From growth studies to microhistory: Finnish economic and social history in the 1990s and early 2000s

Abstract

Economic and social history was already being practised in Finland before the Second World War, although it became established as an independent academic discipline only after the war. The terms social history or economic history were not used then; what we now recognise for instance as social history was then called “cultural history” or “history of the culture”. This approach was often characterised the collective approach to distinguish it from the individualistic approach of more historicist study. Nearly all economics research was historical before the 1950s, and practically all professors of economics were actually historians by training and had defended their dissertations in history, usually after having studied some economic problem of the past. But our discipline has also other roots. In Finnish universities the discipline called social policy, usually included in faculties of social science, has always had strong ties with social history.