Centre for History and Economics

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Click to visit Visualizing Historical Networks site.

Detail from 'Asia,' in R. Brookes, The General Gazetteer; or, Compendious Geographical Dictionary, 8th ed. (Dublin, 1808). Courtesy of the University of Texas Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection, available at http://www. lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/asia_1808.jpg

Joseph Vernet, Première vue de Toulon, vue du pont-neuf prise à l'angle du parc d'artillerie (Oeuvre – RMN 179024. Réunion des Musées Nationaux)

Shinanogawa Electric Power Station is TEPCO's hydroelectric power station. It receives water from Nishiotaki dam's intake on Shinanogawa river.

announcements

NEXT HISTORY AND ECONOMICS SEMINAR
Tuesday 2 March 2021
Jenny Andersson (Sciences Po Paris / Uppsala)
Ghost in a Shell. Scenarios and the world-making of Royal Dutch Shell

Further information and to register »

NEXT JOINT CENTRE ONLINE SEMINAR
Wednesday 17 March 2021
Tim Harper (Cambridge)
Nights at the Circus

Further information and to register »

NEXT LAW & SOCIETY IN HISTORY SEMINAR
Tuesday 23 March 2021
Writing International Legal History From and Through the Margins

Further information and to register »

The Centre is delighted to congratulate Fei-Hsien Wang, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and Mellon Research Fellow at the Centre in 2012-2014, on the award of the 2020 Peter Gonville Stein Prize of the American Society for Legal History, for the best book in non-US legal history written in English.

Paul Warde, Research Director at the Centre and author of The Invention of Sustainability, has written a new sequence of essays for Visualizing Climate and Loss. Through an intimate history of the island of Tiree in Scotland, it tells a larger story of transformations in people's relationships with the sea, agriculture, industry, and each other and the scattering of a community across the world.

Read 'Tiree' »

David K. Richards (1939-2015) was a friend and adviser to the Joint Centre for History and Economics, at Cambridge and at Harvard, over many years. He was a participant in Centre events, a wonderful observer of economic history, and, with Carol Richards, an immensely generous supporter of the Centre's work. One of the many interviews with him, in Barron's, began, "Of all the people we interview, David Richards strikes the deepest chord with readers. His interviews seem to be the ones that get tacked to walls or saved in a desk drawer, treasures of insight and wisdom." We miss him greatly.

WELCOME

The Joint Centre for History and Economics is based at Magdalene College and King's College, University of Cambridge, and at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. It was established in 1991 to promote research and education in fields of importance for historians and economists, including the history of economic and social thought, economic history and the application of economic concepts to historical problems. The objective of the Centre is to encourage fundamental research in history, economics, and related disciplines. It also encourages the participation of historians and economists in addressing issues of public importance.

The Centre is supported by a generous gift from the David K. and Carol Richards Fund. In cooperation with its counterpart Centre at Harvard, the Cambridge Centre undertakes research projects and organizes workshops, seminars and exchanges of faculty and graduate students. It provides the base for the History Project, and for current research projects on Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas; Energy History and Gender Bias in India.