The Future of Economic History Must Be Interdisciplinary

Essays--The Future of Economic History

Economic history in the future will be shaped by economic history in the past, but it also needs to transcend that past. In particular, it needs to transcend the breakdown of the field's original interdisciplinary structure and its transformation into a subfield of economics. Most economists and historians today accept the stereotype that economics is about generalization and history is about understanding specific phenomena in the past. There is some validity to this stereotype, but I will argue that economic historians must operate somewhere in the middle of those extremes if they are truly to advance knowledge. Most research by economic historians trained as economists does not in fact produce universal generalizations and to treat it as such, rather than to acknowledge its context-specific character, is to mislead. At the same time, research in history risks degenerating into antiquarianism when scholars amass information about their specific topics without worrying about how their work might inform those who study other times and places, including the present. As a matter of actual practice, critical discussion in both disciplines tends to push scholars toward the middle of this range. Economists are continually forced to acknowledge the limits on their generalizations, and historians face relentless "so what?" questions. Nonetheless, I would argue, the ability of economic historians to function effectively on this middle terrain has long been hampered by a lack of interdisciplinary conversation.¹

The lack of communication between economics and history is the product of two developments: the cliometric revolution in economic history; and the cultural turn in the historical profession more generally. The story of these developments is well known (see, for example, Williamson 1994; Lyons, Cain, and Williamson 2008; and Bonnell and Hunt 1999). I have written about them myself (Lamoreaux 1998, 2016 (forthcoming)) and do not intend to go over that material again here. Instead, I will simply use some examples from early cliometric scholarship to underscore my argument about the tendency of economic historians to move toward the middle. Cliometricians initially drew sharp distinctions between their own efforts to test hypotheses drawn from neoclassical theory and the more descriptive work done by economic historians in history departments. Over time, however, the logic of debates within cliometrics led...