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Development Economic history

Treating economic history as a discrete academic discipline has been a contentious issue for many years.Academics at the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge hadnumerous disputes over the separation of economics and economic history in the interwar era. Cambridgeeconomists believed that pure economics involved a component of economic history and that the twowere inseparably entangled. Those at the LSE believed that economic history warranted its own courses,research agenda and academic chair separated from mainstream economics.

In the initial period of the subject's development, the LSE position of separating economic history fromeconomics won out. Many universities in the UK developed independent programmes in economic historyrooted in the LSE model. Indeed, the Economic History Society had its inauguration at LSE in 1926 andthe University of Cambridge eventually established its own economic history programme. However, thepast twenty years have witnessed the widespread closure of these separate programmes in the UK andthe integration of the discipline into either history or economics departments. Only the LSE, the Universityof Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh retain separate economic history departments and stand-alone undergraduate and graduate programmes in economic history. The LSE, Glasgow and the Universityof Oxford together train the vast majority of economic historians coming through the British highereducation system.

In the US, economic history has for a long time been regarded as a form of applied economics. As aconsequence, there are no specialist economic history graduate programs at any mainstream universityanywhere in the country. Instead economic history is taught as a special field component of regulareconomics or history PhD programs in some places, including at University of California, Berkeley, HarvardUniversity, Northwestern University and Yale University.

In recent decades economic historians, following Douglass North, have tended to move away fromnarrowly quantitative studies toward institutional, social, and cultural history affecting the evolution of

economies .[2][a 1] However, this trend has been criticized, most forcefully by Francesco Boldizzoni, as a formof economic imperialism "extending the neoclassical explanatory model to the realm of socialrelations. "[3] Conversely, economists in other specializations have started to write on topics concerningeconomic history .[a 2]

History of capitalism

Since 2000 the new field of "History of Capitalism" has appeared, with courses in history departments. Itincludes topics such as insurance, banking and regulation, the political dimension, and the impact on themiddle classes, the poor and women and minorities .[4][5]

Relationship between economics and economic history

Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that's the raw material out ofwhich any of your conjectures or testings will come.

- Paul Samuelson (2009 )[6]

Yale University economist Irving Fisher wrote in 1933 on the relationship between economics andeconomic 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

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an actual historical case of great dis-equilibrium, such as, say, the panic of 1873; or we may take as ourunit 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 beunderstood in the light of various historical manifestations 1873 and other."

There is a school of thought among economic historians that splits economic history the study of howeconomic phenomena evolved in the past from historical economics testing the generality ofeconomic theory using historical episodes. US economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger explained thisposition in his 1990 book Historical Economics: Art or Science? .[7]

The new economic history, also known as cliometrics, refers to the systematic use of economic theoryand/or econometric techniques to the study of economic history. The term cliometrics was originallycoined by Jonathan R. T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter in 1960 and refers to Clio, who was the muse of historyand heroic poetry in Greek mythology. Cliometricians argue their approach is necessary because theapplication of theory is crucial in writing solid economic history, while historians generally oppose thisview warning against the risk of generating anachronisms. Early cliometrics was a type of counterfactualhistory. However, counterfactualism is no longer its distinctive feature. Some have argued that cliometricshad its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and that it is now neglected by economists and historians .[8]

Nobel Prize winning economic historians

Simon Kuznets won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971 "for his empiricallyfounded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into theeconomic and social structure and process of development".

Milton Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 for "hisachievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for hisdemonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy".

Robert Fogel and Douglass North won the Nobel in 1993 for "having renewed research ineconomic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explaineconomic and institutional change".

Merton Miller, who started his academic career teaching economic history at the LSE, won theNobel in 1990 with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.

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