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 had
numerous disputesover the separation of economics and economic history 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 chair separated from mainstream economics.
In the initial period of the subject's development, the LSE position of separating economic history from
economics won out. Many universities in the UK developed independent programmes in economic history
rooted in the LSE model. Indeed, the Economic History Society had its inauguration at LSE in 1926 and
the University of Cambridge eventually established its own economic history programme. However, the
past twenty years have witnessed the widespread closure of these separate programmes in the UK and
the integration of the discipline into either history or economics departments. Only the LSE, the University
of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh retain separate economic history departments and standalone undergraduate and graduate programmes in economic history. The LSE, Glasgow and the University
of Oxford together train the vast majority of economic historians coming through the British higher
education system.
In the US, economic history has for a long time been regarded as a form of applied economics. As a
consequence, there are no specialist economic history graduate programs at any mainstream university
anywhere in the country. Instead economic history is taught as a special field component of regular
economics or history PhD programs in some places, including at University of California, Berkeley, Harvard
University, Northwestern University and Yale University.
In recent decades economic historians, following Douglass North, have tended to move away from
narrowly 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 form
of economic imperialism "extending the neoclassical explanatory model to the realm of social
relations."[3] Conversely, economists in other specializations have started to write on topics concerning
economic history.[a 2]
History of capitalism
Since 2000 the new field of "History of Capitalism" has appeared, with courses in history departments. It
includes topics such as insurance, banking and regulation, the political dimension, and the impact on the
middle 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 of
which 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 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 involveddeflation and other; and deflation can only be
understood in the light of various historical manifestations1873 and other."
There is a school of thought among economic historians that splits economic historythe study of how
economic phenomena evolved in the pastfrom historical economicstesting the generality of
economic theory using historical episodes. US economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger explained this
position 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 theory
and/or econometric techniques to the study of economic history. The term cliometrics 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. Cliometricians argue their approach is necessary because the
application of theory is crucial in writing solid economic history, while historians generally oppose this
view warning against the risk of generating anachronisms. Early cliometrics was a type of counterfactual
history. However, counterfactualism is no longer its distinctive feature. Some have argued that cliometrics
had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and that it is now neglected by economists and historians.[8]
Nobel Prizewinning economic historians

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

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

Robert Fogel and Douglass North won the Nobel 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 1990 with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.