Historical IPE

Much of my research and teaching has been dedicated to reviving–and advancing–historical approaches to international political economy broadly construed–what is often called “Historical IPE.”

For my article on Keynes and the abandonment of the gold standard, I drafted a 15,000-word appendix of “extended citations” as a model for the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) initiative of the American Political Science Association. I subsequently organised an extended issue of the International History and Politics Newsletter discussing the challenges and opportunities brought by these initiatives. This material is taught and discussed at various methods training camps; and I have presented it to a number of PhD student colloquia in the UK, in Europe, and in the US.

I distilled the insights I have garnered from this work into a (forthcoming) chapter on “Historical Methods” in the Oxford Handbook of International Political Economy. This chapter highlights the pervasiveness of “historical IPE” across different epistemologies, ontologies, and traditions. This new way of viewing historical IPE builds common ground for conversations between groups of scholars around the world who rarely talk and initially appear to have little in common.

I have also written up some practical guidance (availabe via the links on the left of this page). I hope this will help students and scholars undertake this kind of research; and I hope it will also prove useful to any writer who simply wants to grapple more easily and more manageably with the “historical” aspects of their own work.

At the LSE, several like-minded colleagues and I convened a multi-disciplinary research group on “History and Theory” to grapple with both the practical and the epistemological questions that arise from doing historical work today. That group is currently on hiatus, unfortunately; but we hope to resume it soon.