The Economic History of Modern Europe

When World War II broke out, the economic history of Modern Europe was largely an underdeveloped and uncultivated field. One country only, Britain, had a well-established school of economic historians, which was already quite prolific. In Germany, there had been a promising start at the end of the 19th century, mostly with the historical school of economists, but it had largely petered out, even before the deadly influence of Nazism set in. In other countries, a number of scholars had done valuable and even brilliant work, but they were few and isolated, and political, diplomatic, religious history remained supreme. This was the case, for example, in France, which had one single chair of economic history in its eighteen universities, despite the passionate campaign which had been waged during the 1930's to promote work in economic and social history by the new journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, under the leadership of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Moreover, pre-war economic history was mostly institutional, with a side-line in the study of techniques and innovations. As Professor Herlihy points out in another article for works on the earlier centuries, scholars were “thinking primarily in terms of institutions and of total economic systems based upon them.”