Call for papers: Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations
St. Hilda’s College
University of Oxford
9-10 May 2019
How do policymakers and economic actors use the past in their decision-making? One of the many exceptional aspects of the global financial crisis of 2008 was the prominence policymakers and commentators gave to the importance of history in helping to determine their response to the crisis. Comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s were a recurrent feature of assessments of the depth and spread of the global financial crisis and reveal the extent to which policymakers sought to ‘learn’ from the past. But how relevant is the past as a guide to the present, or even the future, and how is it used when policymakers, bankers and the public are faced with difficult economic challenges?
The main objective of the conference is to build an understanding of how policymakers and economic actors have used the past as a foundation for their decisions, how they created and discriminated among different interpretations of the past according to their preconceptions, and… READ MORE