Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

For over 100 years, economists at the University of Chicago worked in close proximity to archaeologists and ancient historians, but they rarely worked together. That began to change with the Economic Analysis of Ancient Trade project (2015–2018).

The first step toward this collaboration took the form of the two-year Working Group on Comparative Economics project at the Neubauer Collegium. Researchers from the Booth School of Business and the Departments of Classics, History, Sociology, Economics, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations found common ground by considering how modern concepts of the managerial firm and bound labor might apply to the investigation of ancient markets. An important highlight from that project was a discussion with the economic historian Avner Greif, who shared insights he gained using Transaction Cost Theory and game theory to compare the dynamics of medieval trade in Muslim North Africa and Europe.

The Economic Analysis of Ancient Trade project built on the ideas and close intellectual relationships that the working group forged. The project brought the tools and methods of economics together with the textual and area expertise of historians working on the ancient world to deepen our understanding of the Old Assyrian trading system of the nineteenth century BCE, the earliest documented case of profit-oriented long-distance trade conducted by mercantile entrepreneurs. The researchers focused on a large body of cuneiform tablets that detail long-distance trade along caravan routes that spanned northern Iraq and central Turkey, connecting ancient Assyria and Cappadocia.

Scholars have long debated whether this kind of entrepreneurial, profit-oriented trade was the norm or an exception in ancient times. The Economic Analysis of Ancient Trade project was the first attempt to use a comprehensive, interdisciplinary set of ideas and methods to study the actual mechanisms and dynamics of the trade process. Members of the research team extracted new information from texts and tested the soundness of theoretically derived market models by applying techniques from economic anthropology, New Institutional Economics, game theory, and network analysis. The project developed a collaborative methodology that allows specialists in the ancient world to ask new questions of their evidence. It also offers mathematically oriented economists an empirical testing ground to gauge the veracity of their working models.

The project brought together an unusual mix of scholars in an inaugural workshop to think through the problem of how the various economic models could speak to each other. The project staff then built the evidence base by digitizing thousands of Old Assyrian cuneiform texts using OCHRE, an innovative computational platform developed at the University of Chicago. OCHRE makes possible complex analyses of information from ancient sources, which are then aggregated for statistical analysis that is shaped by specific research questions. Software specialists continually tweaked and improved the methods to strengthen the analysis. Data specialists shared early results with researchers, working together to identify any problems with the approach. Economists presented preliminary research findings to experts on the region and period, and they received valuable feedback.

These early encounters confirmed the need for continuous software innovations throughout the digitization process. The end result was a refined technique that served the team well and will benefit other researchers on later projects. At the same time, the core group of economists integrated the new data into their ongoing analyses of these ancient markets and continued to present their findings to other economists. Kerem Coşar was able to infer the location of ancient cities otherwise lost from the historical record by using a structural gravitational model of trade—a powerful example of the value of this sort of complex interdisciplinary approach.

This example of “lost cities found” is an early indicator of how important the project may turn out to be. The model Coşar used revealed important information about the economic landscapes of the Bronze Age—where people chose to live, what they produced, and how they traded. But it also has immediate relevance to economists and policymakers, who analyze the same processes to shape policy. The models developed and refined through the Economic Analysis of Ancient Trade project did not merely improve our understanding of the drivers and mechanisms that governed Old Assyrian trade—though that is, in itself, an important result. Using the past to improve the efficacy of economic modeling for the present, the project presents an opportunity for direct positive impact. Knowledge generated in relation to trade that occurred thousands of years ago may help improve the economic policies of the twenty-first century.

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the strategy of governing the macro economy primarily through the management of money and financial markets while ceding most of society’s investment to the private sector has been in retreat. Again and again, governments and central banks have aggressively intervened in the economy to backstop runs on financial institutions, prevent the collapse of various asset markets, bolster purchasing power in the economy through direct payments to citizens, maintain the solvency of intensely pandemic-disadvantaged businesses, and stimulate employment (Tooze 2018). Perhaps even more remarkably, this revival of state and fiscal intervention has not simply been an emergency response to a series of crises. The accumulation of longer term economic, social, and environmental externalities, widely believed to be generated by policies privileging private-sector investment and market freedom, also has given rise to impatience with the use of market mechanisms to achieve social goals or redress imbalances. Political demands from society have already generated moves to use the state to redistribute income, forgive specific forms of debt, restructure industry, engineer “energy transitions,” encourage investment in “green tech” and otherwise redirect investment toward ends that appear to be, or are alleged to be, in line with the will of the demos (Allen 2022, Aronoff 2019).

