It's the economic history, stupid

Every year, I walk into a first-year lecture hall in Bilbao at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and watch shoulders slump.

- IKER SAITUA

The title of the course I'm teaching — “Economic History” — draws a similarly dejected reaction from my students: “Meh.” “Boooring.” “What's this even for?” Some call it “the history class”, as if it belonged to another century.

Sceptics often dismiss my subject, history, as “just one thing after another”, as the playwright Alan Bennett jokes in The History Boys. My economics and business school students are future economists, managers, and marketers, trained to think in terms of data, growth, and efficiency.

The first weeks of class are always a struggle. Many students are recent high school graduates, unaccustomed to reading beyond short excerpts or slides, let alone working through a full book. They've been trained to memorise, not to reason. They protest, “There's too much to study!” In the age of TikTok, where attention is a 15-second currency, long reading feels like punishment.

But history doesn’t reward shortcuts. To understand a crisis, you trace its roots. To see progress, you ask: progress for whom? My course takes students from the early modern era to the present, moving from the first wave of global integration and the Industrial Revolution through empire, world wars, the Great Depression, postwar growth, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the recent acceleration of globalisation. We compare regions and periods to show how today's economy grew out of long-run changes in trade, technology, institutions, and inequality. Every so often, we turn to local histories — Basque industrialisation, the autarky under Franco, and Bilbao’s painful restructuring of the 1980s — to understand how global processes played out in one place.