Economic History
topic
Economic history — the study of how economies have been organized and have changed across time and across different societies — provides the most extensive available evidence that the specific economic arrangements of the present (market capitalism, industrial production, financial systems, property rights regimes, labor organization) are neither natural nor inevitable but are historically specific arrangements that have developed through specific historical processes.
Role
Economic history is the most important corrective to the naturalization of current economic arrangements — with the historical record demonstrating that virtually every feature of contemporary economies that is presented as natural or inevitable has been organized fundamentally differently in other historical periods. The creator whose economic imagination extends to the full historical range of economic organization has access to a much richer space of alternative institutional possibilities than the creator who treats current arrangements as the natural expression of human economic nature.