A prosopography of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought

Abstract

Since its formal establishment in 1996, the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) has organised 23 annual conferences. Participation data gathered from various sources reveals 1777 unique participants. In order to study their regular engagement with ESHET, we focus only on a group of 476 scholars who attended at least three conferences. We collect available biographic data on this smaller group of regular attendees and analyse their educational background, career trajectories, geographical and gender representation. With this prosopography we depict the evolving structure of the history of economic thought community in Europe and beyond.

Keywords:

• Prosopography
• history of economic thought
• ESHET

JEL CODES:

• B20
• B30
• A14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This research would not have been possible without the help of various colleagues. For information on the ESHET conferences or for feedback on a previous version of this paper, we are grateful to Alain Alcouffe, François Allisson, Richard Arena, N. Emrah Aydinonat, Roger E. Backhouse, Spencer Banzhaf, José Luis Cardoso, Volker Caspari, Muriel Dalpont, John B. Davis, Daniel Diatkine, Pedro Duarte, Guido Erreygers, Gilbert Faccarello, Julie Ferrand, Tiziana Foresti, Nicola Giocoli, Harald Hagemann, Shin Kubo, Harro Maas, Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, Tiago Mata, Antoine Missemer, Anna Mogilevskaja, Manuela Mosca, Elke A. Muchlinski, Annalisa Rosselli, Roberto Scazzieri, Bertram Schefold, Francesco Sergi, Philippe Steiner, Pedro Teixeira, Estrella Trincado Aznar, Lefteris Tsoulfidis, Richard Van Den Berg, John Vint, and Carlo Zappia. We are also indebted to the dozens of colleagues who have responded to our email request for biographical information. We thank Joshua Denefleh and Lara Torka for useful research assistance. We are also thankful for the constructive criticisms received from the participants to the REHPERE seminar in Paris where the paper was presented in October 2020. Finally, we want to express our gratitude to the two referees and the editors of the journal who have helped us in improving the paper. We are obviously responsible for all remaining errors.

2 The 2020 conference scheduled to take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, was postponed until the autumn of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

3 After the creation of ESHET, an Iberian Association for the History of Economic Thought (AIHPE) was created in the late 1990s and the Associazione Italiana per la Storia dell'Economia Politica (STOREP) was established in 2003. More recently, the Latin American Society for the History of Economic Thought (ALAHPE) was founded in 2015.

4 The four scholars were based in Portugal, France, Netherlands, and Canada respectively. See History of Economic Thought Newsletter (edited by John Vint), Issue 52, Spring 1994, p. 29, available at https://thets.org.uk/archive/.

5 The steering committee was initially composed of Richard Arena, Ricardo Faucci, Albert Jolink, Heinz Kurz, and Stephen Rankin. Jolink later dropped out of the group. We are grateful to the two referees for their recollection of events which complemented the scarce documentary evidence on the events leading up to the creation of ESHET.

6 “Minutes of the Founding Meeting of ESHET (9.12.95 and 10.12.95, Nice)”, https://www.eshet.net/minutes-of-the-founding-meeting/. Carlo Zappia to HES list on July 1995, https://listserv.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9507&L=shoe&T=0&P=5044. Archive of ECHE website from 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20081203112712/http://www.eche.eu.com/

7 A council was elected by the attending founding members. Chaired by Bertram Schefold, it was composed of Pascal Bridel, Jean Cartelier, Jan van Daal, Pierre Dockès, Walter Eltis, André Lapidus, Cristina Marcuzzo, Stephen Rankin, Christian Schmidt, Ian Steedman, Erich Streissler, Gianni Vaggi, Donald Winch, and Stefano Zamagni.

8 “European Conferences on the History of Economics” (ECHE) continued to be organised by Cardoso, Fontaine, Jolink and Leonard (in collaboration with local organisers) in parallel to ESHET conferences until 2007. From 1997 onwards, the conferences were smaller and focused on particular topics. In 2007, together with Roger Backhouse and Tiago Mata, Philippe Fontaine organised the first of a new series of even smaller conferences focused on the History of Recent Economics. See http://hisreco.org

9 In the following cities, in chronological order: Marseille (FR), Bologna (IT), Valencia (ES), Graz (AT), Darmstadt (GE), Rethymno (EL), Paris (FR), Treviso and Venice (IT), Stirling (UK), Porto (PT), Strasbourg (FR), Prague (CZ), Thessaloniki (EL), Amsterdam (NL), Istanbul (TR), Saint Petersburg (RU), Kingston (UK), Lausanne (CH), Rome (IT), Paris (FR), Antwerp (BE), Madrid (ES), Lille (FR).

10 We would like to thank Harald Hagemann for his help with identifying the attendees with first names containing only initials.

11 Based on Eurostat Series “Graduates by education level, programme orientation, sex and field of education”, educ_uoe_grad02. Many European countries do not report the number of women among PhD graduates by programme orientation (economics). https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=educ_uoe_grad02

12 There are five instances of dual degrees (cotutelles) and each is counted with equal weight given to each institution involved.

13 We excluded from this analysis visiting studentships, exchange abroad stays, and postdoctoral contracts.

14 Note that in Table 6, the country of PhD degree does not equate with a country of nationality.

15 The ‘half’ person is accounted by someone with a position in two different countries.

16 Eligible candidates (PhD students or young scholars who had been awarded a PhD no more than two years before the date of the conference) had to submit a full paper to be considered.

17 We did not identify any non-binary gender individual in the group.

18 ESHET Newsletter, N°1, Winter 1996. https://web.archive.org/web/20010529130712/http://www.ecn.bris.ac.uk/het1/eshet/winter96.htm.

19 For instance, to successfully triangulate various personal perspectives and archival records a witness seminar could be organised (Svorenčík and Maas 2016).