Whose history of which economic thought?

This blog post draws upon a longer analysis of our experience teaching HET recently published in the International Review of Economics Education (Powell & Yurchenko, 2025).

Economics students have called for more attention to be paid to the History of Economic Thought (HET). Backing up the students’ calls is the conclusion of the recent Economics Subject Benchmark Statement from the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA): 

“The core and applied content, or standalone content, [should] include economic history and history of economic thought, as these provide the context within which Economics is studied. They are in a sense fundamental to the understanding of the basis of Economics, establishing, respectively, the historical and policy contexts of the applied economic and social issues studied in the degree and the process through which the lenses currently used to study a phenomenon were developed.” (2023, 12)

Despite this recent support for HET, there has been a decades-long decline in both interest among academic economists in HET and in university provision of HET as part of economics degree programmes. Similarly, evaluation of the teaching of HET, in the pages of journals of both HET itself and economics education, has been sparse.  

At the University of Greenwich, responding to the calls of the Rethinking Economics movement to integrate HET into economics teaching, a single term module of HET has been core to the second-year of undergraduate economics programmes since 2014. When the authors took over leadership of the module, it was organised in two parts: six sessions ordered chronologically according to the main schools of thought and four sessions on ‘applied’ HET topics. However, an issue which was immediately evident was the dominance of what we have since termed ‘WEM-HET’.  The sub-discipline has historically been dominated by White, European, Male (WEM) scholars, and their research on WEM economists since Adam Smith. While this has begun to change a little in recent years, but the seminal texts of the sub-discipline, both the original contributors and the HET analyses thereupon, remain decidedly WEM.  

With our first chance to revise the curriculum we focused our efforts on de-colonisation, making two significant changes.  First, we condensed the sessions on European HET so that we could add an initial session on International HET.  Of course, this risks ‘ghettoising’ non-European HET.  In recognition of this risk, we are trying, where possible, to introduce non-European perspectives both on traditional WEM-HET and on the applied topics. We use the international HET session to highlight the important non-European contributions which both pre-date and run contemporaneously with the major developments in European HET.  Second, we re-organised and expanded the applied section of the module.  We now have sessions on race and class, sex and gender, and the environment. This has involved a significant investment in learning on our part. 

Underpinning this re-organisation has been an ongoing attempt to de-colonise the learning resources of the module.  We are using an edited collection, Re-charting HET (Deane and Van Waeyenberge, 2020), which takes an entirely applied approach, reflects a pluralist analysis, and, wherein authorship is more demographically diverse (if still European dominated).  In addition to the core textbook, we have attempted to diversify the supplementary readings in terms of race, class, sex/gender, though there is still room for improvement on this front.  

A further reform which we introduced to the learning resources was to include a ‘classic text’: each week we ask the students to read a renowned piece of writing in economics (often an excerpt), a ‘synthetic’ piece assessing the subject (a chapter from Re-charting or other HET textbooks), and a ‘supplementary’ reading which introduces more depth to the topic, often a journal article or book chapter.  Where possible, we have attempted to include diversity in our choice of ‘classic’ text; for example, students are asked to read a selection from W.E.B Dubois’ The Gift of Black Folk (1924) in the week on the HET and race.  Of course, the inclusion of ‘classic’ texts in the section on European HET risks reinforcing WEM dominance, however, it is our belief that it is preferable for our students to encounter the original material, and be guided in the works’ historical context and author’s values and beliefs, rather than purely accepting the interpretation of such works through the eyes of a (likely WEM) HET scholar.  This has allowed us, for example, to have challenging discussions about Alfred Marshall’s sexism, classism and racism or John Maynard Keynes’ support for eugenics. 

We have also tried to diversify learning resource medium by including links to podcasts, videos and films that cover, either directly or indirectly, the authors and topics that we are discussing. While such resources often replicate the WEM dominance of the traditional HET textbook, there are also spaces where a diversity of voices on new issues to HET can be heard. 

Finally, the implications of decolonisation for assessment also deserve consideration.  When we took over module leadership, it was assessed through two pieces of summative assessment, a shorter and a longer essay.  We have moved to a single longer summative essay, supported by the submission of a formative draft.  This has also allowed us to introduce student co-creation, wherein students are allowed to construct their own essay question, getting approval and feedback on their proposed topic at the formative stage.  Over recent years, the number of students choosing to research non-traditional topics and/or bring non-WEM perspectives into their writing has steadily increased.

As educators, we still struggle with levels of engagement in the module. Attendance can be disappointing and preparedness limited. Most of our students are reluctant to do the reading that truly engaging with HET requires. However, we are encouraged by individual accounts of students becoming inspired by, for example, discovering HET from a non-European region of their ancestry, or a first encounter with serious exploration of the role of women in the development of economic thought.  

A survey of our students’ experience of the module yielded a number of interesting results.  Female students notice and are more critical of the lack of gender diversity. They appreciate efforts to discuss sex & gender. This suggests a need to continue to improve the integration of female economists throughout the module. BAME students notice and are more critical over the lack of regional diversity and appreciate efforts to discuss International HET (if, counterintuitively, not race & class). This suggests a need to integrate more international HET throughout the module.

Our hope is that by sharing our experience, and learning from others, we can make HET of interest and relevance to a new generation of economists. This is critical if we are to retain HET on the economics curriculum where it already has a foothold, and argue for its inclusion where it has been pushed to the sidelines.

References

Deane, Kevin, and Elisa Van Waeyenberge, eds. Re-Charting the History of Economic Thought. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2020.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Boston: The Stratford Co., 1924.

Powell, J. and Yurchenko, Y. (2025) Whose history of which economic thought?, International Review of Economics Education, 50, p. 100325.

Quality Assurance Agency (2023) QAA Subject Benchmark Statement Economics, Gloucester, QAA, [online] Available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/the-quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements/subject-benchmark-statement-economics