Teaching

Oxford never had a separate first degree in economic history. An 1870s paper in Literae Humaniores was the first examined course in political economy. The subject was taught sporadically, for example, by Toynbee at Balliol and by Rogers in the Hall of Worcester College.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Modern History School at Oxford was offering a module of half a dozen lectures in political economy. A single course in economic history (from 1898) extended to four or five a term after 1907. When PPE began in 1921, it included an optional paper in “British Social and Economic History Since 1770”. A hundred years later, this paper is still being taught, with the initial date moved up a century. Undergraduate teaching in the discipline is a rich seam: For the period 1920 to 1980, there were always around half a dozen course offerings in the Lecture List (mostly both in History and PPE) during the first two terms of the academic year (fewer in the third), covering British history from medieval to modern, with a single paper on European economic history being taught from 1941. Written recollections by inter-war PPE students claim that they did almost all of their work in tutorials and rarely went to any lectures—but they still felt able to pass judgement on the lecturers (Lee 1993). In Modern History, it was still possible to take papers in political economy up to the 1930s. In 1940, this fell to a single paper, “The Economic Policy of Peel”, which remains on the books today albeit in a different form.

Training for research was an apprenticeship, primarily the DPhil: an incom­ing candidate would be assigned a supervisor and then left largely on their own. Such was my own experience in the 1970s. A weekly seminar was intro­duced by Habakkuk in the 1950s complete with full minutes of each paper and its discussion (see Thompson 2004: 104), and was still running in the 1960s. Hartwell convened one for doctoral students at Nuffield in the late 1950s. Today's weekly staff-graduate seminar first appears in the Lecture List in 1970, and many other seminar series came and went, often several of them every week. Postgraduate and doctoral research is the beating heart of the discipline. Every year, a young and eager cohort arrived and measured itself anxiously against the challenge. It could be a lonely experience and connec­tions were not always easy to make. Half an hour of sherry after the seminar was the main opportunity. As a graduate student, I used to see a distinctive young face across the seminar table but only learned his name when he turned up as my host at a seminar in Melbourne several years later.

In the 1970s, the core of the discipline in Oxford stabilised. There were four permanent posts: The Chichele Chair at All Souls (in the Faculty of Modern History), Max Hartwell’s Readership in Recent Social and Economic History at Nuffield (Faculty of Social Studies), Joan Thirsk’s Readership at St Hilda’s (History) and Patrick O’Brien’s Lectureship at St Antony’s (Social Studies). Another was added in the 1980s, namely Richard Smith’s Lectureship in Population History, also at All Souls. Area Studies (mostly at St Antony’s) appointed economic historians of other continents and regions, who did not mix much with the disciplinary core (their achievements have already been mentioned).

In the 1980s, economic history went out of fashion in British universities and most independent departments closed. In this dismal setting, economic history at Oxford recovered in response to an external nudge. The Economic and Social Research Council laid down that students should undergo a year of training before going on to doctoral work. In 1991—1992, Feinstein (with Offer) devised a taught Master’s degree which for the first time imposed a structure on the discipline in Oxford. Graduate instruction fell outside the rigid conventions of Oxford teaching and it was possible to design a course from the ground up. Two core courses in methodology and quantitative methods were combined with an array of options arranged around the teach­ers’ own research interests, and a thesis. The course attracted a cosmopolitan entry of twenty to thirty students a year, about half of them from North America and Europe, one-fifth from Britain and the rest from elsewhere. Everyone acquired some statistical competence and every lecture on theory was linked to a class which applied it to an historical episode. Course progres­sion promoted bonding, this in part serving to change the local culture. A community of up to fifty graduate students interacted frequently at lectures, classes, seminars and informally with postdocs and postholders. A norm of

methodological pluralism accepted any line of inquiry as legitimate if aspira­tions were high. Undergraduate teaching continued, but the focus of the sub­ject had shifted to graduate work.

The practical purpose of this effort is to equip students and their older selves with the capacity to make informed judgements by means of argument and evidence. More than five hundred graduates have gone forth to respon­sible positions around the world in universities, public service, business, law, advocacy, even in medicine and art.

The experience is also a good in itself. The past is lost. It comes alive when some­body holds it in their mind, perhaps while reading a book, or while composing thoughts in conversation and writing. Meeting together week after week in a lec­ture room or seminar, people bond together. In the shared quest for understanding, and when the magic works, history can light up in their heads.

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