11 - Comparative economic history and the modernization of China (1993)

Summary

An overview of economic history

Economic history, as an academic discipline, studies the historical process of economic activity that involves the evolution of the economic system, the development of productivity as well as the interaction between the two. It is a hybrid of economics and history, as its name suggests. From the viewpoint of the history of economics, a lot has been said and written about past economic phenomena and issues, and many ideas have been put forth on the relationship between economics and history from perspectives ranging from mercantilism to classical economics. These efforts, however, were not systematic enough to give rise to economic history as an academic discipline. It was not until the late 19th century that economic history emerged in Western Europe as an independent discipline, thanks to contributions from numerous prominent European scholars. These included representatives of the German history of economics such as Gustav von Schmoller, Albert Eberhard Fridrich Schaffle and Karl Wilhelm Bücher, as well as their contemporaries James Edwin Thorold Rogers, Henry de Beltgens Gibbins, Arnold Toynbee and William James Ashley of Great Britain, Emile Levasseur of France, and Charles Franklin Dunbar, Henry Walcott Farnam, Gerald C. Gross and Richard Theodore Ely of the United States. Economic history came a long way in Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century.