A Clear-Sighted Case for Economic History

Economic history—the study of economic phenomena, processes, and patterns in past time, employing tools from economics, history, and other disciplines—is a small field. For a brief time, roughly half a century ago, it was a hot area of scholarly interest, but from the 1970s until the early twenty-first century its fortunes ebbed, as historians gravitated to trendier fields such as cultural history and economists moved increasingly toward modeling. The recession of 2007–09 and its aftershocks helped to spark a modest uptick in interest in economic history in both history and economics departments, but mostly in the former, as scholars looked to the past (particularly the Great Depression) for lessons about how and why significant economic downturns arise, how to respond to them, and how to prevent them going forward. A second reason for the renewed interest in history was a seeming rise in economic inequality in the US and elsewhere in recent decades, which prompted some scholars to study income and wealth distributions in the past and others to “interrogate” the capitalist economic system, which they already believed at least implicitly, to have been responsible for economic inequality both historically and in the present day.