Recent Danish research in economic history — a survey

Abstract

Abstract Academic disciplines which straddle the traditional subject-boundaries have frequently to contend on the one hand with the great difficulty that the scientific environment is frail — e.g. university posts are few, library facilities poor and there is normally no serious research journal in the national language. On the other hand the very differences of academic working methods on each side of the traditional subject-boundaries can frequently give rise to fruitful controversies over theoretical and methodological problems, which can produce scholarly innovations at a pace which does not always necessarily characterise the established disciplines with their more copious resources. In what follows we shall test whether these two circumstances can be said to apply to the Danish border-discipline between economics and history. After a review of the institutional framework (in section 2) and an interim balance sheet of the discipline in section 3 the profile presented by the research subjects in the l...