scholars to adhere to these precepts means coming to terms with membership of a community and avo... more scholars to adhere to these precepts means coming to terms with membership of a community and avoiding the often unconscious infl uence that it exerts on their way of thinking. It means shunning power (not only political power) and giving up the advantages that it offers to whoever submits to it. But Lucian also warns against following fashions and conforming to trends; otherwise historiography becomes an exercise in serial imitation. Before considering how Clio comes into this book, we need to introduce the main character: economic history. As in all stories worthy of the name, one cannot guess the direction in which someone is heading without knowing where they started from. The tale of Little Red Riding Hood opens in the mother's kitchen and finishes in the wolf's stomach. The perils of the wood would be difficult to imagine without the prior experience of the reassuring peace of the village. In the first place, economic history has not always existed. During the Renaissance, nobody would have found it of very great interest to deal with the economies of the past. When in the 1510s Machiavelli wrote his Discourses on Livy, his concerns were the structure of republics, warfare, and leadership. Machiavelli would enter his study dressed in "regal and courtly" attire, as he told Vettori, to converse with the ancients, the great statesmen now departed, and they could respond to him precisely because they knew how to write. He would ask them about "the reason for their actions" (1513, p. 142) and not about what they produced or how their fellow citizens made a living. Two centuries later, Edward Gibbon (1776-89) did not fi nd it beneath him to deal with manners and customs as long as it could be useful for understanding the political collapse of an empire. Nowadays it would be considered as coming within the domain of social and cultural history. Yet the economic past started to become a matter for investigation precisely at that time. Gibbon's contemporaries sensed that the economy was changing irremediably and that new values were coming to the fore. Even when they are not historical works, historical references abound in the writings of Smith, Malthus, or Marx. One of the first cases in which the elevated term "history" is applied to a subject that is anything but elevated is the History of the Cotton Manufacture written by Edward Baines (1835), a forerunner of David Landes's triumphalistic account Unbound Prometheus (1969)! However, only when economics became a deductive science, and one prone to universalize particular, culture-specific patterns of behavior,
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