Dramatic in itself, this re-politicization of investment and consumption comes at a time when our confidence in the institutions of liberal democracy is being challenged. The contemporary demos, wherever it is, often feels alienated, underserved, or excluded from the institutions that are there to represent and serve it. With the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental goals intentionally displaced to the market for half a century, the non-market, deliberative, political mechanisms for the democratic transmission of citizen will into investment and consumption policies have atrophied, or, worse, become instruments of economic and social interests favored by the market (Fishkin & Forbath 2022, Philippon 2019). Core institutions in the incumbent order (parliaments, parties, corporations, markets, unions, nonprofit entities) are being attacked, their authority and effectiveness as governors of economic process delegitimized and their claim to be channelers of democratic will called into question. Many once powerful movements and organizations that traditionally represented broad social interests in macroeconomic policy formation, such as those for workers and farmers, have nearly disappeared altogether (Andrias 2016). Other crucial governance institutions that continue to exist – in particular, central banks and corporations – are being continually recomposed by new social, economic, and environmental dynamics in ways that are dramatically recasting their boundaries and forcing a reconsideration of their social roles and the way in which they formulate and pursue investment goals (Omarova 2021; Herrigel 2018, Baldwin 2016,). Old norms, such as an understanding of economic growth as an unadulterated good capable of creating social harmony and overcoming material division and conflict, are losing their appeal in the face of worsening inequality and climate crises (Daly 2007, Kallis et al 2018). To be sure, there is no shortage of new ideas about alternative social ends – involving different ways of relating to nature, to work and production, or to community life and solidarity – but the existing political economic arrangements for converting those ideas into investment seem often inadequate to the task.

We believe that this confluence of mounting state intervention into key social processes of investment and consumption combined with growing disarray and disillusionment with the incumbent political and economic institutions and organizations of will formation and governance is the defining political economic dilemma of our age. Our proposal to the Neubauer Collegium is to convene a series of workshops that gather different groupings of scholars (from an array of disciplines) to discuss the relationship between the market, the state and democracy in both historical and contemporary contexts.

For many humanists and social scientists “the economy” has long been a realm apart, inscrutable to their analysis. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, new work, ranging across a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has sought to make the economy newly legible and alive to various forms of scholarly inquiry. Boundaries between economy and history, society, literature, politics, philosophy, law, psyche, environment, and more are being scrutinized. The ambition of this project was to set the groundwork at the University of Chicago for a cross-disciplinary, humanistic social science of economic life. Where, within different methodological and disciplinary approaches, can “the economy” be located? How and for what purposes can it be analyzed? How might various approaches inform one another? Faculty in History, Sociology, and English convened the group with the goal of creating dialogue between humanists and humanistic social scientists who use qualitative and interpretive methods, and social scientists who employ quantitative and mathematical methods.

This project explores new chronological and thematic frameworks for understanding the hyper-capitalism of the twentieth century. Global flows of “hot” money putting pressure on industries and governments; state-of-the-art factories situated in enclaves in the global south; multinationals exercising quasi-governmental functions; the flourishing of metropolitan economies as their surrounding hinterlands stagnate; and the squeeze that environmental constraints put on productive capacities of all kinds—none of these are new phenomena. And yet the grand narrative of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization giving way to an unprecedented phase of post-capitalism obscures the ways in which early modern experiences may help to illuminate our own epoch. It was also during this period that financial capital dominated industrial capital; the protean forms that merchant capital took in its hunt for value elude the elegant formulations of classical political economy. During this period, the multiplicity of labor and property relationships did not map clearly onto political rights claims. Finally, and in contrast to the industrial period, in the early modern period problems of resource scarcity dominated economic thinking. By placing a temporary parenthesis around the economy of the Industrial Revolution and of its Fordist offshoots, this project will explore how the early modern economy may enrich our understanding of the hyper-capitalism of our present. The research team will trace a new intellectual history of global capitalism by focusing on the ways in which ideas and debates about politics and the economy both reflected and shaped the development of capitalism since the seventeenth century the world over.

Loïc Charles joined us for a year of scholarship on three projects. The first was a study of the interactions between the nascent science of political economy and the practice of the French economic administration in late eighteenth century in order to assess the impact of the former on the latter. Secondly, he looked at the classification practices of the administrative actors in the context of the measurement of the French balance of trade, and more generally economic exchanges throughout the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (1715-1815). The third study investigated the status of visuals and visualization in the social sciences during the first part of the twentieth-century.

Loïc Charles (Ph.D. University of la Sorbonne) is Professor of economics at the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis where he teaches economic history and history of economics. Over the past several years, his reserach has centered on topics such as the history of eighteenth-century French government and trade, the history of enlightenment social sciences and the history of visualization in economics. He has published in journals such as Past & Present, History of Political Economy and Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine and co-direcetd two books. He is presently completing a co-authored book, The Physiocratic Movement and the French Enlightenment: Science, Culture and Society (under contract at Cambridge University Press) and co-directing a French National Research Agency project that aims to build a comprhensive database of French eighteenth-century external trade.

What does “sustainability” mean in the context of agriculture? Ask an executive at a large-scale dairy producer, and you will get one answer. Ask the organic cheesemonger at your local farmer’s market, and you will likely get another. Both responses have a point. But then what accounts for the differences? And what can we learn about sustainability from these variations?

