Offering a convincing account of the merchant political economy, its demise in the nineteenth century due to increasing market instability, and the rise of industrial, productivist capitalism as an answer to this crisis, allows us to reassess the project of “total history” developed by the French Annales School in the twentieth century. Rather than retreating into cautious empiricism, or giving up on logocentric meta-narratives, it is proposed to focus on historicizing analytical categories to try and recapture their meanings in the context they were used in the past, thus avoiding presentism. Moreover, asserting the essential variability of sociopolitical equilibria accounts for the diversity of observed societies, while maintaining the notion of an overarching political economy with meta-rules applicable throughout it. This distinction also allows us to differentiate structural change – the shift from one political economy to another, not necessarily a progress but certainly a break – from short-term political upheavals, important but not game-changing. Last but not least, whether the resulting narrative is optimistic or not becomes a political assessment, not a historical one.

In the early twentieth century, economists on both sides of the Atlantic sought to uncover timeless “laws” about the business cycle. Chapter 1 recounts the history of the Harvard Index, a forecasting tool developed in the United States in the late 1910s. The Harvard Index’s success in forecasting the 1920–1921 recession earned it international acclaim for its purported accuracy and objectivity. However, the Index’s failure to predict economic developments in the early 1920s led researchers to seek new methods of forecasting. As economists recognized the power of agents in shaping business fluctuations, they began to engage in informal expectation exchange. By inquiring about the expectations of economic and political decision-makers, they aimed to gauge their behavior and anticipate future economic conditions. Ironically, the success of the Harvard Index had laid the groundwork for this shift in methodology. The Index’s seemingly “mechanical” workings had facilitated new relationships between economists and decision-makers, ultimately paving the way for the emergence of informal expectation exchange as a new approach to forecasting.

Chapter 4 explores the history of surveying, a forecasting practice developed by and for business representatives in the 1930s as a response to the increasing policy intervention. Initially, survey data were intended to complement the existing statistical data infrastructure. However, economists soon discovered that survey data had surprisingly low predictive power, as agents continuously adjusted their expectations in response to new information and reports on the expectations of other agents. This experience of disappointment led to a new understanding of economic expectation formation and decision-making and ultimately also a new role for business forecasting, which became a technique to coordinate economic expectations and influence the economic future. In this process, forecasting transformed from a representation of the future to a dynamic process of expectation formation and adjustment.

Chapter 3 explores the history of macroeconometric modeling, which emerged in Norway and the Netherlands in the 1930s and became a crucial tool in business forecasting after World War II. By enabling economists to simulate policy interventions and compare different future scenarios, macroeconometric modeling strengthened both policymakers’ and economists’ agency. While policymakers were entrusted with the responsibility to choose and engineer the “optimal” future, economists played a crucial role in shaping the realm of possible futures and limiting it. This led to a paradoxical situation where the future became both more open and more narrow. The development of macroeconometric modeling reignited hopes in the planning capabilities of individuals, prompting economists to question whether the business cycle was “obsolete” in the 1960s. However, the crises of the 1970s revealed the limitations of previous econometric approaches, leading to experimentation with new methods and a reevaluation of the role of econometric modeling in economic research. Despite this, macroeconometric modeling remained an indispensable tool for economic forecasting and decision-making.

Chapter 5 argues that the new insights into economic expectation formation, revealed by survey data, formed the basis for not only the rational expectations hypothesis but also for a new approach in monetary policy. The use of published forecasts at the Federal Reserve since the late 1970s demonstrates this shift. The rational expectations hypothesis, which gained widespread acceptance in the economic discipline in the 1970s, challenged the prevailing faith in central bank secrecy. In the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash, this led to a shift toward greater central bank transparency. Published forecasts gained new significance, becoming a vital monetary policy tool to anchor inflation expectations and influence inflation and output. While economists and sociologists have hailed this shift as a turn toward a new, “performative” role of forecasting, recent developments since 2008 and 2021–2022 suggest that the divergences between forecasts and actual future outcomes may, once again, reshape the theory of economic expectation formation and the role and use of forecasting.

The conclusion synthesizes the key findings and explores their implications for our understanding of economic expectation formation. It also highlights the new insights that can be gained about the relationship between capitalism and economics and underscores the critical role of trust in economic decision-making, as demonstrated by the results of the study.

