Revisionism.

• Author: KINDLEBERGER, CHARLES P.
• Position: Brief Article

Henry Ford said that history is bunk. Someone else--who?--claimed that history is a fable agreed upon. But not everyone agrees. Fernand Braudel once said that the way for the young to make a reputation is to take an agreed fable and to revise it. Examples abound:

A new book by Peter Garber says that the Tulipmania, the Mississippi, and South Sea bubbles were not bubbles but can be explained by "fundamentals."

Daniel Goldhagen denies the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Alan Milward claims that there was no necessity for the Marshall Plan; Europe was recovering normally. And Charles Maier believed that there was no serious danger that Italy or France would become Communist.

Rondo Cameron has held that there was no industrial revolution in Britain.

Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Keyder have written that France was as rich as Great Britain in the late Eighteenth Century before the revolution.

It is important to distinguish disagreement from revisionism. Historians disagree on causes of such an event as the French Revolution, emphasizing unrest in the cities, bad harvests in agriculture, taxation, and especially the gabelle, the heavy tax on salt. Pouring over archives, they tend to choose an outstanding cause for parsimony, rather than the complex tangle that often existed. Contrary evidence may be ignored--the jump in British patents after 1766; or dismissed--the account of Arthur Young's travels through France before the Revolution, commenting on the poor condition of French agriculture compared to that of the British. At a personal level, I confess to not having read the Goldhagen book, but feel no need to do so having visited the concentration camp at Nordhausen in April 1945, and having seen conditions with my own eyes.

Whether the Marshall Plan was called for or not introduces another question: insurance versus risk. After the fact, it may be appropriate to introduce what economic historians call a...