Economic historians study the history of economic and business patterns and practices, using theoretical and statistical models while grounding their work in specific historical events. The discipline emerged in the interwar years and has attracted both technocrats and ideologues. The rise of cliometrics in the 1960s saw a focus on rigorous statistical methods to understand underlying economic causes and effects.
An economic historian is an academic professional who studies the specific history of economic and business patterns and practices. Economic historians work closely with traditional historians and pure economists and occupy an interdisciplinary position between these two fields. Typically, the work of an economic historian will employ theoretical and statistical models, but will also attempt to ground the work in specific historical events and circumstances. Some economic historians strive for an even-handed and unbiased approach to history, while others, including some of the earliest and most famous defenders of capitalism and socialism, have produced work from more ideological points of view.
Like cultural studies and other disciplines with clear roots in other fields, economic history occupies a position between economics and history. The discipline emerged in the years between the two wars, but its position in many universities remained ambiguous, as some schools saw economic historians as primarily historians, some treated them as economists, and some saw a unique intermediary role for them. In some academic systems, there is a further subdivision between the role of the economic historian, who studies the evolution of economic systems and practices over time, and that of a historical economist, who employs historical examples and methodologies in an effort to test economic theories. . .
The 1960s saw the rise of a new economic history, an academic movement that employed very rigorous statistical methods for important moments in history, in an effort to understand underlying economic causes and effects. This movement, sometimes known as cliometrics, a name literally meaning the measurement of Clio, the muse of history, arose at a time when historians in general were focusing more attention on economic issues and statistical methodology. Cliometrics tended to divert economic historians from history departments to economics departments, especially after the gradual decline of interest in statistical methodology among the wider community of historians.
The discipline of economic history has historically attracted a mix of technocrats and ideologues. Karl Marx, who considered himself, in essence, an economic historian, would have seen himself as an objective observer of history. After all, Marx was a contemporary of Leopold von Ranke, whose ideas about the central importance of objectivity in history shaped the methods of generations of historians. Milton Friedman, the ardent defender of 20th-century market capitalism, also worked as an economic historian and similarly had an ideological agenda. Friedman, most typically of modern economic historians, admitted to his intellectual participation in the scholarship he produced.
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