2024 Newsletter
I hope you have all had a productive start to 2025. As usual, I am writing to update you on the activities of the IEHA during the previous year, and on preparations for the World Economic History Congress in Lund, which will take place from 28 July-1 August.
As is customary, the Executive Committee visited the site of the next Congress during our meeting in June 2024. I would like to thank Mats Olsson, Igor Martins and the rest of the team at Lund for the warm welcome (including the famous Swedish fika!) and seamless coordination of the meeting. The Congress will be held in AF Borgen in the center of Lund and in surrounding buildings. I’ve included some pictures of EC members touring the meeting rooms - it is a beautiful venue, and we anticipate a very pleasant and productive week there!
Our other task at the June meeting was to select the sessions to be presented at the Congress. This, as always, was a more difficult job than the site tour - this year especially given the large number of high-quality sessions submitted. As usual, our selection process tried to prioritize both cutting-edge research and diversity of speakers and topics across a range of factors.
Overall, we accepted 183 total sessions for the Lund Congress. They span a wide range of regions, periods and approaches to economic history. What they have in common is many are global in scope. Most accepted sessions include speakers from at least 2 different regions, and 130 out of the 183 include a comparative aspect encompassing multiple regions.
This year we have also launched a new initiative, namely member association sessions. The program includes six such sessions which feature the history and contributions of our members. We look forward to seeing more of these in future!
The result of our deliberations was an exciting list of sessions covering the breadth of economic history research. Now the hard part will be choosing which sessions to attend!
New IEHA website
As I noted in the 2023 newsletter, one of my tasks this year was updating the IEHA website, which has been sorely out of date. I’m pleased to announce that you can now visit our new site at www.ieha-wehc.org. We would like to thank Ross Alexander at Viabold for his efforts in designing it.
We spent considerable time deliberating on a vision for the site and what it should communicate to our members and the wider economic history community. Our website committee (consisting of BlancaSanchez-Alonso, Johan Fourie and myself) agreed that it should convey both the deeper history and global scope of the IEHA’s activities. I’d like to thank Blanca, Johan, and the rest of the EC for their comments and feedback as the site was developed.
The new page shows the location of congresses and gives a timeline of the IEHA’s history. The latter was based primarily on Maxine Berg’s excellent piece on the history of the Association, published in 2015 (Maxine Berg, "East-West Dialogues: Economic Historians, the Cold War, and Detente", Journal of Modern History87 (2015): 36-71) Highly recommend for anyone who hasn’t read it!
We see the new website as a work in progress which will allow us ample scope to include additional mate-rials on the history of the IEHA and the World Congresses. We are currently working with the archivist responsible for managing the IEHA’s archives (currently held at Appalachian State University) on the digitization of material. We will start by building out links for each of the Congresses. If any of you have mate-rial or memories you would like to share, please get in touch!
Challenges and opportunities facing economic history in 2025
Reading about the history of the IEHA has been cathartic. We live in deeply uncertain times, which will inevitably affect the questions that we as economic historians ask not to mention our ability to conduct and disseminate our research.
What this history reflects is that we have been here before. The IEHA was founded as a means of building connections across political and ideological divides during the Cold War. It continues to serve this purpose today. Every three years we come together to exchange ideas and, hopefully, develop connections, collaborations and friendships which will last until the next Congress.
As we’ve seen in recent years, economic history research helps us not only to understand the past but also to contextualize the present. Many of the major debates we have today – on trade and development, immigration, the role of the public sector – have historical parallels. Our purpose is not just to speak to each other but also to a wider public.
With that in mind, I look forward to seeing you all in Lund!