Travelers' Tales: Their Values and Virtues

Abstract

As historians of economics, we are most used to dealing with the finished work of economists: the written words, diagrams, and math of those we study. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have research notes, diaries, or oral interviews, or to attend seminars. These are valuable resources from which we can learn more directly (than from their published pieces) how our subjects think about doing economics as they are doing it—or at least, very soon afterward. Their tales of traveling offer one such resource that enable us to capture that process, but it has its own especial characteristics. By studying their travel reports, the historian is led directly into economists' experiences of the economies they visited. We have an almost firsthand entry into what they saw, how they interpreted those impressions, and how they dealt with those experiences and reasoned with them to make sense of them. They enable us to see—in a certain direct way—not only into those travelers' modes of thinking qua economists but also into personal attitudes that illuminate for us as historians the different ways that traveling economists engaged with the places they traveled.1Let me use one of my own traveling experiences, one that gave rise to strong economic reflections, as an example. In 1981, I visited China, traveling in by train from Hong Kong and returning that same way. I still have vivid recall of China's city streets with no cars and only a few vans, but with many bicyclists carrying amazing loads balanced on their backs and shoulders, or in their carriers or panniers. I can see now in my mind our scheduled tourist visits to a textile factory producing the most beautiful white silken cloth, and our unscheduled side visits that included a small kiln in the midst of a field with perhaps ten workers shaping and baking clay into bricks. I can recall our Christmas Day visit to a citrus-growing commune (of sixty thousand people) where that day, we were told, was “a holiday,” and so village residents were making fireworks (cottage industry style) to sell in the town, rather than working in the orchards. (Strangely—as we were told—it seemed they always had a holiday on December 25!) But my most vivid memory, and most important economic insight from traveling (one that as you can see I repeat still), was what hit me on the trip back once we had crossed the border into Hong Kong. It was a Sunday, and I observed not just one, but several, giant earthmoving vehicles lying completely unused along the roadside. It was a moment of realization that this was the signal of a truly capitalist economy—real capital equipment so plentiful that it was idle in the streets.2 And it also caused me then to recall that for the past many days of my travels, I had seen, but not really noticed, that every bucket (even those with holes) was being used for something, every piece of corrugated iron was purposely protecting something. Anything that might be used as capital equipment was used: buckets with holes were real capital, and real capital (even such buckets) was in very short supply.This was casual tourist travel, not purposeful travel for economic insight; nevertheless it offers two poles for reflection for historical work. The first question focuses on what do economists see about the economy when they travel, what experiences do they notice in the new country or place? And following from that: What do economists learn about when they travel—the country they visit or the country they come from? The second question is to ask about the traveling economists' own standpoint: Do they remain outsiders, or can they gain some kind of insider knowledge? Is this just down to their personal attitude and behavior, or does it relate to their traveling purpose? And how do these relate to their actions as economists in their travels? These two reflective points—on what gets seen, and what gets done—are not necessarily unconnected.One of the main purposes of economists' travels, as discussed by historians in this special issue, can be understood as the fact-finding mission, that is, to go to a country as a stranger, look into the other space, and bring back information on that other territory to the home country. But the possibilities this entails are not straightforward (as my personal experience recounted above suggests). Perhaps the critical issues can be understood as matters of engagement, and of openness to comparative possibilities. The complexity of the historians' problems about how to recognize and interpret the evidence from these fact-finding activities is made manifest in Cooper's and Chao's articles, and might be framed in two different ways.First, it may be useful to note a distinction between looking and seeing, and so to (mentally) “ask”—about the traveling economist—not just “what did they report that they looked at,” but “what did they see” in the sense of what aspects of those phenomena did they take especial notice of, which caused them to pause and comment. This might entail not just noting differences but things they expected to be present in a landscape or situation but found absent. Phyllis Deane's travels in Africa in the 1940s are full of observations about the differences in local economic life that would make national income accounting categories misleading there (see Morgan 2011). Fact-finding travel seems to entail not only a kind of committed gaze from the traveler, but also an inquiring economic mind. The committed observer entails a purposeful outsider standpoint: the traveler is there to take note from the side; the inquiring mind requires an attitude not to take what is seen for granted and not to assume it would necessarily make sense at first sight. As we see in his article, Cooper's mining prospectors