ABSTRACT
I will not begin by questioning the legitimacy of this conference. It would not only be ill mannered of me, but an outrage against common sense. We have all gone to considerable trouble to be here, and one must suppose there are sufficient reasons. As I understand it, the purpose of these meetings is the encouragement of quantitative economic history in the United Kingdom. We do not ask whether we think there is enough there now, or whether more would be a good thing. Is the object to ‘export’ our New Economic History to Britain? I am going to ask if such an exportation is possible. This is going to be a curious paper as I intend to discuss the ‘history’ of the new economic history and argue that both as an intellectual and a real phenomenon, this particular permutation of economic history is based upon institutional factors that probably cannot be duplicated elsewhere.
