Hi! I am a newer history student with a degree in Economics. Both disciplines fascinate me. However, lately while reading about the late middle-ages and the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie I find my self struggling to understand how historians think about economic topics. Historians are very good at talking about "production volumes" and "Trade Balances" but I feel that they do not understand those topics the same way an economist would. An economist would focus on things like alternate cost, how the trade balance itself is maintained or for instance price formation. Historians do not seem to be very good at explaining the mechanisms behind economic phenomena. How can I as a newbie historian approach these topics using my economic knowledge without sounding pedantic to my lecturers (this happened today I think) and at the same time providing useful insight?
An economist would focus on things like alternate cost, how the trade balance itself is maintained or for instance price formation.
That's because economists are trained to work with mathematical models to formulate policy recommendations. Calculating opportunity cost don't matter as when you are studying past historical cases as when you are trying to present the best set of investment projects the government should be making next year.
Historians are very good at talking about "production volumes" and "Trade Balances" but I feel that they do not understand those topics the same way an economist would.
How can I as a newbie historian approach these topics using my economic knowledge without sounding pedantic to my lecturers (this happened today I think) and at the same time providing useful insight?
I have a masters in Economics and I'd be interested in hearing you go into more detail about exactly what sort of mechanisms you believe they are missing. In my experience economic history and economics have very different methodology in research. Economic history reads like a history paper with statistics, while economics papers frequently dedicate the majority of its pages explaining the model it's using in mathematical terms. Even economic papers which uses historical data tend to follow this trend.
And there are reasons for this, because of the need to defend policy recommendations economics require far more rigorous modelling on the part of economists. At the same time, fragmentary data from several centuries ago make similar modelling difficult for economic historians.
On the other hand though economic history tend to discuss very macro issues such as the long term trends of monetary expansion in the 16th century, whereas economist who study historical cases focuses on relatively micro cases like railroad pricing in the 1880s.