Introduction

In 2009, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) launched the initiative to publish a special annual issue of EJHET with a selection of papers presented at the ESHET conference of the year before. In the thirteenth year of this collaboration, the result is one more time a special issue that testifies to the shared commitment of the society and the journal in disseminating a panel of original research in the History of Economic Thought. The 24th annual ESHET conference took place at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE) at Sofia, Bulgaria, from 8 to 10 October 2021. It had originally been scheduled to happen there from 28 to 30 May 2020. At that time, however, the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, and the conference had to be postponed. Since a large number of papers had been submitted and selected for presentation, it was decided to produce a "virtual" conference issue nevertheless. A selection of papers was published after the usual procedures of evaluation in the December 2021 issue of EJHET (see volume 28, issue 6 of this journal). During the editorial process that issue carried the project name "virtual Sofia", or "Sofia I". The present issue (of December 2022) has accordingly been dubbed "real Sofia" or "Sofia II". It contains a number of papers that were presented when the ESHET conference finally materialised at the UNWE in 2021. The general conference theme was "Development and Underdevelopment in the History of Economic Thought", but the sessions covered a much wider range of topics. Many of them were organised in a hybrid set-up – partly on the ground, partly online – since the ongoing pandemic hindered many participants from travelling to Sofia. The organisers faced considerable logistic challenges in these arrangements, but they met them well. Most of the participants felt that such mixed interaction was an important step in the return to normality.