Ninety years of publications in Economic History: evidence from the top five field journals (1927-2017)

The growing appeal of the long run perspective among economists and the fiftieth anniversary of the of the publication of the Conrad and Meyer article (1958), which signed the Cliometric Revolution, have attracted a lot of interest on the origin and the development of Economic history. This paper explores the evolution of the field with a new articulated database of all the 6,516 articles published in five journals (Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, European Review of Economic History and Cliometrica) from their establishment to 2017. We show that these journals are the most important in the field, with a wide influence also outside it. Our main results are that the Cliometric Revolution took quite a long time to fully display its effects, which became evident only in the 1990s, when personal computer and software packages became available. Finally, as for the last two decades, we find that the process of integration of economic history into economics is, so far, slower than previously suggested and limited to US. On the other hand, the most striking and neglected change is the overall success of Continental European scholars within the field. Are these changes the harbinger of a new divergence between the two shores of the Atlantic with the rise of a new paradigm based on the “Historical economics” approach? It is too early to tell.