COMMENTS ON DISSERTATIONS SELECTED AS FINALISTS FOR THE GERSCHENKRON PRIZE

Abstract

I feel especially honored to be handling the Gerschenkron prize for these meetings on the American Century because I have concluded that the Gerschenkron prize is a quintessentially American beast. This may seem an odd statement; the prize is named for a man who was bron in Russia, trained in Austria, and spoke more than a dozen languages. None of these traits sound quintessentially American. But the prize we have named for him reveals some profound national characteristics. To see my point you have to recall that a dissertation is eligible for the Gerschenkron prize only if it is not eligible for the Nevins prize. We often say that the Nevins prize is for North American economic history, but if you check the precise definition it is really for the economic history of the United States and Canada, thus illustrating our characteristically weak grasp of geography. North America, my encyclopedia tells me, includes all the lands north of the Isthmus of Panama. There is a very large country well to the north of Panama and just to the south of the United States, but for some reason dissertations on this country do not qualify for our prize in North American economic history. But the most revealingly American feature of the Gerschenkron prize is the way it is defined as “not American.” The prize is not for European, or Latin American, or Asian economic history; it is for the rest of the world, or as one of my uncles would put it, “them foreigners over there.”