The Beginnings of the Economic History Society
T THE Economic History Society was founded in July I926 and the first issue of the Economic History Review, which the Society was created to sustain, appeared six months later. This jubilee provides a suitable opportunity to look back, and perhaps reflect, upon the Society's growth and especially upon its beginnings and earlier history, of which very few members now have personal knowledge. It will be seen at a glance from the individual membership statistics in Table i that the Society made no headway at all during its first twenty years. It was kept alive-and then only with outside help-by the growing reputation of the Review and the willingness of more and more libraries to buy it. In the later I940's, however, the great expansion began and all was very different for the next twenty years. But since the later i960's history has to some extent repeated itself as individual membership has ceased to grow while library subscriptions have continued to increase. Yet comparison goes no further than that, for the Society, now well established financially, has so far experienced none of its earlier money problems, nor has there been any reduction in support for its conferences or group activities. Quite the reverse, in fact. The upward movement of individual membership after I 947 was, of course, based upon the increase in posts in economic history in universities and other fields of higher education which led to the training of more specialists in the subject. The increase in interest was reflected in a greater flow first of articles and then of books, which is discussed elsewhere in this issue by Mr Harte. The initial impulse, however, came from economics in the shape of members from the Royal Economic Society. (Its issues of Economic History, the origins of which