going to South America were clearly engaged outsiders, yet for some of them, their European standpoint, their mind's eye, shielded their ability to really see what was going on. They expected to see European mining methods and behaviors and technologies, and therefore judged what they saw according to those previous experiences and found the South American methods wanting. But one of Cooper's travelers, John Miers, gradually began to see those local practices in comparison with those back home. This is the starting point for useful comparative judgment by the traveling economic fact finder.But for historians of economics using these sources (as opposed to for Cooper's travelers), those comparisons might be multidimensional, and Chao's discussion certainly deepens our difficulties in assessing travelers' tales. First, his article compares the possibilities of insight of the one-way travelers carrying economic ideas from the West to China with the roundtrip students who later went West to bring back economic ideas into China. But there is a second path of traveling knowledge which opens up a different tranche of issues for comparisons. This he locates in the translations of economics texts that come directly into Chinese, compared to those that come indirectly—via Japanese—into Chinese (and are thus translated twice), with all their cultural attachments. Third, there is the changing notions of what that imported “economics” was understood to mean over time—from statecraft to science—as found in the texts and in the traveling accounts. Chao's account alerts us, as historians, to the importance of worrying about the stability in meanings of the words used in these accounts, independently of whether their writers were real travelers or not.Second, Cooper's and Chao's articles, in their different ways, raise issues about the role of comparisons: the value of the comparative gaze, not only for travelers at the time, but also for the work of historians of economics. Historians of economics have often focused on individuals, or perhaps schools, or even approaches, rather than geographical comparisons per se. In contrast, global economic history, which relies heavily on comparison, now asks historians not just to look at both similarities and differences between economies but to do so from both standpoints. Over the last twenty years, historical studies of the development of economies (not economic science or thought) have undergone a radical shift. They have, in two steps, moved from single-instance nation-based studies, to comparative studies between similar economies, to the method of “reciprocal comparison” (see, e.g., Austen 2007). The key question driving this final change was the observation that parts of China and parts of India were more technologically advanced in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries than those parts of Northern Europe that experienced the so-called First Industrial Revolution. In the move away from nation-based histories, the historiographical literature refers back to Marc Bloch's (1953) seminal work on why comparative history is so important because it requires inquiry not just into the similarities between countries, but the differences, and particularly the absences, of phenomena, between countries.For economic travelers of any period on fact-finding missions, that reciprocal comparison injunction would be, indeed, stringent. It would ask travelers to have an insider-outsider, looking both ways, stance so that by seeing what happens and what works well elsewhere, they could also gain insight into their own country's economic activities, including why they do not see the same things in their home country. For us as historians of economics, we might look carefully at the way traveling economists used knowledge from both their country of visit and their country of origin, and analyze how they used the differences as much as the similarities in both countries as prompts to their insight, understanding, and knowledge. On this basis, one can have obvious doubts about how far Robinson in China or Jean-Baptiste Say in Great Britain made use of a comparative gaze, in contrast with Dutt in Europe (particularly in his visits to London).Say, according to Alain Alcouffe and David Le Bris's article, appears not even to have noticed some salient characteristics of the sites he was taken to see, whereas we might have expected more from a serious political economist traveling to a rival economy. Say's neglectful gaze can be measured against the wide notice taken and reported in the reactions and commentaries made by foreign visitors (including economists) on the “British Industrial Revolution.” These, surveyed by Giorgio Riello and Patrick O'Brien (2009), are suggestive about the variety of what was noticed and the importance of the comparative standpoint in those visitors, both in what they noticed, and what sense was made of it. (And in these respects, such travelers were not unlike the broader set of travelers reported on by Brian P. Cooper in South America.) Whereas some contemporary travelers saw exciting new technologies and industrial structures as marks of that revolution, others saw ghastly cities and work sites with exploited workers in terrible conditions barely fit for humankind. As Riello and O'Brien note, some of these Industrial Revolution–era travelers were known “political economists” of the day, others were industrialists, and both might be spies for technology secrets. In contrast, Say apparently saw little of economic note from his travels in Britain during the same period. We also know, from the current reciprocal comparison literature, that in the case of cotton textiles, where Say thought the French were ahead of the English (a hint of reciprocal comparison there), both are now thought by those global