Chapter 2 explores the history of the Leading Indicators developed at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Founded in an entrepreneurial, intervention-critical context, the NBER aimed to provide entrepreneurs with the tools and expertise needed to navigate future economic challenges. Initially, researchers sought to uncover recurring patterns in statistical data to forecast business cycle movements. However, the newly compiled data and analyses revealed that each business cycle was unique, contradicting their initial expectations. The introduction of the electronic computer further reinforced this finding, highlighting the need for economic experts who could interpret and evaluate each economic situation individually. As business cycle research and forecasting at the NBER progressed, it laid the basis for a fundamental transformation of the relationships between economists, economic and political decision-makers, and the economy. The NBER’s work ultimately entrusted policymakers with a new responsibility of economic stability, while also establishing the notion of a “national economy” that could be measured and administered.

Energy is the capacity to perform work, but what is “work”? Examining representations of labor, energy, and race, this chapter considers forms of energy that resist, demand, or may be denied representation. It reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction with his poem “The Song of the Smoke,” the legend of John Henry, historiographic debates about African American coal miner and union organizer Richard L. Davis, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s story of labor conflict, “Shaft 11.” Disagreements between labor historians Du Bois and Abram Lincoln Harris reveal conflicts in historiography and fossil culture. Tensions emerge in competing views of “human capital,” but so does an appreciation for elided energies and lives.

This chapter examines the methodological and ideological limitations in past scholarship on the history of craftwork, which includes a reconsideration of the core terms, debates and historiography regarding late Roman production. Of particular interest are the misleading binaries – in most cases not actually a conceptual feature of the original era – that arose concerning the producers themselves, their work and production processes, places of production and more. Among these are the division between the named ‘artist’ on one hand and the anonymous, supposedly unskilled ‘maker’ on the other, as well as art and craft itself, enslaved worker and free and worksite and shop. Beyond recognizing such dualities as inadequate, a framework is established for a new paradigm with which to approach late Antique craftworkers – one applicable in particular to marginalized unknown makers of the Roman past but also useful for both art historians and historians more broadly.

To scholarship on contemporary Europe, this business history of European political economy challenges the linear teleology of European integration and reinforces its historical contingency in four ways. First, my narrative provincializes the Single Market by framing market integration as part of a long historical process, inflected by global events and affected by global actors like multinationals. Second, a focus on firms pluralizes the actors involved in market integration, expanding the scope of agency from nation states and supranational institutions to interest associations, companies, and even individual executives. Third, granular analyses of a wide range of firms problematize business influence on the market by uncovering instances in which business interests eclipsed those of the demos and by demonstrating the broad spectrum of firm perspectives on regional market integration – from active proponents to “business Eurosceptics." Fourth, engagement with arguments about the market’s winners and losers and the need for reform politicizes the history of market integration and situates this book among present debates about the future of regulating and doing business in Europe.

Following our discussion of the role of the green transition in enabling economic growth, we explain in this chapter the social upheaval that low-carbon technological change will inevitably entail for the regions and social groups that stand to lose. This is about deindustrialisation and post-industrial decline that some regions of the world will face with the end of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are an inefficient and very labour-intensive way to power the global economy compared to the intelligent use of renewables and electrical applications that the green transition will deliver. However, a zero-carbon transition would imply that lots of people lose their jobs extracting, transforming, delivering and using fossil fuels and other high-carbon occupations. These jobs are typically well paid and highly concentrated geographically, which leads to very steep and abrupt socio-economic challenges. We look back at past coal transitions in the UK and across the world to try to foresee what the end of oil and gas could mean.

In this chapter, the book takes a new turn towards the empirical evidence. We look at history to understand how technology transitions have happened, what led to them and what problems they may have caused. We go back to the first industrial revolution and look at five successive great waves of innovation (textiles, steam, steel, petrochemicals and information technology) and the deep societal transformations they have caused. Each transition has unlocked enormous economic growth but also caused huge socio-economic and financial upheaval. We provide substantial amounts of data in accessible graphs and diagrams that clearly show how transitions come to be. We make the proposition that we are currently at the onset of a new great wave of innovation that will have similar implications.