Editors' Conclusion

Summary

Francesca Carnevali left an impressive academic legacy; a body of work able to inspire the preceding chapters and more. In the introduction to this volume we identified four concepts or themes that tie together our various contributions: a problematisation of the notion of the market; a ‘thickening’ out of understandings of trust; an emphasis on the economy as a system of ordering in which processes of legitimation play out; and, finally and most fundamentally, an insistence that we recognise human economic actors as people, with all their fascinating flaws. Taking these themes forward promises to be very rewarding – but also challenging. It may well require that we do economic history differently. Thus, we believe Francesca's legacy also constitutes the foundations for a rich future research agenda in terms of our approaches, one that might be summarised under three broad headings: ‘economic history as if people matter’; ‘bottom-up (rather than top-down) methodology’; and a more eclectic, expansive approach to modelling and explaining historical phenomena. While all three are closely and inextricably interlinked, it is convenient to discuss them one by one.

The first, ‘economic history as if people matter’, essentially involves a departure from the approach to economic history that was particularly dominant during the early years of Francesca's career – based on explaining historical phenomena using simple ‘black box’ economic models, usually based on maximisation of some clear objective, such as profits, subject to various constraints. Both the objective, and the constraints on it, were generally viewed in narrowly economic terms, while any other factors – reflecting sociological, political, cultural, psychological, or even biological phenomena, were generally rejected, downplayed, or simply ignored. People in all their wilful, messy, irrational, obdurate, obstinate and messy reality were not welcome.

Britain had a long-established and well-respected tradition of quantitative economic history and historical economics, including the Cambridge Group's pioneering reconstruction of Britain's population history and the work of Charles Feinstein, R. C. O. Matthews, Phyllis Deane, W. A. Cole and others on British economic growth and historical growth accounting. However, the cliometrics movement, as imported from America, represented a new and markedly narrower paradigm.