Inaugural Workshop of The History of Economics London Partnership (HELP)
A new network
HELP — the History of Economics London Partnership — is a new network that aims to provide a space for people working in the history of economics, the history of economic thought, and related fields to meet, discuss, disagree, and, yes, help each other. HELP will begin as a series of seminars in the 2026-2027 academic year but aims to grow into something more flexible: work-in-progress and writing seminars, as well as specific events, for scholars who might otherwise feel isolated within their own institutions. We also want it to be a network that people passing through London can easily get in touch with. It will be collectively run by colleagues from (mostly, though not exclusively) London-based institutions. Finally, one of our aims is to give people newer to HET — PhD students, for instance — a place to meet more established academics and help build a sense of community. To support this, and especially to help students based outside London attend, the History of Economic Thought Society (THETS) intends to make some funds available. For future announcements and discussions, you can subscribe to the HELP mailing list
A first workshop
The inaugural event of the network is jointly organised by researchers at King’s College London and LSE. The one-day event aims at providing a first moment with plenty of time to discuss on-going research and the future of the networks itself.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
The workshop will he held in the Anatomy Museum Theatre, at King’s College London: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/kingsvenues/rooms/strand-anatomy-museum
9.30-10.00am: Welcome and introduction
10.00-11.15am: Roundtable 1: Who is the history of economic thought for?
Chair: Cleo Chassonnery-Zaigouche (LSE)
A recurring tension in the public life of history of economics is the gap between what audiences ask for and what the field does. Media and institutions approach scholars around anniversaries — Smith's tercentenary, Keynes's centenary — expecting a "great man" narrative, while much current scholarship works to dismantle exactly that myth. Alternatively, comparison with the past and lessons for the present are high on journalists’ wish list when major events are echoing the past--while historians tend to emphasize the singularity of the past or the contrast with today’s context. Can this mismatch become an opening rather than an obstacle? Can we use it to introduce how ideas form and get simplified? Practically, how much can we push back before losing the platform, or the audience, altogether? And does the answer depend on who “the audience” is — journalists, policymakers, students, or the public — each with different expectations and different tolerance for complexity, time availability, as well as different agenda? This also raises a deeper question: is there one “correct” way to do HET that these audiences are simply misunderstanding, or do different audiences call for genuinely different modes of practicing the history of economic thought?
Speakers:Tiago Mata (UCL), Danielle Guizzo (Bristol), and Jeff Powell (Greenwich)
11.15-11.30am: Coffee/tea
11.30am-1.30pm: Session 1: Work in progress
Chair: Poornima Paidipaty (KCL)
André Torres (UCL-IIPP, Ph.D. student) , Doing History of Economic Thought of Development Economics from a Racial Perspective: Arthur Lewis in 1930s London
Colin Danby (University of Washington & SOAS), The Paternalist Political Economy of Richard Jennings
Natalia Vasilenok (LSE), Reading Orwell in Moscow
Guillaume Yon (RWTH Aachen & Oxford), Platforms and Compute: An Airline Story
Giovanni Razzu & Yanshu Wang (University of Reading) Light and Heavy: Guanzi Meets Schumpeter on the Boundaries of a Universal Science
1.30-2.30pm: Lunch
2.30-3.45pm: Roundtable 2: History of economics and economic history
Chair: Pamfili Antipa (LSE)
Marx and Keynes were famously influenced by their contemporary contexts when devising groundbreaking economic paradigms. Equally infamously, American policy makers implemented policies that aggravated and prolonged the Great Depression because they relied on outdated and unrealistic economic models. Do these interactions between the history of economics and economic history generalise to other, including contemporary, contexts? Can the synergies between the two fields help us to ask different questions or questions differently, bridging the growing disconnect between increasingly formalised economics and economic history and pressing social and political issues. Finally, in a world of information overload, can we combine the two fields to understand the genesis and inherent biases of datasets, providing new angles to understand the available information
Speakers: Maylis Avaro (Trinity College, Dublin), Roger Backhouse (Birmingham), Johanna Gautier-Morin (CEU Vienna, Sciences Po Paris), Mary Morgan (LSE),
3.45-4.15pm: coffee/tea
4.15-5.00pm: Discussion on the future of HELP
5.15-6.00pm: drinks, 8th Floor Terrace, Marshall Building, LSE
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