Economic history in the future will be shaped by economic history in the past, but it also needs to transcend that past. In particular, it needs to transcend the breakdown of the fieldГs original interdisciplinary structure and its transformation into a subfield of economics. Most economists and historians today accept the stereotype that economics is about generalization and history is about understanding specific phenomena in the past. There is some validity to this stereotype, but I will argue that economic historians must operate somewhere in the middle of those extremes if they are truly to advance knowledge. Most research by economic historians trained as economists does not in fact produce universal generalizations and to treat it as such, rather than to acknowledge its contextYspecific character, is to mislead. At the same time, research in history risks degenerating into antiquarianism when scholars amass information about their specific topics without worrying about how their work might inform those who study