English Historical School

The English Historical School was a group of nineteenth-century British economists, including Richard Jones, Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie, Walter Bagehot, Thorold Rogers, Arnold Toynbee and William Cunningham, who rejected the abstract, deductive method of classical economics associated with David Ricardo in favor of inductive, historically grounded research into how economies actually developed. Rather than deriving universal laws of economic behavior from a small set of assumptions, the school's members compiled detailed statistical and historical studies of prices, wages, industry and institutions, arguing that economic laws are contingent on time, place and social custom. The school flourished roughly from the 1840s through the 1890s, overlapping in outlook, though not in national origin, with the contemporary German Historical School. Its influence receded as the marginalist revolution and the rise of neoclassical economics reasserted a more abstract, deductive style of theorizing in Britain by the turn of the twentieth century, but its historical and statistical methods fed into the later development of economic history as its own discipline. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/