Abstract

In the 1960s the "new economic historians" brought economic history and economics closely together by applying the neoclassical economics of choice and econometric methods to some issues in economic history. The evolution of the relationship between economic history and economics can traced by following lines of research arising from the topics these cliometricians explored and from other topics that arise from economists awareness of historical connections. The discipline imposed by careful neoclassical analysis and statistical methods remains key to economists' economic history but interests and methodology of both economic history and economics have increasingly realized that issues of strategic interaction and externalities, which lie outside the strict neoclassical paradigm, must also play key roles in historical economic analysis.