What Next?

I have had just over a week now to recover from the Economic History Society's annual conference, which we hosted in Belfast on 5-7 April. We had 261 registered delegates, presenting 152 papers in 46 sessions and two plenary lectures over three days. I think the conference was outstanding, which is all down to the excellent organisational skills of the EHS's administrative secretary, Maureen Galbraith, supported by our small army of postgraduate students. Thanks to all!

Palgrave Macmillan hosted a reception at the conference to celebrate over 12,000 ebook downloads of An Economist's Guide to Economic History. ​It was an opportunity for the book's contributors and readers to come together and think about what next in our quest to Make Economic History Great Again. We had some great suggestions for additional chapters for the second edition. And we also got some interesting ideas on how to make this website useful for colleagues using the book in their teaching.

One idea, which Matthias and I very much share, is to generate, and curate, teaching-ready audiovisual economic history material. Something I do in my own teaching is let the authors I am discussing speak about their own work in the form of a short video snippet. For senior academics I am usually able to find something good online, which I can then edit down to size; there are many great podcasts and videos involving economic historians out there to use (for example, the EHS films its plenary lectures). But this is more difficult to do for junior scholars. And so we will now embark on a campaign to encourage colleagues to generate new audiovisual material, starting with the contributors to the book!

While on the subject of videos, we have another book promo video for you. If you recall, we hosted our book launch in Belfast back in January, and Econ Films covered the day for us. They have just completed a video reportage of the events of the day. Enjoy!

​Chris.