Railroads and the Construction of Knowledge: Comparing France and the United States

In research comparing the financial history of French and American railroads, 1840-1940, I discovered that many French scholars fail to reference their sources. This situation, rarely found in comparable American scholarship, creates significant obstacles, not least locating relevant primary sources. I overcame this problem partly by studying the social and political history of the construction of knowledge in France; for example, learning how scholarly societies were formed, such as the Statistical Society of Paris, which then influenced the development of bureaus of statistics in both government ministries and private corporations. This, in turn, helped me locate relevant primary source data in the archives of those ministries and corporations and, as a consequence, led me to a better understanding of certain generic methodological problems in transnational research. For the AHA Roundtable, I will distill some of the lessons I have learned about methodology based on my France-U.S. comparative research.