Economic History Timeline — theories and crises from 1776 to today

Interactive timeline: 26 economic theories from Adam Smith to Piketty and 10 crisis case studies (1873, 1929, Weimar, dot-com, subprime...).

Pre-Industrial (1500–1760)

• 550
  Money Beyond Borders: How International Money Has Shifted From Ancient Coinage to Crypto—and Why Power Follows Currency
• 760
  New Research Reconsiders Whether a Single Devastating Civil War Sparked the “Great Divergence” Toward Northwestern Europe
• 1506
  Inventory Reveals Lorenzo de’ Medici Owned Five Firearms as Renaissance Florence Grappled With Gunpowder’s Moral Stigma
• 1602
  Amsterdam’s First Short Squeeze: Isaac Le Maire’s Bear Raid on the Dutch East India Company
• 1650
  Würzburg’s Hidden Demographic Engine: Migration, Mortality, and the Making of an Early Modern City
• 1650
  Seigneurial Institutions and the Hidden Foundations of Holland’s Seventeenth‑Century Economic Miracle
• 1700
  Money of the Masses: How Copper Coinage Powered India’s Everyday Economy, 1500–1900
• 1776 TEORIA
  The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith and the Birth of Modern Economics

Industrial Revolution (1760–1840)

• 1780
  Beyond Steam: How Skill, Community and Know-How Powered the Industrial Revolution
• 1798 TEORIA
  Malthus's Population Trap: Diminishing Returns and Economic Growth
• 1800
  The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Became the World’s Dominant Economic System
• 1802
  Dealing with a New Schism after the Revolution: The French Government and the Cult of the Petite Église in the Vendée (1802–1830)
• 1803 TEORIA
  Say's Law: How Supply Creates Its Own Demand
• 1817 TEORIA
  Ricardo's Comparative Advantage and the Labor Theory of Value
• 1838 TEORIA
  Cournot's Duopoly: The First Mathematical Economics
• 1840
  Painkillers and Profit: How Opium Shaped Modern Capitalism and the Global Drug Economy

Victorian Era (1840–1900)

• 1850
  Blessing in Disguise: How British Ceylon’s Grain Tax Shaped Sri Lanka’s Long-Run Economic Legacy
• 1864
  Marx and Engels’ Forgotten Foray Into the Heart of London’s Financial Markets
• 1865
  Coerced Labor’s Long Shadow: How Slavery and Emancipation Shaped Modern Prosperity
• 1867 TEORIA
  Marx's Critique of Political Economy: Labor Value and Capital Accumulation
• 1870
  Victorian Britain’s Elite Education Was More Social Club Than Scholarly Training, New Research Suggests
• 1871 TEORIA
  The Marginalist Revolution: Menger, Jevons, and Walras Redefine Value
• 1874 TEORIA
  Walras and General Equilibrium: Mathematics Enters Economics
• 1890 TEORIA
  Marshall's Scissors: Supply, Demand, and Neoclassical Synthesis

Gilded Age (1870–1900)

• 1870
  MIT Historian Traces “Boston Tea Party” Tea-Chest Label to a Far More Complex Origin
• 1873
  Liaquat Ahamed Explores the History of Money, Power and Politics in Wide-Ranging Multi-Format Episode
• 1873 CASE HISTORY
  The Long Depression: America's Forgotten Economic Crisis of 1873-1896
• 1889 TEORIA
  Italian Marginalism: Pantaleoni, Pareto, Barone and the Lausanne-Rome Axis

Early 20th Century (1900–1929)

• 1905
  Coal, Industry, and Infant Death: Japan’s Hidden Human Cost of Modernization
• 1906
  Study Finds 1906 Naturalization Act Federal Standards Curbed Local Discretion and Bias in U.S. Citizenship Decisions
• 1906 TEORIA
  Pareto Efficiency and the Foundations of Welfare Economics
• 1923 CASE HISTORY
  When Money Died: The German Hyperinflation of 1921-1923
• 1925 CASE HISTORY
  Paradise Sold Twice: The Florida Real Estate Bubble of the 1920s
• 1928 TEORIA
  The Production Function: From Cobb-Douglas to Artificial Intelligence
• 1929
  Study Suggests 1920s Tech Optimism Fueled Risky Overinvestment, Setting Stage for Downturn
• 1929
  Rumours, Risk, and Returns: How Information Shaped China’s Sovereign Debt Market, 1921–37
• 1930
  Interwar Britain’s Management Puzzle: Why Productivity Lagged Despite Innovation, Finance and Empire

Great Depression (1929–1939)