economic historians (above) to have been behind Asian products in terms of quality. The intriguing question for historians of economics might be to reflect not just on what economist-travelers like Say saw, and what sense they made of it, but also whether—in the light of economic historians' research—Say's traveling changed anything about his views of French industry and economy.The challenge for historians of economics is a different one when thinking about Robinson. As Mauro Boianovsky and Gerardo Serra's article shows, her view of her contemporary audience back home (and perhaps in the international arena), and her personal political commitments, are both clearly to be taken into account: these were upfront in her standpoint and thus engagement. (Hsiang-Ke Chao's Chinese travelers, in their own times, may have had equally strong personal commitments and audiences in mind.) These considerations aside, Robinson by ambition was a serious economist-traveler on fact-finding missions in her many visits to China (certainly compared to my own later tourist visit). Yet she gained bad press—for both her earlier trips to Russia and to China later—as not being a serious observer. Did she report through a particular rosy-glinted pair of spectacles for her audience back home, or did she just not see things that others felt must have been observable because her gaze was hindered by those political rose tints? Boianovsky and Serra are somewhat neutral on these questions. Yet, thinking about the comparative dimension, historians can still wonder: Did she use her travels to compare these communist or centrally planned economies? Did she perhaps rethink the nature of capitalism in Britain on her return? Or maybe her traveling experience affected her theorizing about capital in economics? Even if her travel observations on China seemed then, and now, to be judged awkward, might they still have proved fruitful for her as an active economist? In sum, how, if at all, did their traveling observations “broaden the economic mind” for either Say or for Robinson?Romesh Chunder Dutt's travels, as Maria Bach's article shows, are a kind of proof of this point, and take us back again to the value of reciprocal comparison. Dutt came to England with expectations about what he would see: expecting a kind of economic promised (imperial) land. He was not just disappointed but shocked (as were many of the earlier Industrial Revolution–era travelers before him) at the poverty, dirt, and squalor of the cities. He arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, before Charles Booth's great poverty study of London, but both Henry Mayhew, and Booth's later descriptions and accounts, corroborate the insight of Dutt's more casual observations. The latter immediately compared his traveling observations with his observations on poverty in his homeland. Indeed, Marc Bloch would have been most proud of Dutt's reciprocal comparisons, for they made him rethink not just his view of London (and England) but prompted him to rethink—even as he traveled—his understanding of poverty, famine, and economy in his native India. Dutt was an outsider to the European economies, and like many of those Industrial Revolution travelers, did not sit on the fence, but jumped down into the crowd. Bach's account of his diaries paints him as a traveler engaged with understanding all he could see; that engagement was driven by the comparing mind, thinking about India by standing in England, and thinking about England from his native Indian standpoint.Even if they did not stay long, some of the travelers appearing in this volume are unmistakably economists with missionary intentions that, almost by definition, exclude the virtues of reciprocal learning. Their standpoint is one of the outside expert bringing “good economics” to create change at the destination of travel.3 For them, it seemed, good economics came in the form of a recipe, a generic solution to a particular economic problem that could be used in these new contexts: “We know how to solve this problem, we have the recipe to do so.” The most obvious characters sharing this identity are Jan Tinbergen in Turkey, Wolf Ladejinsky in Asia, and Edwin W. Kemmerer in the Philippines. But I also want to introduce another comparator, Wolfgang Stolper in Nigeria. They all shared the belief that the economic recipe they each brought from the outside was the right one for the circumstances in the new country. As historians of economics, we can understand these institutional and policy recipes as technocratic ones—indeed a label perhaps the travelers would have understood for themselves. But for us as historians, we can see that they each came with different brand markings: such economic recipes may look purely technocratic, but first they were recipes of political economy, not just technical economics. And second, in using these recipes for intervention, these economists, of course, depended upon their experience and knowledge set. That experience and knowledge set in turn depended upon their personal insider or outsider standpoint: Did they rely just on outsider knowledge, or gain and use insider local knowledge?Kemmerer emerges from Rebeca Gomez Betancourt's historical account as the perfect example of a man on an economic mission. This was a conversion mission (not a fact-finding one). Kemmerer believed that the full gold standard was the best international economic exchange rate system of the time, that the gold exchange standard would piggyback onto that system, and so would be the best option for those colonies, ex-colonies, and quasi colonies in the formal and informal empires of the day (including the American ones). He had learned this “best recipe” at his graduate school, took it into the field, and continued to peddle it as he traveled though the