Commentary: Economic History and the Future of Pedagogy in Economics
Author: Daniela Tavasci (QMUL)
Brownlow, G. and Colvin, C. L. (2025), Economic History and the Future of Pedagogy in Economics
In Economic History and the Future of Pedagogy in Economics, Graham Brownlow and Christopher L. Colvin argue that economic history should play a much larger role in undergraduate economics teaching in the UK. Their central claim is that economic history helps address a persistent paradox in economics education: economics graduates often do well in the labour market, yet students and employers frequently perceive economics degrees as too abstract, too detached from real-world problems, and insufficiently useful for understanding contemporary challenges.
The authors present economic history as a way of reconnecting economics to the real world. It offers students a long-run perspective on how economies evolve, how institutions change, and how economic theories themselves are historically contingent. Economic history helps students think more critically about issues such as trade wars, migration, financial crises, climate change, growth, and political instability. Rather than treating theory as timeless and self-contained, it shows how economic ideas emerged in response to particular historical problems.
A major contribution of the article is its review of undergraduate economic history provision across UK universities. Brownlow and Colvin show that provision is highly uneven. Some universities still offer stand-alone modules in economic history, sometimes as compulsory parts of economics degrees, while many others offer none at all. This unevenness appears both in Russell Group universities and in other institutions. In some cases, even joint degrees in economics and history do not include stand-alone economic history modules. The authors identify several reasons for this variation: historical legacy, staffing decisions, internal university politics, and research incentives created by systems such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF). These institutional factors, rather than purely intellectual ones, have strongly shaped the decline or survival of economic history in the curriculum.
The article also places this issue in historical perspective. Economics and economic history were once much more closely connected, but they gradually diverged as economics became increasingly formal, deductive, and mathematical, especially in the English-speaking world. Economic history, by contrast, retained a stronger commitment to context, interpretation, and historical specificity. In the UK, economic history expanded significantly in the 1960s, often through separate departments, but many of these departments were later closed. In the United States, economic history survived more successfully within economics departments, especially after the cliometric revolution, which aligned it more closely with theory and quantitative methods. Even there, however, integration often came at the cost of narrowing the broader interpretive dimension of the field.
Brownlow and Colvin argue that the recent empirical turn in economics has created both an opportunity and a problem. On the one hand, economists increasingly use historical evidence, and some of the most influential recent research — including work recognised by Nobel Prizes — draws heavily on economic history. On the other hand, this empirical turn has often narrowed what counts as valid evidence. Econometrics and identification strategies dominate, while richer historical reasoning is sidelined. The authors distinguish between true economic history and what they call “economist’s history”: research that uses historical data mainly to answer econometric questions rather than to solve genuinely historical puzzles. They warn that the current emphasis on identification privileges narrowly causal and locally specific findings at the expense of breadth, context, and deeper understanding.
In response, they propose a broader conception of empirical economics with three branches: econometric, experimental, and historical. The historical branch is especially valuable because it trains students to work with messy, incomplete, and heterogeneous evidence. Historical reasoning requires judgment, triangulation, and narrative interpretation. It teaches students to weigh competing explanations, understand contingency, and think about long-run mechanisms. These are not weaknesses but strengths, especially in a world where many important economic problems do not lend themselves to neat models or clean identification strategies.
The pedagogical core of the article is the proposal for “Teaching Economics with Economic History” (TEWEH). This approach extends the earlier idea of Teaching with Historical Perspectives (THP) by embedding economic history more systematically into economics teaching. TEWEH treats economic history not simply as a separate field or optional extra, but as a teaching method that can enrich economics modules across the curriculum. It encourages students to place themselves in the position of past thinkers, policymakers, firms, or workers, and to understand how economic problems and responses evolved over time.
The authors outline three possible teaching models: stand-alone modules, embedded modules, and curriculum-wide integration. Stand-alone modules remain useful, especially in later years of study, but they depend on specialist staff. Embedded and curriculum-wide approaches may be more realistic for many institutions. Non-specialists, for example labour economists or macroeconomists, can still teach economic history effectively by linking it to their own expertise — through topics such as industrialisation, historical cartels, labour market discrimination, long-run growth, or macroeconomic crises.
The Great Depression is presented as an especially powerful teaching case. It allows students to compare different interpretations, from the gold standard to banking crises to fiscal and monetary policy, while engaging with competing narratives and counterfactuals. This case-based approach resembles methods used in business schools and is particularly suitable in the UK context, where many economists now work in business schools rather than in traditional economics departments.
The article concludes that embedding economic history into economics teaching is both feasible and necessary. It can improve critical thinking, judgment, communication, and pluralism in economics education. Economic history should not be treated as antiquarian or marginal, but as essential for helping students understand how economies actually work through time. The broader message is clear: economics education needs rebalancing — less abstract formalism on its own, and more historical and institutional awareness.