Academic Profile

Research Interests: Economic history: long run economic growth and development; historical national accounting; macroeconomic history; wars and economic performance.

Stephen Broadberry is a Professorial fellow and a Professor of Economic History, Oxford University. He is also a Research Theme Leader at CAGE, University of Warwick and Director of the Economic History Programme at CEPR. He has also taught at the London School of Economics and the Universities of Warwick and Cardiff and held visiting positions at University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, Humboldt University, Berlin, UPF Barcelona and Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. 

His research interests include (1) the development of the world economy from 1000 AD to the present, using a historical national accounting approach to shed light on the Great Divergence of productivity and living standards between Europe and Asia (2) sectoral aspects of comparative growth and productivity performance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the role of services (3) wars and economic performance.

He has been Editor of the Economic History Review, and also Editor of the European Review of Economic History. He is currently President of the Economic History Society and has been President of the European Historical Economics Society and a Trustee of a number of other economic history organisations, including the Asian Historical Economics Society, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Association and the International Economic History Association. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2016.

His books include The British Economy Between the Wars: A Macroeconomic Survey (Blackwell, 1986); The Productivity Race, 1850-1990: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850-1990 (CUP, 1997); Market Services and the Productivity Race, 1850-2000: British Performance in International Perspective (CUP, 2006), the 2-volume Cambridge Economic History of Europe, edited with Kevin O’Rourke (CUP, 2010) and British Economic Growth, 1270-1870, co-authored with Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen (CUP, 2015).​

Stephen Broadberry was the Principal Investigator  on a Leverhulme Trust funded  project "Reconstructing the National Income of Britain and Holland, c. 1270/1500 to 1850", and is now responsible for a database hosted on the Bank of England website, with British data reaching back on an annual basis to 1270 and linking to a benchmark estimate for 1086, based on the Domesday Book. The pre-1700 data  was incorporated in June 2017 and the Millennium of Macroeconomic Data now constitutes a separate database on the Bank's webpage.