field, though it was rarely a field, more likely a banking or political office. He did not seem to value the advantage of personal local experiential knowledge. And potentially important contextual differences in the economies he visited: for example, their trade patterns or access to base metals made no difference to his recipe and appeared not even to be noticed. Nor did he seem to appreciate the fact that perhaps the system was not even necessarily the best institution for the United States!4 As an economist, he came with a true belief in the magic of the gold standard and was determined to convert others to that true religion.This kind of missionary stance creates a different challenge for the historian than that presented by the case of Joan Robinson, who was “fact finding” to influence folks back home rather than seeking to interfere in the visited country. Given how prevalent this economic conversion missionary stance became after World War II, it is perhaps useful for the historian of economics to take note of contemporary commentaries on such traveling. Wilfred Beckerman, writing in 1956, in the context of the early usage of development plans in the field, focused on the importance of economic “know-how” in the economist's mission. But he argued that such know-how did not take you very far: economists' knowledge was highly fallible in application, so economists needed to be suitably modest in advice. Not so for Kemmerer: he carried the flag of the gold exchange standard into the field as the only valid monetary institution for a satellite economy and appeared to remain quite aloof from local interests, local circumstances, and local knowledge. Tinbergen, by contrast (on a development mission), had a technocratic approach that embedded a certain flexibility, a recipe for designing and planning development as we see in Erwin Dekker's article. Tinbergen introduced an institution-based blueprint, learned initially from his own experience of planning the Dutch economy after World War II. It involved both a technocratic planning apparatus and intersecting, democratic, political-economy committee structures designed to inform—for the particular economy he advised—the planning aims and decisions and the rollout of their (not his!) plan. At the same time, his theory of economic policy developed during the 1940s was an analytical framework to show the choices and use of economic targets and policy instruments in designing any planning system (see Morgan 2019).While Tinbergen, as traveling economist, over a period of years interacted on a regular basis with various countries such as Turkey and India, he remained ever aloof in those countries, importing his modes of technocratic institutional structures of planning and helping them into place in the importing country. Tinbergen's stance contrasts with other development economists of the period, who varied in their engagement with their destinations of travel. Even among his own team of collaborators, Tinbergen's stranger mode stood out while his team members engaged themselves in going to local markets, investigating the resources and industries, talking to locals, and so forth.5 More broadly, development-plan travelers of the postwar period ranged from outsiders with particular standpoints, to serial visitors, and to others we might consider resident (if somewhat temporary) insiders. Those on World Bank or IMF “missions” stayed briefly, and perhaps had little time for engagement beyond the local economic offices they had to visit—perhaps like Kemmerer before them. Their travels were circumscribed by full timetables of meetings and sometimes perhaps they never looked out the window! They had outsider standpoints, even though some briefly experienced the local economic life.At the other end of the local experience and engagement scale from both Kemmerer and Tinbergen was Wolfgang Stolper, who signed on as a Nigerian civil servant to create Nigeria's first five-year plan, and stayed over a two- to three-year period in 1960–62 at its point of independence.6 The historian reading his diaries finds that, unlike them both, he traveled around the Nigerian regions, wherever and whenever he could find an excuse to do so, he investigated every economic site he could find, and he made notes on them all. He used his local travel to gain local knowledge: to fill in the conditions and details of the context in order both to validate (or not) the statistical information he received and to test out the viability of certain plans (for often he found facts did not match claims), and sometimes his travels revealed things he had not even thought about. Stolper clearly became an insider but remained both a fact-finding traveler (in our earlier sense), as well as a missionary with a purpose from which, there is no doubt, he made outsider statistical and planning demands in his office work. His approach was even more flexible than Tinbergen's about the contents of the plan, the aims of the plan, and the importance of political choices; he understood his technocratic role as ensuring those political and economic choices were doable within the resources of the economy.Stolper's local travel investigations can be interpreted as a particular kind of missionary work, according to Hugh Fern (1959), writing from the “backward” economic periphery (the University of Ghana) in response to Beckerman (who wrote from “the center”: the OECD in Paris).7 Fern argued that successful missionary work depended not just on economic “know-how” (the technocratic recipe), but equally on “know-why,” understood as knowledge of the local context, ways of doing things and why they were done that way. For Fern, this knowledge was acquired from field reports—documentary reports made in the field about the field (e.g., by local civil servants, etc.), and