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How Do We Ensure a Useful Future for Irish Cliometrics?

Any book that has a subtitle suggesting that economic history requires nothing less than a resurrection is sure to gain attention. However, will such attention be well deserved? This reviewer thinks it will. Readers of Irish Economic and Social History, as well as economic historians more generally, should find much that is stimulating within Boldizzoni’s bold book. Boldizzoni’s two hypotheses are, first, that cliometricians have taken economic history in the wrong direction and, second, that a resurrected historicism is required if economic history is to be resurrected. This reviewer has reservations about both of these claims and is particularly unconvinced that a revived historicism is needed to give economic history a useful future. The Poverty of Clio provides an important (if flawed) vision of the theory and method of economic history. Yet despite its flaws, it is a book that deserves to be read and debated in research seminar and classroom. A more sophisticated debate on the method of economic history would undoubtedly help in the discussion of Irish economic history. For example, in the context of Irish cliometrics a more sophisticated appreciation of methodology enables us to appreciate that Joel Mokyr’s view on the place of economic theory in the writing of economic history is very similar to the arguments that George O’Brien came to later in his career. Cliometrics is a research programme that seeks to apply economic and econometric techniques to historical topics. Initially, it was a product of the post-war expansion of American universities, but it has subsequently spread around the world.1 Eli Heckscher has the strongest claim to be the founding