“Writing economic history: the narrator and the arguer”

The aim of this chapter is to look at the peculiarity of the tension between narrative and argument, or between perspective and position, through the case study of a contemporary economic historian – Douglas Dowd. His work can be looked at as an example of both interdisciplinarity and individuality (with particular reference to the narrative dimension of his fundamentally economic work). Economic history is first of all an area of study where the modes of discourse of different disciplines like history and economics mix and mingle. Within this combination, different ideological and theoretical positions can be assumed. Academic discourse, however, is also a site for individual variation, like all other forms of writing. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the paper tries to identify features of (inter) disciplinary identity by comparing a corpus of Dowd’s work to an economic corpus and an historical corpus. The focus then shifts to Dowd’s ideological position, identified by the writer himself as “radical”, before moving to an analysis of the most individual and original peculiarities of his writing, which are illustrated through a few sample features.