from local surveys. This localized know-why knowledge was an essential complement to the generalized recipe knowledge of know-how. This brings us back to the importance of the active open gaze and open mind of the traveling economist who looks into the local habits of economic behavior sufficiently, as Fern suggests it, to acquire know-why knowledge of that local economy and why things work as they do and not in some other way. This know-why knowledge, he argued, would be critical to the ability of the technocratic missionary to get their recipe to work.Collecting such know-why knowledge was also a key feature of Ladejinsky's missionary work noted by Federico D'Onofrio and Hannah Tyler. In their account, he was another of the international experts, this time in agricultural economics, and like Tinbergen and Stolper, he was a serial missionary, carrying his own recipe, traveling place to place, and often with considerable time commitment. Unlike Tinbergen, but like Stolper, he traveled around the country talking to farmers and those in the agricultural sector. He had the right credentials—he was trained in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), an organization that believed in fieldwork. His was investigative fieldwork—not idle sightseeing, and like Stolper, of the open-minded traveler kind, an outsider seeking insider knowledge.8 It remains unclear from his own accounts how far his traveling investigations and locally acquired knowledge altered his recipe; it may be right to say that the recipe was generic, and adjusted to the local circumstances, be they the Philippines or Japan or India. Over time, it seems, his success waned; maybe he found it difficult to update his recipe with local know-why knowledge, or perhaps his recipe was just not as usable in some places as in others.We might, as historians, recognize the importance, and acquisition, of know-why knowledge of the local environment as one important skill in the missionary. But the point of calling these economists missionaries is to pay attention also to the baggage they brought along with their technocratic recipes. Of course—as historians of economics know—such technocratic knowledge is not a view from nowhere. So, the point here is to take us back to the missionary elements in the technocratic ideas that economists bring with them. Tinbergen, Stolper, and Ladejinsky were all bringing an outsider know-how recipe into their work in the field, but their three know-how recipes were not understood by them as strictly exact universal technologies; on the contrary, they each in their own way were careful to think of how these would work in the local environment. In contrast, Kemmerer believed his monetary systems advice to be true objective economic knowledge. But in all four cases, we, as historians, might understand those recipes as having features of cultural artifacts, branded items carrying not just the economists' own name and the name of some international/national agency as the branding devices, but each individual carrying their own past traveling experiences with them. These recipes were not just technologies but recipes of political economy that came from particular times and places—and people.Tinbergen's planning recipe was forged in his experience of postwar reconstruction of the Dutch economy, in a very particular kind of local democratic environment. But equally, he brought into that recipe both his own strong political beliefs about how politics and economics interacted, and his econometric knowledge about how to analyze an economic system and the related possibilities and limitations on how to change that system. Both Stolper and Ladejinsky were migrants into the United States, which makes chasing the cultural artifactual elements of their recipes more difficult. Ladejinsky came with a recipe that seemed branded by his work within the USDA, for it favored small landowning in place of tenant farming or plantation cropping. A historian might speculate (but would need a lot more knowledge to make the claim fit) that he was exporting the recipe of the nineteenth-century American Homestead Acts, which in turn rested on the belief contemporary to those acts, that such an institution engendered its own virtuous mentality of productivity (and of course economic democracy). Stolper, by his own account, revered the democratic planning sensibilities of Tinbergen, but used them within an accounting-based approach to his planning recipe (which privileged regional aims over central ones for political purposes) rather than a structural macroeconometric approach using targets and instruments.A serious comparative history of the cultural artifactual elements—values in a broad sense—that missionary travelers brought into their recipes would be a tall order but perhaps illuminating. It would be the ideal addition to the insight that historians can gain into the notes and tales left by the traveling economists both those on missions of intervention and those on fact-finding missions.Leaving that wish list aside, the values of those travelers' notes remain for us, as historians, the possibility of gaining snapshots of how economists think about and adjust to new experiences. This is especially true of those travelers who practiced the virtues of the open gaze, the reflections of comparison, and followed their belief that there were local differences that matter. But even where those travelers seemed to have rather closed minds to their new sites of travel, or remained determinedly outsiders therein, those features themselves are important signals to historians and sources of insight into the work of the economists they study.I thank Harro Maas and Mauro Boianovsky for inviting me to the workshop for this special issue of HOPE and for their invitation to contribute these reflections.