ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how data about population can unpick the shape of past societies; while the methods of economic history can add significantly to our historical knowledge. It focuses on the contribution by economic historians to the understanding of wealth and poverty over centuries. The chapter deals with the role of luxury and luxury goods in the modernizing process and the way that historians have dealt with pessimistic and optimistic approaches to industrialization; economic understandings of industrialization that argue whether the industrial revolution benefited the economic lives of contemporaries. It discusses the role that business historians play in understanding past societies, defining and explaining the relationship of business history to economic history. The chapter draws at the boundaries of these concerns, and to offer some examples of how this approach works in historical practice when seeking to understand, for instance, medieval plagues and epidemics.