Reinventing History

It is always interesting how historians go through the same trash heap and come up with pretty new baubles. Here is a NY Times article by Tim Arango about an upcoming re-interpretation of the American Revolution in the light of a housing bubble and credit crunch by Gordon S. Wood and Robert W. Wright:

When Benjamin Franklin returned to America in 1762, after almost five years in London, he was shocked at the housing prices.

“The expence of living is greatly advanc’d in my absence,” he commented. “Rent of old houses, and value of lands ... are trebled in the past six years.”

Franklin, it seems, had come home to a real estate bubble. It eventually popped — bringing on a credit crunch and deep recession that was the macroeconomic backdrop to the American Revolution.

Sound familiar? ...

“I think there’s reason to doubt the Revolution would have happened as it did if it weren’t for these economic conditions,” said Ronald W. Michener, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, in a radical departure from today’s popular notion that the Revolution was a product primarily of grand ideas about self-government. ...

As Professors Wright and Michener see things, had British monetary policy been different, and had the recession been short, the United States might have gained independence only gradually, much as Canada did — over the course of more than a century, beginning in the 1860s.