The LRI at the EHS Centenary Conference

The Long Run Institute was pleased to co-sponsor the 2026 Annual Conference of the Economic History Society, convened this April in the Cheng Kin Ku Building at the London School of Economics to mark the Society's centenary - a hundred years, almost to the day, since its foundation in 1926. Over three days, scholars drawn from every inhabited continent read papers on migration, working conditions, trade, gender, welfare, and the durable question of how the world we now inhabit came to assume its present shape.

The Institute was represented, fittingly, at the centre of proceedings. Dr. Judy Stephenson of University College London — a director of the LRI — took the chair in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre for the Society's own centenary panel on the History of the Society, with papers by Maxine Berg, Richard Trainor, Pat Hudson, and Thales Zamberlan Pereira and Lúcia Centurião. To be given the gavel, at a centenary conference, for the one panel on which the discipline reflects upon itself, is an honorific of a peculiarly collegial kind. Dr. Stephenson subsequently chaired a second session, on European labour markets before industrialisation. Professor John Turner of Queen's Business School, Queen's University Belfast, a co-founder of the LRI, chaired the New Researchers' session on Working Conditions.

Two further LRI members figured among the presenters, their papers neatly bracketing the Institute's characteristic range - from the archives of high finance to the census returns in which the fortunes of ordinary lives are recorded.

Dr. Michael Aldous, LRI Co-Founder and Director, presented Agents, Sentiment and The Baring Crisis of 1890, co-authored with Dr. Tehreem Husain of the University of Oxford. The paper returns to the last great sovereign-debt panic of the classical gold standard to examine how the private intelligence of the House of Baring's agents shaped - and at length misshaped - the bank's appetite for Argentine risk: a cautionary parable whose contemporary resonances scarcely require underlining.

Dr. Tiarnán Heaney, LRI Senior Research Fellow, presented From Pensions to Pupils? Schooling, Resource Constraints and Old Age Pensions in Ireland, 1901–11. Drawing on the full-count Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911, he asked whether the 1908 Old Age Pension — Lloyd George's unconditional shilling, delivered weekly to the homes of the elderly poor — loosened household resource constraints sufficiently to keep Irish children longer at their desks. His qualified affirmative is a useful reminder that welfare's returns are often measured not in the generation that receives them, but in the one that follows.

The LRI congratulates all four members and salutes the Economic History Society on its first hundred years.