The research interests of the Joint Center for History and Economics are concerned with histories of economic life in a capacious sense. Over the next few years, we will feature different research projects, some focused on particular regions and periods, some on sources for histories of economic life, and some on approaches to economic history, the history of economic thought, and the history of economic life.

As part of this new program, we are very pleased to introduce Invisible Histories coordinated by Franziska Exeler and Diana Kim.

 

Sunil Amrith
Emma Rothschild

 

The early 21st century has been a time of continuous innovation across the frontiers of history and economics. One reason is a continuing, slow economic crisis which is widely considered to be of historic importance. A second has to do with changes within the discipline of history, and in particular new involvement with large data and new technologies of visualization and representation. A third has to do with changes within economics, including the rise of behavioral and experimental economics, a renewed interest in the economics of cities and in inequality, and the rise of a highly empirical micro-economics of development, centered on the economic lives of the poor.  A fourth explanation for the transformation has to do with changing understanding of “the economy.”

Economic history, the history of economic thought, and the (legal, cultural or political) history of economic life are all identified by their relationship to the economy, or the economic. But the economy has been defined, since the early twentieth century, as a national system; a national macro-economy. It is defined in relation to what it is not; the economy is that which is not the state. It is a system of markets. It is the territory, in turn, of free, rational, and self-interested action. So the historical study of the economy has in this sense been the study of a subject – a territory – which is itself in the process of continuing change. Economic flows cross national frontiers. The state is everywhere a major component of economic life. Markets are shaped everywhere by the political process and by the new politics of money and influence. Self-interest is an interest, in part, in avoiding the cost of participating in markets. Individuals and ideas cross the frontiers of states, as they have since well before modern times, and they also cross frontiers between states and markets; even as states seek, usually without success, to close borders by land or sea or in the minds of individuals.