Casual conversations with colleagues in other parts of my university suggest that academic historians still have what Crowcroft (Reference Crowcroft2018) describes as a “widespread professional distaste for the Thucydidean vision” that lessons can be learned from the past. But unfortunately, we cannot afford not to be part of the “lesson learning” industry; civil, political, and business leaders constantly draw from history to justify their decisions. If we are not in the room when they are doing their learning, then they will inevitably, as MacMillan (Reference MacMillan2008) warns, “pick and choose what you want” to justify practically anything.
The applied history movement, which now boasts its own imaginatively named academic journal (Journal of Applied History), seeks to solve this problem. By employing what Tosh (Reference Tosh2006) calls “processual and analogical reasoning,” applied history practitioners aim to shed light on big questions facing policy makers today. They aim to provide the necessary analytical rigor to the historical parallels and analogues that policy makers draw on in their decision making. They do things like write popular books and accessible policy briefs, engage directly with decision makers outside of normal academic venues, and inject history into executive teaching.
The volume under review, which was edited by a retired financial historian (Youssef Cassis) and a retired banker (Jean-Jacques van Helten), is best seen through the lens of applied history. It has an ambitious objective: to look back at the financial crisis of 2008 and learn the lessons for the future. Each chapter has its own unique angle, centered around a specific policy domain, country experience, or disciplinary perspective. Contributors include academics and practitioners, policy makers and policy takers, macroeconomic historians, and macroeconomic forecasters.
This very competitively priced book is worth acquiring for the good parts. The chapters by the academic contributors are especially worth perusing, as they typically distill and translate complex ideas developed elsewhere into concise, accessible prose. The chapters by journalists are perhaps a little derivative but can be easily skipped.
Chapters that I wish to highlight as examples of useful applied history are: Charles Goodhart’s plea for new measures to change bankers’ incentives away from “the pursuit of return on equity” (Chapter 1); Catherine Schenk’s forensic look at how the past (and especially the Great Depression) was used to inform and justify policy decisions in the wake of the 2008 crisis (Chapter 2); Ramon Marimon’s three lessons from the past and three lessons for the future on the various linkages between banking crises and fiscal crises, and the challenges of central bank policy making for monetary unions (Chapter 4); and Patrick Honohan’s comparative history (based on first-hand policy experience) of crisis resolution strategies used in Ireland, Iceland, and Cyprus (Chapter 7).
Youssef Cassis, the volume’s co-editor, is currently running an ERC-funded project at the EUI called “The Memory of Financial Crises: Financial Actors and Global Risk.” I think this volume is best seen as this project’s launch document and manifesto. It is concise and has lots of interesting content written in an accessible way for policy professionals, but it ultimately promises more than it delivers.
Cassis’s project has produced a more academically inclined (but substantially more expensive) edited volume that specifically focuses on remembering and learning from financial history (Cassis and Schenk Reference Cassis and Schenk2021). I would have liked to have seen more of that book’s contents reflected in this one.
