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This book is an experiment in comparative economic history. That is, it attempts to apply a model of structural change and fiscal crisis to two critical periods of the past: Renaissance Florence and Victorian Britain, as well as to recent events in the United States. These qre periods of great economic changes and – not coincidentally – fiscal crisis and tax reform. In other words, these are times and places where the book thinks the outlines of the model hold. The book's ultimate goal is to apply the insights provided by past episodes to an analysis of problems today. This is not a history book but one which uses history to explore a profound contemporary problem: the problem of structural change and fiscal crisis. The goal is not to enlighten the understanding of the past but to use the past to improve the understanding of the present.

This chapter is a manifesto for the reconstruction of economic history and calls for a new pact between history and the social sciences in order to counter the way economists have abused the past. The chapter cites the need for European economic historians to organize themselves with greater awareness and regain the courage to construct the type of historical models of past generations. It claims that economic history is in the midst of an intellectual crisis faced, as evidenced by the growing marginalization of the discipline in the universities. It further argues that economic history has to lift itself out of the difficult situation it is now in by becoming involved with the genuinely “social” sciences and with all those scholars who are interested in an innovative interaction with historians without imposing any particular point of view.

The 1960s was a period of ferment, intellectual excitement, optimism and expansion in all the social sciences, including sociology. It is, therefore, an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the relationship between history and sociology in Britain. The ferment affected different branches of history in different ways: political and diplomatic history hardly at all; social and economic history much more. The impact of the social sciences on economic history came primarily from neo-classical economic theory allied to econometrics. Historians looked to the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s for concepts, theories, and methods which would assist them to reinvigorate the writing of history. There can be little doubt that economic history was much more influenced between 1960 and 1990 by economics than was social history by sociology. However, history since the 1960s has drawn more on the insights and methods of the social sciences than the social sciences in Britain, including sociology, have drawn on history; this is to the detriment of scholarship in the social sciences.

Economic history has always been quite a peculiar department both in the domain of history and that of economics; dealing with change, institutions, collective rationality, and conflicting strategies of economic agents, privileging descriptive and non‐formal analytical tools, economic history remained for long outside the scope of formal neoclassical economics.

This chapter describes and discusses the story of the incorporation of economic history into the mainstream of economic theory through the cliometric revolution, a powerful intellectual movement emerging by the late fifties, which encapsulated this reconstruction of economic history from the point of view of marginalist price theory and the postulates of individual rationality; Meyer and Conrad were the major drivers of this radical vision, and challenged the ‘old historians’ school’, today best represented by the response of David Landes.

Yet the coherence of the cliometric movement was soon jeopardized by internal contradictions: Paul David issued the most powerful challenge to the seminal building block of the new approach, Fogel's ‘Time on the Cross’, a revision of the traditional approach to the economics of slavery in the pre‐Civil War USA.

Douglass North is another example of a dissident from cliometrics, and Alfred Chandler provided alternative arguments for a reasoned history approach to societal change.

The cliometric analysis of the British Industrial Revolution, using counterfactuals, namely by Crafts and Hawke, is discussed and contradicted in the chapter.

Donald Coleman was an outstanding economic historian, specialising in industrial history. ‘Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’ (1956) was an early influential article by him. Coleman held professorships at LSE and then Cambridge, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1972. He published many articles and books, among them a highly respected history of Courtaulds and was editor of the Economic History Review and the Records of Social and Economic History series published by the British Academy. Obituary by Peter Mathias FBA and F.M.L. Thompson FBA.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the roots of economic history. It then turns to the identity crisis faced by economic history today, brought about by the development of a movement founded in the United States at the end of the 1950s known as “new economic history” or “cliometrics.” History is normally expected to improve our understanding of the past. It is probably agreed that what distinguishes good historical research is its capacity to throw light on the workings of societies that differ to varying degrees from our own. However, the aim of cliometrics is not to increase our knowledge of the past. It is to create narratives of the past compatible with neoliberal economics, and often it is a highly ideological exercise to endorse specific worldviews, theories, and policy recommendations.

This chapter discusses height as a reliable indicator of health status and standard of living. It also suggests that mapping from height to other measures of well-being has attracted the attention of economic historians. The history of heights may prove to be a useful means by which economic historians can better explain the past. The first area is social history, and in particular family history, in the developed world. The second is the economic history of those countries or areas with limited amounts of other data.

