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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Present-Day economic historians should be well qualified to talk about uncertainty. There was a happier time when the empirical and concrete study of individual situations was deemed sufficient, when mediodological problems of the long run were left for historians to raise and solve if they could and controversies centered on questions that they themselves formulated. Differences there were, but few irreconcilable differences; areas of the unknown were recognized but there appeared to be no gaps in knowledge that could not be bridged in the course of time. Now, for better or worse, this sheltered position has itself become a datum of history. The challenge of social scientists seeking chics to an understanding of die forces shaping secular change has become increasingly insistent and effective; the strenuous wooing of Clio by economic theorists, statisticians, and Parsonian sociologists can no longer be ignored. Assuming that retreat to the shelter of cloistered storytelling is out of the question, creative response on the part of historians to the uncertainties of their twentieth-century environment becomes a condition of leadership in historical inquiry, its lack a virtual guarantee of submergence.
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10 Construction of a transcontinental railway, a gigantic undertaking for this young nation, was carried through in the face of uncertainties present in lack of knowledge of the prairie environment and of costs of construction. The same may be said of the whole process of western expansion based on wheat, which with the railway and tariffs constituted the backbone of national policy. There were compensations present, however, in the vast area of virgin territory open to exploitation, the prospect of a greatly improved position in world markets, and, for settlers, free lands and assisted immigration. And there were pressures too in the drive to salvage large-scale investments already made in the transportation network of the St. Lawrenc e area and the overriding necessity of moving westward to meet the challenge of the United States-this last an aspect of primary uncertainty as outlined above. These developments appear to provide an illustration of Keirstead's remarks on “objective uncertainty-subjective certainty,” although the limited range of choice in this instance should not be overlooked.
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