On 21 February 2020, the Global History and Culture Centre hosted a workshop to celebrate the career of Professor Maxine Berg. Focused on the question "Why Does Economic History Matter?", the event concluded with the presentation of a volume of essays written and edited by Maxine's friends and colleagues, titled Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (McGill-Queen's University Press: 2020). In this guest blog, Professor Tirthankar Roy (LSE) responds to the book and the central place of Berg's scholarship in shaping the field of global economic history.