Research is one of the forces driving the intellectual life of the Department. Given the composition nd international delivery of our staff, research specialisms are extremely wide-ranging, chronologically and geographically. This breadth is reflected in the choice of subjects on offer in teaching on offer at all levels, from undergraduate to research students.
Externally funded research projects
Economic Outcomes Flowing from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and with support from LSE, a network of European economic historians has been formed to examine contrasts in the economic outcomes and potential for long term development that flowed from the Napoleonic wars for several major European economies (including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany) their overseas colonies. Among other outcomes, the network will create case studies for a major book which aims to exemplify the insights obtained from reciprocal comparisons and the value of research in economics and history based upon collaboration.
The Lead Investigator (Patrick O’Brien) and Network Facilitator (Loraine Long) are located at LSE.
Macroeconomics and Financial History (MACROHIST)
MACROHIST brings together some of the strongest European departments in history (Geneva, Oxford), economic history (Carlos III, LSE) and economics (Humboldt, Sciences Po, ULB). Its aim is to expose young macroeconomists to the most recent work in macroeconomic and financial history, and to expose young economic and financial historians to the most recent techniques in financial and macroeconomics. It is thus explicitly inter-disciplinary. The training will involve formal training in the methods of both economics and economic history. It will provide this by drawing not only on the training programmes of the partner institutions, which reflect their differing disciplinary backgrounds, but by providing a series of network-wide training events explicitly geared towards young researchers in macroeconomics and macroeconomic history. Insofar as it is practical to do so, we will encourage young researchers from other institutions to attend these training events, so as to maximise the impact of this network’s activities across Europe. A key consideration will be to ensure that young researchers from one institution spend time in other institutions, so as to benefit from the specialised training unavailable in their own university and in doing so benefit from exposure to the quite different research cultures of economics and history/economic history departments.
For more details click here or on the MACROHIST menu button.
Historical Citizenship - Guilds and Apprenticeship
Before the emergence of national citizenship in the wake of the French Revolution (1789), European countries had only local—more specifically urban—forms of formal citizenship rights. Citizenship in this period has been hailed by some as one of Europe’s advantages. Others are more critical, depicting citizenship as a form of exclusion against females, religious minorities and migrants, and a constraint on the free movement of citizens. Local citizenship was abolished in most European countries around 1800 in favour of national citizenship. As a result, during much of the 19th century European states experimented with various elements of national citizenship.
This project examines two stages of the history of citizenship:
the working of local citizenship arrangements before 1789
the formation of national citizenship in the 19th century. It will allow us to compare various citizenship regimes, and connect their characteristics to economic performance and over-all well-being.
The project is funded by the European Union and aims to provide a long-term perspective on the issues facing modern policy-makers in relation with citizenship in the multi-national environment of the EU. It forms part of a large project, bEUCitizen, exploring obstacles to EU Citizenship today.
Contact: email@example.com or click here for more details
Integration and Growth: Capital and Grain Markets in Central Europe, 14th to 18th centuries
With the aim of revealing the origins of economic growth in late medieval and early modern Europe, research has in recent years increasingly turned to the analysis of market integration. The underlying insight is that larger and better integrated markets allow specialisation, thereby promoting productivity. Our project addresses a gap in this research: Traditionally the focus has been on grain markets; we look at capital markets, too. In particular, we consider three broad questions: how capital markets integrated between 1350 and 1800, why, and with what consequences. We employ so far unused primary data, i.e. interest rates on annuities, and econometric methods, exploiting the idea that in a perfectly integrated market real interest rates converge to identity.