History and Economics

History and economics is a pairing that gives you two of the most powerful analytical frameworks for making sense of the human world. History trains you to think about change and continuity over time, to handle evidence critically, and to construct arguments about complex causal chains. Economics provides formal models of how individuals, firms, and governments make decisions under constraints, and how those decisions aggregate into markets, institutions, and macroeconomic outcomes.

Together they allow you to ask how economies have actually developed across time, why some societies became wealthy while others did not, and how policy choices in the past have shaped the present.

At the University of Edinburgh you will study this four-year full-time programme, which includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to encounter different national historiographies and economic traditions in an international academic environment. Across the programme you will engage with economic theory and econometrics alongside historical periods and themes, developing fluency in both the quantitative methods that economics requires and the archival and interpretive skills central to historical practice. The interplay between the two disciplines is genuinely enriching: the economic historian can ask questions neither the historian nor the economist can answer alone, tracing how institutions, culture, and contingency shape economic outcomes in ways that formal models alone cannot capture.

The typical entry tariff is 168 points.

Graduates from this kind of joint programme are valued across a particularly wide range of careers because of the combination of analytical rigour and contextual depth they bring. Finance, banking, consulting, economic policy, the civil service, international organisations, journalism, and research are all common destinations. Edinburgh's reputation and international connections strengthen graduate prospects considerably.

Postgraduate study in economic history, economics, public policy, or history is also a natural path for those interested in academic or advanced professional careers.