Cinderella or princess: Past and present of economic history

Abstract

The article considers: (a) the main features of the development of economic history (EH) as an academic discipline in the second half of the 20th century; key challenges faced by the EH in the early 2020s. Based on the results of the survey of 147 international economic historians author reveals the most popular methods used by scholars from different local research communities. Special attention is paid to the study of respondents’ perception of the place of EH among other sciences. The analysis has shown that nowadays EH is gradually becoming an interdisciplinary research platform connecting scholars from a wide variety of subject At the same time, these scholars are united not as much by the unity of conceptual views, as by the desire to study EH not for the sake of history per se, but for the sake of finding the origins of modern social and economic challenges. The article also contains the results of a survey of 42 Russian economic historians about the theoretical and methodological assumptions they use and their vision of the problems of studying economic history in today’s Russia. The analysis has revealed that one of the main challenges for the development of the Russian community of economic historians is its high fragmentation, manifested in the lack of methodological consensus, as well as a rather pessimistic vision of future prospects of EH.