ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the conditions for emergence and evolution of ‘declinist’ history. It offers some speculations on the consequence of that emergence for prevalent approaches to recent British history, and their political implications. The emergence of historical declinism in academic discourse during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the emergence of declinism in contemporary politics. Development economics could be absorbed and deployed by other writers unaffected by the abstractions of the economics of growth. The growing links between economic history and economic growth may be observed in the articles published in the Economic History Review. Economic history has always been a discipline squeezed, usually somewhat uneasily, between history and economics. Declinism also tends to lead to a kind of ‘inverted whiggism’, where every generation finds only renewed failure.
