History and the Economic Past: An Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History in Britain

Is economic history a branch of economics or a part of history? The fusion of history and political economy attempted by the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment was destroyed when nineteenth-century English writers confined history to the political and constitutional past and attempted to make political economy an abstract science. This study of the rise and decline of economic history in Britain since the 18th century examines the emergence of economic history as an academic subject in opposition to both orthodox history and orthodox political economy. Discussing the 20th-century split between the "reformists" and the "neutralists," Coleman traces the remarkable boom in the subject after World War II and its decline in popularity in the last decade.