Editors' Introduction: Economic History ‘As If People Mattered’

Summary

This book seeks to celebrate and to continue the career, work and legacy of Francesca Carnevali (1964–2013) by presenting new perspectives on debates in economic, social and business history and, indeed, history more generally. Driven by curiosity and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Francesca produced work that was multifarious in its themes, methods and styles; but all of it was underpinned by a desire to reveal the complex historical interactions between economy and society, always placing people at the centre of that nexus. Whether individually or collectively, we cannot hope to emulate Francesca's unique elan but we do hope that we can pick up and carry forward what mattered most to her in her work as an historian. That hope is what has motivated this project. Thus we have identified the debates and questions with which Francesca was most preoccupied, as well as the various methodological avenues she used to explore them, and have asked a distinguished groups of scholars to consider where they might be taken next. This is very apt as Francesca was most prescient – or agenda setting – in her work: this introduction outlines that agenda and the various chapters through which we attempt to extend it.

In the early 1990s, when Francesca and several of the contributors to this volume were working on their doctoral theses, economic history was undergoing a period of contraction as an academic discipline, both in the UK and internationally. Simultaneously, it was experiencing a narrowing focus towards the ‘new economic history’, an approach that reduced complex historical phenomena to ones explicable by simple neoclassical economic models and studied via quantitative, cliometric methods. Francesca's legacy has been to help recast economic history as a discipline where people matter – that is: they make a difference. If everything – economy, society – is connected then it was people who built those connections and rendered complex the historical interactions between economy and society. This role for people as agents who really matter was revealed in Francesca's work in many different ways: thus, she consistently showed people as being at the heart of the processes shaping political economies, institutions and the creation and meaning of ‘value’.