200 HISTORY OF ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS 



the world and simultaneously discoveries and inventions began to 

 revolutionize economic life, and above all in the last century when 

 economic and social problems have swayed men's minds far more 

 than transactions of state, the shifting of political power, or the 

 opinions and deeds of princes. 



The training of all intellectual powers with the impulse given by 

 the art of printing necessarily aroused an increased interest in the 

 development of mankind as a whole and brought out more clearly 

 the final aim of all historical investigation, the knowledge of man in 

 all his aspects and of his ways and means to assist the progress of 

 civilization, in order by such study better to understand the present 

 and the problems of the future. There thus arose, in contradistinction 

 to the history of individual peoples, the conception of a universal 

 history such as that attempted by Gatterer l and Schlozer 2 in Gottin- 

 gen during the eighteenth century, and thus far brought to its most 

 finished form by Leopold Ranke. But while unity of aim was being 

 realized, the necessity became apparent for a division of the science 

 in the form of the history of intellectual and of economic culture, 

 each of these extensive fields affording opportunity for the life- 

 work of students of very differing abilities and interests. Along 

 with the history of art and literature came that growth of economic 

 history with which we have here to deal. 



As no science can advance without taking historical retrospects, it 

 was natural that from the very beginning the representatives of the 

 two great studies, history and political economy, which stand in 

 the closest relation to economic life, could not well avoid making 

 economo-historical investigations. It is, however, only very recently 

 that these have become of fundamental importance. We find the 

 mercantilists, as, for example, Antonio Serra, already studying the 

 movement of prices and the monetary history of their country, in 

 order to explain the events of their own time. And Adam Smith, 

 who is so often reproached for his purely abstract method, turned to 

 good account in his work the history of coinage as well as of trade in 

 England. Robert Malthus supports his theory of population upon 

 a study, reaching as far back as possible, of the increase of popula- 

 tion in different countries. Saint-Simon founds his socialistic doc- 

 trines upon a description of the class differences emerging in the 

 course of centuries. Of historians, Schlozer must again be named 

 among the first who found an economic basis indispensable for uni- 

 versal history. Among later writers, Macaulay seems to me particu- 

 larly worthy of notice, and his account of the economic condition 

 of England at the end of the seventeenth century, of the state of 



1 Johann Christoph Gatterer, Handbuch der Universalgeschichte, etc. GOttin- 

 gen, 1761. 



2 August Ludwig SchlSzer, Wetigeschichte nach ihren Haupttcilen. Gottingen, 

 1792. 



