Thu Dec 30 11:19:07 EST 2004
Charles Hilliard Feinstein, Fellow of All Souls College, and Chichele
Professor of Economic History emeritus at the University of Oxford,
b. 18 March 1932, d. 27 November 2004.
by Avner Offer (Chichele Professor of Economic History, University of Oxford)
(Published in _The Times_, 23 December 2004,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1413099,00.html. See also
the interview of Feinstein from the _Cliometric Society Newsletter_
at http://www.eh.net/feinstein-interview.php.)
Charles Feinstein's achievement was to work out the structure and
size of the British economy from the present and all the way back to
the Industrial Revolution. His work makes it possible to evaluate how
well the economy has performed at any period in the past two
centuries, and to compare it with other periods and other countries.
When The British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown recently
proclaimed the economy's longest period ever of unbroken growth, it
is Feinstein's work that he relied upon.
Charles Hilliard Feinstein was born in Johannesburg in 1932. He
studied economics and subsequently accountancy at Witwatersrand
University. Initially, he was attracted to Marxism, and as a student
participated in the early stirrings of the anti-apartheid movement.
In 1954 he arrived at Cambridge to study economics, and eventually
wrote a doctoral dissertation on 'Home and Foreign Investment
1870-1914.' In 1958 he married Ruth Loshak, and also began to work
as a research officer at the Department of Applied Economics, where,
among other tasks, he joined an effort to construct a set of
retrospective national accounts for Britain. The objective of
national accounting was to construct a descriptive statistical model
to capture the flow of economic activity on an annual basis. Keynes'
_General Theory_ of 1936 gradually persuaded policy makers that
government could beat unemployment and control the level of economic
activity by means of precise interventions in taxation, government
spending and credit. National income accounts became the
indispensable tool for 'tuning' the economy. During the 1940s, this
method was implemented all over the world, and the growth rate of GDP
became the benchmark for economic and social performance which it
remains to this day.
By the 1950s, the main industrial countries had all embarked on
projects to extend the national accounts backwards into history. In
Britain this was undertaken at Cambridge University, and after
Feinstein joined this effort in 1958, he made a notable contribution
with an estimate of domestic capital formation. By the mid 1960s, the
Cambridge project had reached a crisis, and Feinstein undertook
single-handedly to bring it to completion. In 1972 this was published
as _National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom,
1855-1965_. Although Feinstein undertook many more investigations,
this was perhaps his crowning achievement. Of the several similar
projects undertaken in different countries, e.g. the American,
Canadian, Australian, and German projects, it is fair to say that the
one which Charles brought into being was the most elegantly reasoned,
organized, and presented, all the more remarkable for being the work
largely of one man. It was achieved with very simple means: hardly
more than a mechanical calculator and some research assistance. The
large red volume, familiar to all students of British economic
history, embodies an exceptional talent for order. It was a
foundational work, and has stood the test of time remarkably well.
Eventually, Feinstein and others extended the estimates back to the
eighteenth century. It remains the backbone of our knowledge of
British economic performance, and links almost seamlessly with the
modern annual series of national output and income which continue to
unfold. The meaning and implications of historical national income
series were analysed (together with R. Matthews and J. Odling-Smee)
in an important book on _British Economic Growth, 1856-1973_ in 1982.
From 1963 and until 1978, Feinstein was a Fellow of Clare College,
Cambridge, where he was an inspiring teacher, and a reforming Senior
Tutor. In 1978, he accepted a Chair in Economic History at the
University of York. His distinction and professional goodwill began
to be recognized with a series of leadership positions. He became the
head of a large and respected economics department, as well as
joint-editor of the _Economic Journal_, the leading British journal
in the field. He was also elected to the British Academy in 1983.
There followed a succession of influential and prestigious positions
in professional associations.
In 1987, after a year at Harvard, he moved to Oxford, first to
Nuffield College, and then to All Souls College, where he was the
Chichele Professor of Economic History for a decade after 1989.
Economic history was falling on hard times. A large number of small
independent departments created in the academic boom of the 1960s
were being absorbed into larger departments of history or economics,
as the subject became more technical and less appealing to
undergraduates. At Oxford, however, Feinstein and his colleagues were
able to reverse the trend and to build up a flourishing graduate
course which attracted students from all over the world. He also
pushed his research into new directions, into important studies of
the standard of living during the nineteenth century, and of
international capital movements between the wars.
Feinstein possessed an austere and supremely disciplined mind, and
had an almost magical ability to impose order on the complexity of
the past, combined with a scrupulous respect for the smallest detail.
These gifts also served him well as an administrator and academic
entrepreneur. They inspired his lectures, which imparted a wonderful
clarity to the protracted muddle of the British economy. Generations
of students took this clarity of vision as an ideal to aspire to, in
economic history as in other disparate pursuits.
Feinstein was a private man. But despite a slight austerity, and a
taste for hard-nosed social theory (first Marxism, then a more
conventional neo-classical economics) he attracted much personal
loyalty and feelings of great warmth, both among close colleagues,
and in wider academic circles. Along with his sense of propriety and
order there was also a manifest integrity, and a great innate
generosity. He was always a giver, rather than a taker. In a crisis,
his response was often to roll up his sleeves, to do it himself if
others would not, in first-year teaching or in the grind of
administration or editing.
The end of apartheid released a new outflow of generosity. He was
exhilarated by the chance to take up the struggle for African
betterment where he had left off as a youth. He began to teach
courses at the University of Cape Town, and to spend part of every
year there. Despite a difficult illness, the years after retirement
were exceptionally productive, with a book on the economic history of
South Africa about to be published. A not-quite-finished book-length
study of the British economy in 1851 is another ambitious project,
which we look forward to being completed by other hands.
Feinstein was a great craftsman, and the advances he made in his
field were both decisive and durable. Economic interpretations
change, but all of them rely in the end, on the quantitative
foundations that he laid down. In that respect, at least, he was
probably the most influential British economic historian of his age.
He was also a good man, a considerate mentor, colleague, and friend.
He leaves a second wife, Anne Digby, herself a noted social
historian, and four children from his first marriage.