Page 35 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Information and Literature Survey in Social Sciences

Notes appears in his collection On History (1997), urging a reconnection of such studies to larger historical
processes.
While culturalist “advocacy” readings of the working class turned away from larger issues, the rise of
historical sociology—with its use of demography, cliometrics, and other statistical tools inspired by
the second and third waves of the Annales school—tended to efface culture and, with it, class conflict
entirely. The twin recoil from the interventions of the Communist Party Historian’s Group inspired
important and often scathing critiques by Tony Judt, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese,
and Geoff Eley and Keith Nield.

4.2.2 Economic History
Economic history emerged in the late nineteenth century as an academic field devoted to the study
of past economic phenomena and processes. Since then it has undergone significant changes in
terms of its thematic and theoretical concerns, analytical methodologies and language, and the
spatial and temporal scales in which it is framed. Distinctive national and regional approaches and
traditions can be identified that reflect the different and changing social systems and ideologies
across the world as well as the diverse forms of training and disciplinary affiliations of the
economic historians themselves.

The Emergence of 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.

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