The rise and present position of the so-called ‘new’ economic history are discussed. Like other fashions in economic history, it arose out of the interests of contemporary economists in this case their preoccupation with econometric models and with social cost-benefit analysis. Its hallmark is a strict application of economic theory, and a search for numerical tests of historical statements. Where no reliable statistical series exist for such tests ‘new’ economic historians have gone to great lengths and have used much ingenuity and sophisticated mathematical techniques to reconstruct them by extrapolation, by using proxy series, and by ‘counterfactual’ reasoning. Much of the work is original and illuminating, but a survey of some actual examples, railroads and slavery in the USA, the leading country in the field, shows that it also suffers from certain defects, such as a cavalier treatment of data to fit them into theorems, and a tendency to believe that all historical periods were single-mindedly and rationally pursuing a profit-maximizing aim. While the ‘new’ economic history aroused strong emotions, for and against, when it first made its appearance in the early 1960s, it has now been absorbed as one of many strands making up the subject.
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