EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Since July 2025, JHET has a new editorial team. We first want to thank Pedro Duarte and Jimena Hurtado for their outstanding work as editors of the journal for the past six years. During their editorship, they set an example for responsible editorial policy, topical diversity, and openness to different historiographical approaches, as well as trustful guidance of the authorship, refereeing, production processes, and the constructive navigation of the relationship with Cambridge University Press and the History of Economics Society. Their highly professional work has shaped the journal in such a way that it has continued to foster rigorous, imaginative, and inclusive scholarship in the field.

For the first time in the history of the journal, JHET now is in the editorial hands of a larger group—four co-editors and one book review editor—that has taken over the duties of one of the key journals in the field. This editorship structure reflects a number of developments in the profession and in the publishing industry at large, such as an increasing number of submissions; a recognition of the importance of geographic, topical, and methodological diversity; ongoing debates about open access; and severe uncertainties arising from demands to cope with the influx of Artificial Intelligence technology at every step in the publication process. It is our goal as an editorial team to constructively engage with and manage these developments by representing the different viewpoints on those matters existing within the History of Economics Society and our community at large. Given our distinct specializations and methodological perspectives, we furthermore aim to maintain a broad research focus of the journal and reduce our collective blind spots—whether methodological, geographical, or thematic. At the same time, a shared editorial outlook allows us as a team to deepen our collective expertise, maintain coherence of the editorial process, and represent our community as a whole.

The journal’s mission remains unchanged: to promote diverse, excellent, and relevant research that speaks to the many areas of our community. As we understand the history of economics as an ongoing conversation, we will encourage authors to be clear about their contribution to that conversation. This will manifest in our continuous encouragement to build on existing research, and to make explicit how new research pushes this conversation forward. Our team is also committed to maintaining the journal’s high-quality standards in an era of shifting publication practices and new technologies. This involves making thoughtful decisions—in conversation with our community—about how to engage responsibly with those technologies and open-access developments, while taking into account different viewpoints.

Ultimately, it is the authors of our journal’s articles who do the hard work of producing first-class scholarship, and the dedicated referees in our community who take on the crucial task of ensuring the high-quality publications that the history of economics deserves. In those endeavors, we view our role not as gatekeepers but as facilitators, helping in this publication process within a vibrant, reflexive, open, and forward-looking community of historians of economics committed to understanding the history of economics, alongside its historiography, in its multi-faceted dimensions. It is also in this sense that we will maintain and cultivate our long-standing relationship with the History of Economics Society.

We see our community as not having fixed boundaries; rather, it evolves dynamically through ongoing dialogue, debate, and cooperation. Pedro Duarte and Jimena Hurtado have introduced inventive ways of creating a virtuous circle between the increase of high-quality submissions to the journal and the enforcement of the journal’s community functions by means of, for example, writing workshops, interviews with authors, and the publication of conversations with established scholars. Such initiatives have already responded to the changing landscape in history of economics scholarship, as well as to the new technological possibilities. While many scholars entering the field in the second half of the twentieth century were trained economists with an affiliation at North American and European universities, there is nowadays a substantial growth of scholarship coming from the Global South, and from scholars with affiliations in different departments, such as history, sociology and political sciences, philosophy, and the history of science. As the new editorial team, we would like to build and expand on our predecessors’ initiatives by continuing the effort of making the journal inclusive in terms of its demographic and geographical spread of authors and reviewers, the subject matter covered and its historiographical approaches. Alongside maintaining the initiatives by our predecessors, we will also use special issues and symposia to reach out to fields that have not yet been covered extensively in the history of economics.

To succeed in this mission, we will be able to draw on a collaborative infrastructure. We are fortunate to work with an editorial team providing the relevant expertise, a skilled production team at Cambridge University Press, meticulous copyeditor Patricia Sanders, and dedicated student assistant Mateus Martins Bruno. Their efforts are indispensable in ensuring that the journal meets its editorial and scholarly aims.

We open this issue with a contribution by Malcolm Rutherford on a subject that has certainly been underexplored in the history of economics: PhDs in economics defended by African American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. Malcolm did not live to see his paper in print. He unexpectedly passed away on September 25 last year at the age of seventy-six. Malcolm is of course known as the leading scholar on American Institutionalism, but he was also of vital importance for the revitalizing of the History of Economics Society in the 1990s, for which he served as its president in 1996–97 and of which he was elected Distinguished Fellow in 2014. Malcolm was extremely proud of the direction in which this posthumous publication was taking him. It is in the spirit of his impeccable scholarship that we hope to work with the History of Economics Society, Cambridge University Press, and our community of historians of economics at large to further high-quality scholarship in our field.