Economic history

For changes in economic ideas, see History of economic thought.

See also Economic history of the world.

Economic history is the study of how economic phenomena evolved in the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and by applying economic theory to historical situations. The topic includes business history and overlaps with areas of social history such as demographic history and labor history. Quantitative economic history is also referred to as cliometrics.

Description

Economic history as a discipline has been a contentious issue for many years. Academics at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge had numerous duels over the separation of economics and economic theory in the interwar era. Cambridge economists believed that pure economics involved a component of economic history and that the two were inseparably entangled. Those at the LSE believed that economic history warranted its own courses, research agenda and academic department separated from pure economics.

Practitioners and advocates of the first approach, which was for a long time dominant in the United Kingdom, generally regarded economic history as being either an independent discipline or a subfield of history. Practitioners of the second approach, which is more influential in the United States, usually regard economic history as a subfield of economics. Indeed, many top US universities today prescribe economic history courses as core components in the academic training of their PhD economists. In France, economic theory and demographics were integrated into mainstream historiography due to the large impact of the Annales School of history from the 1920s and onwards.

In the initial period of the subject's development, the LSE position of separating economic history from economics seemed to have won out and many universities in the UK developed programmes in economic history rooted in the LSE model. Indeed, The Economic History Society had its inauguration at LSE in 1926. However, the past twenty years have witnessed the widespread closure of these separate programmes in economic history in the UK and the integration of the discipline into either history or economics departments. Only the LSE and Glasgow University retain separate economic history departments and stand-alone undergraduate and graduate programmes in economic history in the UK. The University of Warwick has the greatest number of economic historians working in an economics department anywhere in the UK. The University of Oxford offers economic history as a specialisation to graduate students in the departments of economics and history.

Economic historians Robert Fogel and Douglass North won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 for "having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change". Merton Miller, who started his academic career teaching economic history at the LSE, won the Nobel in 1997 with Myron S. Scholes for "a new method to determine the value of derivatives".

Yale University economist Irving Fisher wrote in 1933 on the relationship between economics and economic history in his "Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions" (Econometrica, Vol.1, No.4: 337-338): "The study of dis-equilibrium may proceed in either of two ways. We may take as our unit for study an actual historical case of great dis-equilibrium, such as, say, the panic of 1873; or we may take as our unit for study any constituent tendency, such as, say, deflation, and discover its general laws, relations to, and combinations with, other tendencies. The former study revolves around events, or facts; the latter, around tendencies. The former is primarily economic history; the latter is primarily economic science. Both sorts of studies are proper and important. Each helps the other. The panic of 1873 can only be understood in light of the various tendencies involved - deflation and other; and deflation can only be understood in the light of various historical manifestations -1873 and other."

Cliometrics

Cliometrics refers to the systematic use of economic theory and econometric techniques to study economic history. The term was originally coined by Jonathan R.T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter in 1960 and refers to Clio, who was the muse of history and heroic poetry in Greek mythology. This term is also sometimes used referring to counterfactual history.

Notable economic historians

• Ram Sharan Sharma
• Moses Abramovitz
• Dudley Baines
• Maxine Berg
• Stephen Broadberry
• Rondo Cameron
• Gregory Clark (economist)
• Thomas C. Cochran
• Nicholas Crafts
• Barry Eichengreen
• Stanley Engerman
• Charles Feinstein

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• Roderick Floud
• Robert Fogel
• John Kenneth Galbraith
• Claudia Goldin
• John Habakkuk
• Eli Heckscher
• Eric Hobsbawm
• Leo Huberman
• Paul Johnson
• Charles P. Kindleberger
• Timothy Leunig

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• Peter Lindert
• Deirdre McCloskey
• Joel Mokyr
• Larry Neal (economist)
• Douglass North
• Karl Polanyi
• Murray Rothbard
• Graeme Snooks
• R. H. Tawney
• Peter Temin
• Adam Tooze

See also

• EAEPE
• Price revolution
• Great Depression
• The Great Moderation
• History of economic thought
• History of international trade
• Anthropometric history
• List of recessions
• List of countries by past GDP (PPP) - For historical gross domestic product (GDP) (purchasing power parity) figures from 1 AD to 1998
• List of countries by past GDP (nominal) - For historical GDP (nominal) figures from 1998 to 2003

References

• Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal (2003, 4th ed.) A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present, 480 pp., Oxford. Description and Table of Contents,
• N.F.R. Crafts (1987). "economic history," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 37-42.
• Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz (1963). A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton. Page-searchable links to chapters on 1929-41 and 1948-60 A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Joel Mokyr, ed. (2003), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 5 vols. Description.
• Graeme Snooks (1993), Economics without Time. A Science Blind to the Forces of Historical Change. Links to chapter previews.

External links

Articles and lectures

• On global economic history by Jan Luiten van Zanden. Explores the idea of the inevitability of the Industrial Revolution.

Professional Societies for Economic History

• EH.Net Economic History Services - Includes Economic History Encyclopedia, Ask the Professor, Book Reviews, databases, directories, bibliographies, mailing lists, and an inflation calculator.
• Economic History Society (UK), publisher of the Economic History Review
• Economic History Association (US), publisher of the Journal of Economic History

• International Economic History Association (IEHA)

Economic History Databases

• Flandreau: Global Finance data series
• Historicalstatistics.org - Links to historical economic statistics for different countries and regions.
• Maddison (2006), The World Economy, OECD, Paris.
• Angus Maddison's Historical Dataseries -Series on GDP, Population and GDP per capita from the year 0 up to 2003
• Groningen Growth and Development Centre Total Economy Database -Series on GDP, Population, Employment, Hours worked, GDP per capita and productivity (per person and per hour) from 1950 up to 2006

Economic History Conferences

• XV World Economic History Congress 2009
• XIV International Economic History Conference 2006

Economic History Services Encyclopedia

• EH.Net Encyclopedia:
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