A very Happy New Year to you!
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that you didn’t receive a newsletter for Autumn Term. This was due to supply chain problems, technical issues beyond our control, and other excuses. But, it means that by combining Autumn and Winter term, you have a bumper edition to read over your morning coffee.
The big news of the year is that Professor Mary Morgan was awarded an OBE in the New Years Honours list in recognition of her services to the economics profession and to social science. You can read more here.
Autumn was also auspicious for Economic History. Most of you who have studied with us in the last two decades will have had a flashback – whether a feeling of warm recognition or a cold flush - when the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson. Their work has been incredibly influential, provoking much debate, and as important, much interest in the long economic past. While the press highlighted the case for institutions, the prize committee underlined the significance of their methodological contribution, the way in which they showed a causal relationship between institutions and economic outcomes. Every week, we see the effects of that in the research seminars we hear and research papers we read, and, naturally, in the techniques we teach.
This marked a three-year run for economic history in the Nobel Prize, with Claudia Goldin’s work on gender and labour markets, and Ben Bernanke’s studies of finance in the Great Depression receiving prizes in 2023 and 2022 respectively. You could say that after decades of angst about the place of economic history in both economics and history departments, it’s nice to be back…
The importance of financial history to our understanding of today’s complex financial world are one reason why the department has made a sustained investment in financial history in recent years. We have now launched a new Financial History Research Group, directed by Olivier Accominotti, which brings together researchers from the department and outside to understand money and finance through the lens of history. Part of its remit is to connect academics and practitioners in finance together, and we would be keen to see our alumni participate in Group’s events, and with many of you working in and around finance we hope that you will play a part in helping to shape and sustain the Group’s work.
The fundamental importance of space and nature in shaping economic history have become a major area of research in the Department over the last two decades, and motivated our undergraduate joint degree with Geography. We have now been able to bring in a new Assistant Professor to expand our expertise in this area, Tom Raster. Tom has an array of interesting projects that we look forward to introducing to you, including a brilliant examination of how trade links in the early modern Baltic were created, where he uses changes in sea ice (I know!) to work out the impact of new trade routes being formed.
Looking forward, we have two dates for your diary. The ever-brilliant Cormac O’Grada will join us on 20th February to discuss his new book The Hidden Victims: civilian casualties of the two world wars. Later in term, Michela Giorcelli of UCLA will be delivering the Annual Epstein Lecture on 20th March, discussing her work on how management and technological changes drove productivity changes after world war II. Registration is now open for both of these events if you would prefer to attend online, I hope you’ll be able to join us.
Finally, it is a real pleasure to announce that I have been elected President of the Economic History Society. This is a particular honour as 2026 marks the centenary of the Society and the annual conference will be held here at LSE – where it all began!
Patrick Wallis