Search

This contribution offers a series of thoughts on new directions which social and economic history in the Low Countries m ight take. The field faces im portant challenges: source digitization, automatic handwriting recognition and digital methods of analysis. Somewhat ironically, social and economic history has received renewed interest afterthe 2008 financial and economic crisis.This crisis has fuelled research into inequality and capitalism and has forced economics as a discipline to question itself. One answer to the crisis of economics is to include more economic history. This essay emphasizes the fact that social and economic history is a house with many rooms and explicitly encourages social and economic historians to be inspired by other scholars, whetherthey be other historians or social scientists. One way to go forward m ight be the inclusion of insights from behavioral economics and the history of emotions which could lead to a fuller and more realistic analysis of the decisions individual historical actors took. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]