• 1929 CASE HISTORY
  Black Thursday to Global Depression: The Origins of the 1929 Crash and How It Spread
• 1930
  Did Technological Progress Trigger the Great Depression? The “Great Accretion” Thesis Revisited
• 1933 TEORIA
  The Birth of Econometrics: Frisch, Tinbergen and Statistical Economics
• 1936 TEORIA
  Keynes's General Theory: Rethinking Employment and Money
• 1936 TEORIA
  Leontief's Input-Output Tables: The Economy as a System of 500 Equations
• 1937 TEORIA
  The IS-LM Model: Hicks Formalizes Keynes

World War II (1939–1945)

• 1917
  Adam Tooze Revives Essay Portraying Lenin as Cultivated Intellectual, Complicating the Revolutionary’s Brutal Legacy
• 1944 TEORIA
  Von Neumann and Morgenstern: Game Theory Enters Economics
• 1945
  Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision Revisited: Scholars Still Split on Strategy Versus Circumstance

Post-War Boom (1945–1973)

• 1947 TEORIA
  Samuelson's Foundations: Mathematics Becomes the Language of Economics
• 1948 TEORIA
  Einaudi's Liberalism: The Good Government of a Liberal Economist
• 1950 TEORIA
  The Post-War Compromise: Bretton Woods, the Welfare State and the Labour Share (1945-1973)
• 1954 TEORIA
  Arrow-Debreu: Proving the Existence of General Equilibrium
• 1956 TEORIA
  Solow and Swan: The Neoclassical Growth Model (1956)
• 1957
  Barbara Ward’s vision
• 1960 TEORIA
  Sraffa and the Cambridge-Italy School: Production of Commodities and the Critique of Marginalism
• 1962 TEORIA
  Italy's Post-War Economists: From Reconstruction to the Economic Miracle and the 1970s Crisis
• 1963 TEORIA
  Friedman's Monetarism: Money Matters Most

Stagflation Era (1973–1985)

• 1972 TEORIA
  Lucas's Rational Expectations Revolution
• 1973 CASE HISTORY
  The Oil Shocks and the Great Stagflation: How the 1970s Broke the Post-War Consensus
• 1975
  From Political Economy to Quant Careers: How Economics Graduates’ Employers Have Changed Over Time
• 1979 TEORIA
  Behavioral Economics: Kahneman, Tversky and the Rise of Psychology
• 1982 TEORIA
  Real Business Cycles: Kydland and Prescott's Revolution

Globalization (1985–2000)

• 1990 TEORIA
  New Keynesian Economics: Sticky Prices Meet Rational Expectations
• 1990 TEORIA
  Endogenous Growth: Romer, Lucas and the Economics of Ideas
• 1990 CASE HISTORY
  Japan's Lost Decade: From the Bubble of 1989 to Two Decades of Deflation
• 1995 CASE HISTORY
  Italy's Lost Decades: The Productivity Stagnation Since the Mid-1990s
• 1995
  From Attention Markets to Border Controls: What a Week of “Assorted Links” Reveals About the Hidden Mechanics of Economic History
• 1997 CASE HISTORY
  Contagion: The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 and the Collapse of the Tiger Economies
• 1999 CASE HISTORY
  The Dot-com Bubble: How Internet Mania Inflated and Burst Wall Street (1995-2002)

New Millennium (2000–2008)

• 2000 TEORIA
  The Credibility Revolution: Angrist, Card and Modern Causal Inference
• 2005 TEORIA
  Modern DSGE Models: Central Banks and Structural Econometrics

Great Recession (2008–2015)

• 2008 CASE HISTORY
  The House of Cards: The Subprime Crisis and the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008
• 2014 TEORIA
  Piketty's Capital: Inequality Returns to the Center of Economics

Contemporary (2015–2030)

• 2000
  How Japan’s Sake Clusters Survived: Agglomeration, Mechanisation and Reinvention, 1980–2020
• 2015 TEORIA
  Complexity Economics: Beyond Equilibrium
• 2017
  When the Basel Output Floor Rises, Bank Lending Tilts: The Quiet Basel III Shift Reshaping Credit
• 2022
  Study Finds Limited Evidence That USDA Livestock Risk Protection Subsidies Are Captured by Private CME Options Markets
• 2026
  From Quartz to Chip: The Borderless Semiconductor Factory
• 2026
  History of Econometrics: From Its Origins to the Present Day
• 2026
  When the Times Are Ripe: Merton and Multiple Discoveries in Economics
• 2026
  From the Smokestacks to the Algorithm
• 2026
  Atlas of the Rust Belt: from the Erie Canal to data centers, two centuries of America’s industrial heartland
• 2026
  The Great Divergence between China and Western Europe: An Lushan, science, or something else?