraordinary access that Schmoller and other economists had to senior
civil servants and Chancellor von Bülow as well as their growing
estrangement from the German public. I will not be restricting myself to
Gustav Schmoller but will be including the leading German imperialist
economists of the time, among them Lujo Brentano, Karl Bücher, Gustav
Cohn, Johannes Conrad, Heinrich Dietzel, Christian Eckert, Ignaz Jastrow,
G.F. Knapp, Wilhelm Lexis, Karl Rathgen, Max Sering, Adolph Wagner and
Sartorius von Waltershausen. This project is now well underway. I have
already published or have in press three chapters of this book:
“Imperialist Socialism of the Chair: Gustav Schmoller and German
Weltpolitik, 1897-1905”; “The Professors’ Africa: Economists, the
Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism”; and
"Every True Fried of the Fatherland: Gustav Schmoller and the 'Jewish
Question', 1916-17." I envision completing the remaining chapters over
the next two years.
The second
major area of my recent scholarly activity has been the impact of the
German Sonderweg thesis on the historiography of modern Japan and
China. I became interested in this topic as a consequence of my
discovery of the close contacts between Japanese and German scholars in
the social sciences before the First World War while doing archival
research for my first book. Since the 1960s, American scholars of Meiji
Japan have made use of those connections to posit a Japanese
Sonderweg which draws on many of the same concepts and theories of
its German counterpart and posits many of the same historical
pathologies. On closer inspection, however, I have shown that these
arguments are tendentious and built on an edifice of scholarship that
has since been called into question or is no longer tenable in
unqualified form. With respect to China, my work has explored the w
ay
current American policymakers and commentators have been prone to view a
rising China in Wilhelmine terms, drawing explicit parallels between
Britain’s strained relationship with Imperial Germany and the evolving
relationship between the United States and China. Likewise, Chinese
nationalism and domestic developments have been viewed through a lens
strongly distorted by the German Sonderweg thesis. So far I have
finished two articles on these topics: “German Social Science, Meiji
Conservatism, and the Peculiarities of Japanese History” and
"China's German
Syndrome: Germany's Long Nineteenth Century and the Rise of China."
At this point it is unlikely that this project will develop into
a third monograph.
Finally, there is my third major research project on Prussian statistics and liberal politics between roughly 1860 and 1882. More than my work on German imperialist politics, this new project extends and deepens a set of topics already discussed in my book: the statistician Ernst Engel, the development of the Prussian Statistical Bureau as a quasi-independent research center in the 1860s, and the influence of interpretations of official statistics published in the Journal of the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau on the politics of social reform in Prussia. Engel, who was given extraordinary leeway by the liberal Prussian Minister of Interior von Schwerin as a condition of his appointment as director of the bureau in 1860, became a thorn in Bismarck’s side, frequently publishing articles calling into question government policy or drafts of legislation with the authority of statistics. Attempts by Bismarck to bring Engel to heel, to censor or put an end to the Journal were frustrated by the protection of Schwerin’s similarly-inclined successor, von Eulenburg. Not until 1882, when Engel published an article criticizing the government’s ignorance of industrial accidents, was he finally forced out of office. My research on this topic is at this point still in its infancy and will likely require a full year of archival research in Germany. For this reason, I envision completing this monograph following my next sabbatical in 2009-10.