The Sustainable Agriculture as Relational Learning Process project (2017–2019) attempted to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and potential of sustainable agriculture by examining farming methods in five of the world’s top dairy-producing countries: the United States, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and New Zealand. The researchers studied the practices that facilitate or impede learning on sustainable dairy farms, and they paid close attention to how such practices differ across social and political contexts. They focused on case studies in each country because that allowed them to compare empirical data on the three “ideal types” of sustainable dairy farms—large-scale corporate-industrial, mid-sized entrepreneurial, and small-scale artisanal. Market segmentation differs in each country, and variations in regulatory standards, community values, technological innovation, and global market integration help account for the divergent strategies that sustainable dairy farms in these markets pursue.

To understand how farms and processors pursue sustainability strategies one needs to understand how sustainability can acquire different meanings for different groups—and how the meaning can shift according to social, political, and economic conditions. By categorizing sustainability models and evaluating the practices, the researchers aimed to identify a broad range of possibilities for sustainable agriculture, and thereby advance our understanding of what it means to be “sustainable.” The project was interdisciplinary in nature, as it drew on debates and methodologies in rural sociology, political economy, economics, and anthropology. It was also the first project to use a comparative value chain analysis as a way of deepening our understanding of sustainable agriculture.

A yearlong Visiting Fellowship provided Susanne Wengle the time, space, and resources to pursue this ambitious research agenda with Gary Herrigel. In the first year of the project, the researchers conducted extensive fieldwork in the United States and Europe. Their goal was to conduct interviews with farmers representing all three sectors across the full range of social and political contexts. Conversations with large industrial processors in California, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Switzerland; mid-sized farms in California, Indiana, and Wisconsin; and several small farms in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Germany, and Switzerland yielded valuable insights.

Early findings revealed expected differences, but also surprising borrowing across strategic and national boundaries. A small Swiss dairy farmer, for example, implemented a pasturing method he learned about from a successful experiment with pasture-based dairy farming among large-scale producers in New Zealand. Several large processors in the U.S. and Switzerland sought to engage their suppliers in ways that both lowered costs and enhanced producer ability to provide decent working conditions with environmentally friendly results. These primarily “commercial” practices resembled value chain governance practices pursued by organic dairy coops considered emblematic of alternative agriculture. Such exchanges have important implications for how the relational learning process is shaping sustainable farming practices across the sample of countries in the study.

The project’s early findings suggest an intriguing message: Many of the oppositions that characterize contemporary debate about sustainability in food and agricultural production should be softened. Alternative agricultural producers are developing new sustainability techniques by adapting methods developed by their conventional and commercial “rivals.” At the same time, the success of small-scale alternative producers is pressing conventional producers to ratchet up their sustainability efforts. Value conflict here appears, at least in some cases, to be creating possibilities for mutual learning across the industry. Further research will determine the conditions under which such mutual learning is enhanced, undermined, disrupted, or blocked.

This project augmented a large social experiment in India that seeks to understand the value of health insurance, specifically India’s large public insurance expansion, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). This experiment used a large scale survey to quantitatively measure the impact of RSBY on self-reported health and financial status, but it did not yet have a qualitative or a significant non-financial component. With support from the Neubauer Collegium, we hoped to accomplish two new goals. First, we combined ethnography with different methodologies to measure a broader range of outcomes and to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of whether and why health insurance achieves certain impacts. Second, we fostered a dialogue between disciplines about their methodology for information gathering and analysis. Specifically, we hoped economists learn from ethnographers the methodology and interpretation of (open-ended) interviewing and informally observed behaviors. Conversely, we hoped ethnographers will combine their own findings with statistical analysis. We aimed to spark similar methodological dialogues with researchers in psychology and epidemiology. Each methodology has its strengths and weaknesses, but together they can provide a level of understanding of the impacts of health insurance in India that surpasses what any single discipline can achieve.

How did the rapid spread of the railroad and telegraph in the late 19th century remake American life, economy, and policies? With the advent of the telegraph, communication over great distances became instantaneous. At the same time, railroads brought about rapid movements in people and goods. These technologies were not merely contemporaneous but deeply intertwined. Scholarly research on the implications of these twin technological transformations has hitherto been limited by an inability to examine when and where people gained access to these new networks, and the nature of that access. To address this gap, this project produced a digital map of railroad stations and telegraph offices in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This map covered annual changes over a 30- to 40-year span of time in which these networks expanded to cover North America. Information for the map came from recently digitized books that include tables from telegraph and railroad trade publications. Interdisciplinary collaboration enabled the team of scholars to compile and transcribe a large set of archival records and images, and unify work on communication infrastructure. The team also created a website to crowd-source the transcription and geographic placement of railroad stations and telegraph offices. The data and maps generated through this process will be shared with researchers and the general public in the forms of interactive maps as well as downloadable data via a new website dedicated to the project.