Economic History

As an academic discipline, economic history first emerged in Western Europe and North America, specifically, in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Although publications that, more or less, incorporated economic history go back to the eighteenth century, the phrase "economic history" apparently first appeared in a book title in the work of a German scholar, Von Inama-Sternegg, published in 1877 and 1879, Über die quellen der deutschen wirtschaftsgeschichte and Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, covering the Middle Ages. The first academic appointment in economic history was made at Harvard University in 1892 and went to a British scholar, William Ashley. The work of the early economic historians focused on either general economic development or specific sectors and processes, especially agriculture, commerce, and industrialization.

But the emerging field exhibited different regional and national tendencies. Although neoclassical models dominated, Marxist perspectives had a lot more appeal to European economic historians, especially in Germany, than to those in America. German historical economists mainly saw economic development in terms of stages and they emphasized the inductive rather than the deductive method. In Britain, the political economists who turned to economic history stressed issues of distribution, especially prices and wages. For their part, American economic historians showed a strong preference for quantitative approaches. Their studies increasingly focused on business history and business cycles, thanks in part to the relative abundance of statistics from census data and governmental and private agencies. In fact, the subsequent growth of economic history in these countries and elsewhere in the world was tied to the increasing capacity and needs of governments to produce and consume statistical data. Also critical was the expansion of, and rising disciplinary specialization in, the universities, the improvement of library collections and archives, the establishment of economic history societies and journals, and the production of large-scale surveys and other bibliographic resources.

Many of the pioneer economic historians were men, but the field also included some remarkable women, such as Eileen Power in Britain, who was at the center of the Economic History Society and the London School of Economics until her death in 1940, and Katherine Coman in the United States, who published an influential economic history text, Industrial History of the United States, in 1905. Unfortunately, the important contributions of these women were ignored as the discipline became more male dominated, particularly after World War II, as the concerns and constituencies of the discipline narrowed, although corrective studies have appeared in more recent years.