Cliometrics has evolved into a literary genre having little to do with numbers in the sense of econometric testing, though a lot to do with the deductive stance of the new institutional economics and of rational choice theory. At times these two approaches, which are not completely compatible, coexist even in the same author's work, giving rise to a sort of analytic schizophrenia. This chapter analyzes the recent developments in economic history. From the standpoint of methodology, it shows the confusion between history and path dependence or presence of “multiple equilibria” in a predetermined deductive schema. It argues that underlying these trends is an ideological slant, whether conscious or unconscious, aimed at exalting values such as individualism and materialism, which are typical of certain segments of contemporary Western society, and at projecting them unduly onto the past.

This chapter covers macroeconomic issues, including economic cycles, money, price levels, the nature of growth, and the historical roots of underdevelopment. It shows how the micro level is logically linked to the macro level. It also argues that the crisis of the French-style economic history in the past twenty years is due more to French historians transferring their interest to cultural history. However, abandoning quantitative history in favor of the histoire des mentalités does not imply there is no room for economic history alongside the new political history and other aspects such as the history of the body and the history of death that were once considered eccentric.

Edward Miller's deep understanding of the history of Europe, together with meticulous scholarship and an equable temperament, made him an ideal editor of wide-ranging works with many different contributors to keep on the rails. His interests as a scholar centred, however, on the social and economic history of medieval England. As discussion of these themes gathered momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, and social history acquired the quantitative dimension that economic history already possessed, they tended increasingly to receive separate treatment. Miller always regarded them as inseparable and believed that neither could be understood apart from a legal and constitutional context.

The major misunderstanding about cliometrics comes from the subsequent spread of Douglass North's new institutional approach. North claims to have challenged traditional economic theory, which he found inadequate. This chapter shows how this approach, besides being patently unhistorical, rests on flimsy foundations. In order to do so, it draws on a variety of evidence from the social and historical sciences. It also compares North's synthesis with the example of social science history offered by Moses Finley, the eminent ancient economic historian. Finley made a powerful argument against the application of modern economic theory to the past. Furthermore, he developed an alternative interpretation for the origin of institutions, rigorously demonstrating the logical precedence of society over the economy. The chapter begins by considering the criticism that Karl Polanyi made against neoclassical economics in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, both North's and Finley's works can be read as a response to Polanyi.

This chapter is the first of two that intends to show that it is possible to practice a different type of economic history from cliometrics, without lapsing into narrative history. It involves approaches that were molded in continental Europe but were not exclusive to Europe, and had the Annales school as their catalyst but were not coincident with it. The chapter discusses the model that Polish historian Witold Kula introduced in his An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (1962). In fewer than two hundred pages, it demolishes the claims of neoclassical microeconomics to universality and shows how its theorems are not applicable to preindustrial eastern Europe. Starting from an investigation of this context, it creates appropriate alternative theoretical tools for explaining it. But the usefulness of this type of history also extends to the present, suggesting that the workings of each particular economic system needs to be understood on its own.

This introductory chapter discusses the inspiration for this book, namely Adam Smith, a founder of economics and economic history. The book covers the period when Britain was an ‘open economy’ under the influence of the doctrines of free trade which Smith advocated in preference to barriers to the free movement of labour, capital, and goods. These tariff and other barriers, most of which had been erected under the influence of mercantilist economic ideas, were largely removed between 1830 and 1860, to be reinstated for the most part only after 1914.

This chapter summarizes the major findings of the book's chapters and their revisionist implications. Rather than seeing the corporation as the dominant economic form simply because it was more efficient, rational, and professional than competing forms — a view argued by neoclassical economists, Alfred Chandler, and other scholars — this book's authors collectively challenge this master narrative in three key ways. First, they offer an alternative periodization that highlights distinctive corporate forms and purposes in the different eras of the 19th and 20th centuries rather than a Whiggish narrative of the rise and triumph of an ideal type. Second, they argue that the boundaries between corporations and their social, political, legal, and ideological contexts were much more permeable than much traditional scholarship suggestions. Third, they emphasize the contested, rhetorical, and exclusionary nature of corporations as they have served as sites of identity construction.

Studies of the social and economic issues of the early societies emerged from the encounter of archaeology with other disciplines which are concerned with the sociological aspects of traditional societies. The study of Scythia or Scythology offers an extensive material that makes it a primary model of socio-economic models. This chapter aims to determine the specific features of the socio-economic development and structure of Scythia. It examines the changes in Scythia and Scythian economic history. It reviews the concepts of unity or lack of unity in Scythia to provide a better understanding on the key problems of the social, political, and economic history of Scythia. It also discusses the issues surrounding the statehood of steppe Scythians. The emphasis of the chapter is on the economic framework and the features of the development of the nomadic society in the Early Iron Age as represented in the archaeology of the Scythian culture.