New contributions to economic history Nouvelles contributions à lhistoire économique

Until recently, economic history was considered an orchid subject, irrelevant to the great debates in economics and historiography. Since the recent financial and economic history, this view has changed fundamentally. Why did Switzerland resist a patent law for so long in the 19th century? What ideas of market, price and regulation underlie Swiss agricultural policy? How is a company organised that has been exporting religious pictures all over the world since the 18th century? How did the international financial crisis of 1907 affect Switzerland? The contributions show how profitable it is to bring economic-historical topics back to the centre of historical scholarship. And they are an expression of the fact that the long-running dispute between structural and cultural history is finally a thing of the past. Today, it is just as legitimate to take a look at material changes from a cultural-historical perspective as it is to conduct an econometric study of agglomeration effects in Switzerland.