by Tim Leunig

An international outlook which sought to understand Britain in an international context characterised much of Nick Crafts’ academic research.

Professor Nicholas F. R. Crafts - known without exception as Nick - was the leading economic historian of his generation. He was made a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours of 2014 - but rather than the citation reading “for services to economic history”, it read “for services to economic policy”.

At one level this is surprising, because Nick was, to the core and from the core, an economic historian. During his life, he authored or edited 10 books, published 131 refereed articles, 80 book chapters and 44 other pieces. Of those, no more than a dozen or so can be said to be primarily about policy.

Nor - to the best of my knowledge, at least - did Nick ever strive to be seen as a policy influencer. He certainly turned down invitations to ‘prestigious’ government roundtables. I know this because I once invited him to 11 Downing Street to an event with the then Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. I don’t think he had ever met Sunak, but for Nick meeting important people was never a reason for involvement in policy work.

He declined my invitation not because he was disinterested in government. Rather, he asked himself two questions before accepting. First, was the person - whether they were a politicianor a civil servant - sensible or silly - Nick’s highest accolade and insult respectively. Second, was whether he thought he had anything useful to say that he had not already said to that group. He never wanted to be the person who is invited to say a particular thing they have said many times. His view was that if you knew what he would say, you did not need to invite him.

Nick's CBE recognised - I think - two distant contributions. The first was teaching many civil servants. For more than 20 years, starting in the late 1970s, Nick was on the Civil Service College’s list of ad hoc lecturers, teaching literally a generation of future Sir Humphreys. Later on, he taught HM Treasury civil servants for eight years. If Keynes was right that we are all slaves of the defunct economists who taught us, at least civil servants were slaves to a decent economist. The second was that Nick contributed to almost twenty government and other policy commissions, including working for the Scottish Executive, the EU, the EBRD, the IMF, and the World Bank, as well as the UK government.

Nick always had something interesting to say, for two reasons. First, he always had a historical dimension that others in the room were unlikely to offer. Sometimes this was explicitly sought - that was why he was appointed to the UK Eddington Review on Transport and the Economy. On other times it was simply that - pretty much without exception - he knew more about the past than anyone else in the room. He had an ability to apply it to the present in a way that is exceptionally rare among historians in public life.

The second reason that Nick was useful is that he was always a fresh pair of eyes. The corollary of Nick not wanting to say the same thing, time and again, was that he liked to work on new things.

He did so with an international outlook, seeking to understand Britain in international context. This also characterised much of his academic research. His first internationally comparative article looked at why the Industrial Revolution happened here in Britain rather than in France and was published in 1977. This underpinned his seminal book on the British Industrial Revolution, but more importantly in this context it underpinned how he looked at the world in general.

That interest in Britain in a European perspective led him, with Gianni Toniolo, to undertake a major project funded by the European Commission on European economic growth during the postwar period. The results were published in two volumes, and demonstrated the relevance of economic history beyond academia, in shedding light on issues of current economic policy.

Nick enjoyed responding to events. He wrote widely on Britain under Thatcher, under Major, and under Blair. He took Gordon Brown to task for claiming that his own work showed that Brown had ended boom and bust (a judgement that was clearly right at the time and was massively vindicated shortly afterwards).

He was rightly proud of the book he co-edited with Peter Fearon on policy lessons from the Great Depression. Nick had never really contributed to the academic literature on the 1930s. There were no papers on the Gold Standard, or tariffs and the collapse of trade to draw on. But as the Global Economic Crisis took hold in 2007-8 Nick was inevitably interested, and inevitably his interest led to serious insights. He drew together many prior experts, challenged and prodded them to think seriously and deeply about what parallels could and could not be drawn, and therefore what lessons we could learn. His own insights into the role of fiscal and monetary policy in the context of the zero lower bound, that is, interest rates falling close to zero, were particularly influential.

That book coincided with his successful bid to found The University of Warwick’s CAGE centre. Now is not the time to give any exhaustive account of CAGE, but it is worth reflecting on how Nick shaped CAGE. He ran it diligently. Nick never sought to be an administrator, but when he was asked to do so, he did so strategically and with aplomb. CAGE was and is a success. Above all, although Nick was CAGE’s founding director, the figurehead who made it credible with the ESRC, Nick never saw it about himself. Rather, it was a way to support his colleagues to think and write about applied economics, to speak to policy makers, and so to influence debates and nations. Long may that continue.

About the author

Tim Leunig is an Economist and Director at Public First Consulting.