As we demonstrate in the examples above, part of the self-critical historical awareness which history can offer to development policy is to be aware of the ways in which the data it frequently uses has been constructed through historical processes and negotiation in the recent or even quite distant past of several decades ago. All empirical data is classified, categorized and constructed; sometimes it can be very important to know how and why it was rendered into the form we now use. All the quantitative data used in economic and other social science models has to be constructed, often by government agencies. There is, in all cases of data construction, a complex history behind exactly how that data is produced in the way that it is. This inevitably feeds various biases, and filters into the way in which economists and those working on development problems can see the problems they are working on. Data collection is not a neutral activity; it can mobilize social movements and spark important social changes.<sup>42</sup> Finally, eighth, in relation to the pressing problems of the environment—problems integral to world economic development for which neither economics nor policy makers themselves have any simple solutions—history should also be investigated as one among many resources with which to think imaginatively about this challenge. History has many episodes of environmental degradation to investigate, some of them very carefully documented, such as the evil of ‘mining’ estates in the early modern period, deforestation throughout western Europe, and desertification (see McNeil 2000, Kula 2001, Burke and Pomeranz 2009).<sup>43</sup>

# **V. Conclusion: The Past as a Foreign Country**

In matters pertaining to development and national economic growth patterns, ‘path dependency’ has been the concept which has won an enduring acknowledgement among economists and other social scientists signifying that ‘history matters’. However, ‘path dependency’ can be a profoundly misleading way to understand the role of history. To the extent that the notion of path dependency can be invoked to mean that a set of historical events and institutions in a country’s or region’s past have exerted a deterministic influence upon its subsequent history, then this is a a-historicist viewpoint which no professional historians would wish to endorse. Paradoxically, to invoke path dependency in this manner merely commits the mirror image fallacy of ignoring history entirely, by suggesting that certain selected aspects of the historical past are inevitable destiny.

Historians see history as constitutive of the present, not determinative of it. If for no other, this is for one very important and powerful historiographical reason, namely that historians believe that it is through the study of the past that we continually modify our understanding of it and so shift our relationship with it. That is, after all, the fundamental rationale for the discipline; the past is never finished and complete. While the discipline of history lives as a practice, it is

> 42 It should go without saying that this point, and the arguments raised in the paper as a whole, should not be interpreted as hostility on our part to quantitative analysis; far from it. Our claim, rather, is that quantitative analysis (a) too often assumes an air of sophistication purely because it is quantitative, and not because it is a product of serious engagement with contextual realities and idiosyncrasies, and (b) is not inherently a more ‘objective’ mode of inquiry—as we have shown above, it can and does have unintended political consequences.

> 43 Also see, for instance, Roodhouse (2007) on the WWII national emergency responses to severe shortages, especially lessons on how politically and culturally to ‘sell’ rationing to a democratic populace and how to get compliance and enforcement.

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