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
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. 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 inseparably entangled. The relative newcomer, the London School of Economics (LSE), believed that economic history warranted its own course, program, study and research apart from pure economics. The Economic History Society had its inauguration at LSE in 1926. Eventually, the LSE position seems to have won out and now many schools in the UK and the US have now developed programs in economic history which have their roots in the LSE model of separating economics and economic history. Often, economic historians such as Robert 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.
Notable economic historians
See also
References
- Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal (2003, 4th ed.) A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present,480 pp., including annotated bibliography, Oxford. Table of Contents,
- N.F.R. Crafts (1987). "economic history," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 37-42.
- Joel Mokyr, ed. (2003), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 5 vols.
- Graeme Snooks (1993), Economics without Time. A Science Blind to the Forces of Historical Change.
External links
Articles and lectures
Economic History Services (EHS)
EHSData
Other EHS
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EHS By country
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Economic histories by country |
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| Historical economies |
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