Abstract
This introductory chapter, written by the editors of this book, provides a personal account of the origins of this unique teaching and learning resource. Part of its motivation lies in the paradox that economic historians are perceived to be an endangered species at the exact moment there is newfound demand for their services. The other is the active economic history scene that is populated by researchers with diverse academic backgrounds, exemplified by the contributors to this book.
We thank Michael Aldous, Graham Brownlow and John Turner for comments on this chapter in particular, and for supporting us more generally throughout this project. Without their input very early on, we would not have been able to get this book off the ground. We thank our publishers, Clara Heathcock and Laura Pacey, for giving us the freedom to make something a little different. Finally, we thank Adi McCrea for the data visualisations throughout the book, and Vinodh Kumar and his team for copyediting and typesetting the text.
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Notes
- 1.
Economic forecasting is practised by a small minority of economists concentrated in just a few fields, such as financial econometrics and macroeconomics. Economics in general is a backward-looking social science in that it aims to explain the past, albeit usually the very recent past. While the prediction criticism is therefore flawed, perhaps it does reveal a failure to communicate the discipline’s main aim to those outside of academia.
- 2.
Although many of these journalistic criticisms are unfair in that they present a very outdated view of what constitutes modern economics. See Coyle (2018) for an impassioned discussion of this point.
- 3.
The field of economic history has become mostly unrecognisable to historians since the mainstreaming of quantification and counterfactuals (the so-called Cliometric Revolution). This is even the case among those historians who have avoided the excesses of postmodernism (see, e.g. Evans 2016).
- 4.
See Backhouse (2011) for a discussion of Cliffe Leslie and the English Historical School.
- 5.
But not without casualties: Miriam Daley, a Queen’s economic history lecturer specialised in migration, was assassinated by loyalist paramilitaries in 1980.
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Blum, M., Colvin, C.L. (2018). Introduction, or Why We Started This Project. In: Blum, M., Colvin, C. (eds) An Economist’s Guide to Economic History. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0_1
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