Cliometrics as Economics Imperialism: Across the Watershed

Auteur

Ben Fine is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Visiting Professor at Wits School of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. His most recent books include Material Cultures of Financialisation, co-edited with Kate Bayliss and Mary Robertson; Race, Class and the Post-Apartheid Democratic State, co-edited with John Reynolds and Robert van Niekerk; and A Guide to the Systems of Provision Approach: Who Gets What, How and Why, with Kate Bayliss. His Marx's 'Capital' is now in its sixth edition (with co-author Alfredo Saad Filho). He was founding Chair of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (iippe.org) until June 2023.

Texte du rabat

In Cliometrics as Economics Imperialism, Ben Fine traces the cliometric revolution, from before its emergence through three phases of the new, the newer and the newest economic history.

These phases are shown to correspond to those of "economics imperialism", the colonisation of topics and fields by mainstream economics, moving successively through disciplines as if they were perfectly working markets.

The text draws upon case studies, for example of the putative eighteenth-century consumer revolution, Douglass North, path dependence, and the British coal industry, and through exposing the reduction of economic theory and economic history deployed within them and giving rise to a corresponding reduction in the presence of the social, the historical and political economy.