Hugh G. J. Aitken

Science, Technology and Economics: The Invention of Radio as a Case Study

Economic history is one of the hybrid disciplines, conceived in the late nineteenth century, offspring of a transitory union between two otherwise virtuous academic parents. It has, in its later career, regularly jeopardized its slender claims to respectability by a reluctance to honor conventional boundaries. Economic historians are most at home in the disputed areas between disciplines. They cultivate the borderlands, the uncertain margins between history and economics, between the humanities and the social sciences.