Introduction: economic history and cliometrics Anglo-American economic history to World War II 5I Before the New Economic History 9II New Economic History in North America 13III Historical economics in Britain 21IV Controversy: or one thing leads to another 26V Cliometrics over 50 years: retrospect and prospect 36VI

A half-century ago a small group of scholars adopted a revolutionary approach to investigating the economic past. This approach originated in North America, but soon it traveled to Great Britain and Ireland, the European mainland, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The revolution had roots dating to the 1920s and in the years following the Second World War was an element of a much wider intellectual transformation that affected history, economics and the other social sciences. In the United States, at least, it was a self-conscious and loosely organized social movement fired with missionary zeal. What came to be called “The New Economic History” or “Cliometrics” was impelled by the promise of significant achievement, by the novelties of the recent (mathematical) formalization of economic theory, by the rapid spread of econometric methods, and by the introduction of computers into academia. In the early years, cliometricians developed a research program with mutual support and encouragement, conducted an unusually large proportion of collaborative work, and were much criticized from without and within. The movement was marked also by methodological disputes, considerable dissent, and some acrimony.