ABSTRACT

Charles Hilliard Feinstein was Chichele Professor of Economic History, Emeritus, in the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College. He was born in Johannesburg in 1932 and died in Oxford in 2004. In 1950 Feinstein graduated from The University of the Witwatersrand with a B.Com. degree, qualified as a chartered accountant in 1954, and left South Africa for the University of Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate in 1958. He remained in Cambridge until 1978, first as a research officer in the Department of Applied Economics (1958-63), then as a University Lecturer in Economics and Fellow of Clare College (1963-1978). He was Senior Tutor at Clare from 1969 until his departure for the Chair in Economic and Social History at the University of York in 1978. While at York, Feinstein was elected Fellow of the British Academy (1983). In 1987 he moved to Oxford, first as Reader in Recent Economic and Social History and Fellow of Nuffield College and then as Chichele Professor from 1989 until his retirement in 1999. In addition to his many university and college administrative assignments at Cambridge, York and Oxford, Feinstein’s service to the academic research community included a term as managing editor of The Economic Journal (1980-86), chairmanship of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Social Science Research Council (1985-86), and the Vice-Presidency of the British Academy (1991-93). A collection of essays presented at a conference in Feinstein’s honour in 1999, The Economic Future in Historical Perspective, edited by Paul A. David and Mark Thomas, was published in 2003 (Oxford UP for the British Academy). His Ellen MacArthur Lectures of 2004, mentioned in the interview, were revised and expanded into a book, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination and Development (Cambridge UP, 2005). The interview was conducted by M T, Feinstein’s collaborator in writing Making History Count: A Primer in Quantitative Methods for Historians (Cambridge UP, 2002). Their conversation took place in Feinstein’s rooms at All Souls, 2 August 2002. Mark Thomas (University of Virginia) writes:

Charles Feinstein’s influence on British economic history since 1750 has been palpable. It is almost impossible to read a contribution to quantitative economic history over the past 35 years without seeing its debt to Feinstein’s canonical statistical reconstructions of national income, capital accumulation, and wages and prices. For those of us working in the field as graduate students and young researchers, Feinstein was a formidable presence, both as a guide to how we should approach quantitative history and as a disinterested, passionate critic of error in the use and application of quantitative data. But Feinstein was more than a simple archaeologist of numbers; he made signal interpretive contributions to such venerable topics as the standard of living in the British Industrial Revolution, the late Victorian climacteric, the origins and diffusion of the Great Depression in Europe, and the reasons for slower economic growth in the British economy after 1945. Towards the end of his life, Feinstein returned to his native roots in South Africa, both physically and intellectually, but he did not abandon his fascination with the contours of British economic development. His last project was a reconstruction of the national accounts for the United Kingdom in 1851, which will appear posthumously under the imprint of Cambridge University Press as The MidVictorian Economy: Making, Earning and Spending in the United Kingdom in 1851, by Charles H. Feinstein and Mark Thomas.