Social Justice

To pick up the thread of Charles’s research: after working for so long on productivity and capital formation, he turned to welfare after all. Capital formation had become ‘rather arid; one was dealing with things that had no human interest, whereas once I got started on issues of wages, that opened up questions such as the standard of living’ (Feinstein quoted in Thomas 2002: 295). The ‘Williamson curve’ controversy had a bearing on what had been the most salient debate in British economic history during its golden age of the 1960s, between ‘pessimists’ and ‘optimists’ about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the living standards of British workers. It was the height of the Cold War. Led in Britain by Max Hartwell, the ‘optimists’ regarded rising standards of living as the vindication of capitalist industrialization. The ‘pessimists’ were led by two brilliant left-wing historians, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P Thompson, who were not comfortable with numbers and stressed the unmeasured detriments of industrial and urban life. Hartwell was somewhat more numerate, but the debate drew mainly on the fragmentary surviving evidence of prices and wages. By the 1970s it seemed that the optimists had won it on points. Charles took no part in this debate. He was not yet an historian.

After Charles’s work on capital formation, wages and profits remained the main components still missing for estimating national income during the Industrial Revolution. Estimating real wages had several attractions for Charles. His nineteenth-century wages series had come almost entirely from the work of predecessors. He now decided to reconstruct the series himself from the primary sources upwards. He had previously questioned the ‘optimistic’ assessment of wage growth represented by Williamson’s book. Another approach to the standard of living had emerged in the 1990s. Human heights appeared to provide an index of well-being which might capture childhood deprivation. Historical height data assembled by Floud, Wachter, and Gregory showed that during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the standard of living might have been expected to rise, heights had actually diminished. Some optimists retreated into an ad hoc defence that the decline in heights might have reflected a preference for other goods rather than those that enhanced health.

Charles extended wage series back to the eighteenth century. Four articles on wages came out between 1990 and 1998, and the effort culminated in his magisterial Tawney Lecture of 1998, ‘Pessimism Perpetuated’ (Feinstein 1998). This (and the article which followed) re-examined Williamson and concluded that the pessimists had been right all along: real weekly working-class earnings lagged far behind the growth of the economy during the first 75 years of modern economic growth and broadly stagnated until the 1830s. It may also be seen as the closing of a circle, bringing Charles back to the social- justice preoccupations of his youth, and, for those who only knew him later, an unexpected alignment with the left-wing historians of the 1960s. Charles himself denied that this was his intention—he did not know, he said, where the findings would lead—but he was not dissatisfied.

A more open return to his roots had already begun. As an opponent of apartheid, Charles had never been able to return to South Africa. He was thrilled by its overthrow in 1990, went back to visit, and felt the tug of his youthful ideals. Starting in 1992, he began to spend the summer vacation months in South Africa. In most years, he taught a course in economic history at the University of Cape Town. He and his wife Anne purchased a house on the slopes of Table Mountain, which became a source of pleasure and a base from which to participate in the country’s transformation. Anne Digby was a noted social historian, and she also began to work on South African topics. After retirement from Oxford, even more of their time was spent there. In 2002, he began an overview study of South African economic history. None had been written for a long time. The end of apartheid offered a chance to understand the distortions it had inflicted. He presented the Ellen MacArthur

Lectures in Cambridge in 2003 and converted them into his book on South Africa the following year. It appeared just too late for Charles to enjoy the praise it received (Feinstein 2005).

When Charles retired in 1999, he stood at the pinnacle of the discipline, admired, and respected by a wide circle of colleagues and students, family, and friends. He was celebrated with a retirement conference in 1999, and a Festschrift in 2003 (David and Thomas 2003). Retirement was darkened by illness, which he endured with stoic courage. But the burdens of administration had lifted, and those final years became among his most productive. In addition to the South African volume, and to a pioneering statistical textbook for economic historians (Feinstein and Thomas 2002), he embarked on another grand project, a ‘social accounting matrix’ for the UK in 1851.

Input-output analysis had been devised by Leontief in the 1930s to trace the supply chains in the economy and their mutual interaction. In the 1960s Stone recast the national accounts in the form of an extended input-output matrix, which included productive factors, households, intermediaries, government, and international flows in addition to industries. This was adopted into the UN national income standard in its revision of 1968 (Bos 1992: 24-25 and Vanoli 2005: 169-171). Effectively it was also a form of general equilibrium analysis, and highlighted similarities with the neoclassical equilibrium modelling approach, with which of necessity it coincided at many points. In its painstaking, encompassing detail, Charles’s final project was nevertheless a valedictory statement of his belief that understanding was not to be found in overarching theory, but in empirical knowledge, disciplined within an accounting framework. A complete input-output table for 1851 would push our secure knowledge of the economy back by more than half a century. It was four-fifths completed at his death, and is due to be finished by his long-standing collaborator Mark Thomas (Feinstein and Thomas forthcoming).

It was not easy to get to know Charles as a person. Despite unmistakable warmth and sympathy, he was private and reserved, and small talk was often an effort. During his last few months, he let down his guard a little, and we had several long conversations. There was a cultured side to Charles, a love of music and literature (Haydn, Bruckner, Paul Celan), which he kept hidden from colleagues. Now he was rereading the novels of Trollope, and we talked about them. It has struck me since that there were affinities between the two men. I think of them both as engineers, each with his own distinctive approach to the same Victorian infrastructure. Trollope, apart from being a novelist, had been a senior official at the Post Office. He devised the red pillar box, and established universal deliveries in Britain. Charles in his turn deconstructed the Victorian economy and reassembled it as a dynamic machine. Trollope’s novels convey a sense of stability and order. Underneath the surface narrative, society rolls along in firm grooves of convention, habit, and self-interest. Charles revealed a similar incremental regularity in economic life. But on almost every page, Trollope also wove in the nuance of emotion and personality, without succumbing to sentimentality. Charles had a similar kind of emotional intelligence in his leadership roles, robust, broad-hearted, and broad-minded. This underpinned his authority as a colleague and administrator, and his appeal as a teacher and friend. He was not only respected, but also loved. He was an immensely able man, and also a good and moral one. His accomplishment endures.