Conclusion
In 160 years, what has the discipline of economic history achieved at Oxford? In several respects, it has gone full circle. It emerged in the twilight years of classical economics.
The rising neoclassical approach took several decades to get established, and eventually expelled economic history. But a 140 years after Toynbee, the ladder of esteem in the discipline leans again towards economics. A new empirical turn in economics is as inductive as history and takes the past as a quarry for its natural experiments. Economic history has declined from its peak as an undergraduate subject, and now thrives as a research discipline.Economic and social development over historical time is too important a subject to ever fall by the wayside and finds a home in a variety of academic settings, and altogether outside them. Is it merely a subject or is it also a method? At its best, it is a vantage point on the human condition. In Oxford, for 160 years, a succession of scholars and their students have striven to stand taller and see further. In the discipline of economic history, this collective effort has had few equals.