economic history - Description
Practitioners and advocates of the first approach, which was for a long time dominant in the United Kingdom, generally regarded economic history as being either an independent discipline or a subfield of history. Practitioners of the second approach, which is more influential in the United States and rapidly extending worldwide, usually regard economic history as a subfield of economics. The term cliometrics (a reference to Clio, the Muse of history) is used to describe the application of econometric and statistical techniques to the study of economic history. In France, economic theory and demographics was early integrated into mainstream historiography due to the large impact of the Annales School of history from the 1920s and onwards.

Economic history has been a contentious issue in the United Kingdom for many years. The London School of Economics and Oxbridge had numerous duels over the separation of Economics and Economic theory. Oxbridge believed that pure economics involved a component of economic history and that the two were irreversibly entangled. The relative newcomer, the London School of Economics (LSE), fought for a different case: they believed that Economic history warranted its own course, program, study and research apart from pure or standard economics. Eventually, over the long run, the LSE seems to have had it right: many schools in the UK as well as the US have now developed programs in economics history which have their roots in the LSE model of separating economics and economic history. (hmmm, in fact many departments for economic history were disbanded, and even the LSE is moving towards a more 'economistic' structure). While the two academic subject areas are significantly unique, of course, economics and history - together - are the back bone of the entire discipline. Often, economic historians such as Nicholas Crafts (of LSE fame; moved to Warick 2005) Bob Fogel and Douglass North (The last two are Nobel laureates in economics) are called upon to advise for some of the world foremost economic institutions: WEF, WTO, OECD and others.

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