The Beginning of Economic History

Abstract

Economists emphasize generalizations, while historians tend to prefer to deal with specific events. In between, there is economic history. Ylva Hasselberg’s book Industrisamhällets förkunnare. Eli Heckscher, Arthur Montgomery, Bertil Boëthius och svensk ekonomisk historia 1920–1950 (The Chroniclers of Industrial Society. Eli Heckscher, Arthur Montgomery, Bertil Boëthius and Swedish Economic History 1920–1950) (Hedemora/Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag, 2007) is an account of Eli Heckscher’s project of establishing the latter — a field which did not yet have any definition, or doxa, to use her own term — as a separate academic discipline. She highlights the tension both between economics and economic history and between general and economic history. The book is a pioneering work, the first of two volumes. The ‘second generation’ of Swedish economic historians, Artur Attman, KarlGustaf Hildebrand, Ernst Söderlund, Oscar Bjurling and Torsten Gårdlund, will all be dealt with in Part II. The present volume concentrates on the period 1920–1950, and only on the Heckscher project, but that is more than enough. The book is very rich as is.