ABSTRACT
The first step, however, is to assure ourselves that the simple model in Chapter 8 is more than pure fiction. All models are, of course, fiction, for their purpose is to simplify and to isolate the important from the unimportant. The advantage that explicit modeling offers is that the historian can then be quite precise in his causal historical narrative. The disadvantages, however, are many. Many models may be equally plausible, and each model may well suggest a different interpretation of history. This is not a problem unique to cliometrics and theory: any historian faces the same problem, whether he uses qualitative, implicit theorizing or quantitative, explicit modeling (Fogel, 1967 ; Williamson, 1974a, Ch. 4; Williamson and Lindert, 1980, Part 111). At least critics of my explanation of British nineteenth-century inequality will know exactly why they disagree and will be able to make revisions they think appropriate in formulating their own explanations. An additional disadvantage, however, is that explicit modeling places heavy demands on the historical data. As Appendices D and E should reveal, even a simple general equilibrium model has a voracious quantitative appetite.
