Economic history

Economic history is the study of how economic phenomena evolved in the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using historical methods and statistical methods, sometimes to test economic theories. 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 Clio metrics.

Description

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 and rapidly extending worldwide, usually regard economic history as a subfield of economics. The term cliometrics (a reference to Clio, the Muse of history) is used to describe the application of econometric and statistical techniques to the study of economic history. In France, economic theory and demographics was early integrated into mainstream historiography due to the large impact of the Annales School of history from the 1920s and onwards.

Economic history has been a contentious issue in the United Kingdom for many years. The London School of Economics and Oxbridge had numerous duels over the separation of economics and economic theory. Oxbridge believed that pure economics involved a component of economic history and that the two were irreversibly entangled. The relative newcomer, the London School of Economics (LSE), fought for a different case: they believed that economic history warranted its own course, program, study and research apart from pure or standard economics. Eventually, over the long run, the LSE seems to have had it right: many schools in the UK as well as the US have now developed programs in economics history which have their roots in the LSE model of separating economics and economic history. While the two academic subject areas are significantly unique, of course, economics and history - together - are the back bone of the entire discipline. Often, economic historians such as Bob Fogel and Douglass North, both Nobel laureates in economics, and Nicholas Crafts, of LSE fame, are called upon to advise for some of the world foremost economic institutions: WEF, WTO, OECD and others.

Cliometrics

Cliometrics refers to the systematic use of economic theory and econometrics 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.

External links

Articles and lectures

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