Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Hands on History talk with Prof Johan Fourie, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
“Every invention is an act of rebellion against time-honoured beliefs and deeply entrenched customs,” Joel Mokyr wrote in 1990. Generative AI is that kind of invention. Across four decades, the share of papers in the leading (South) African history journals that include a single quantitative table has fallen by close to half. Historians who once measured wages, reconstructed kinship networks and counted disenfranchised voters have ceded that ground to economists, demographers and political scientists. The price has been paid in the questions the profession can no longer credibly answer. In this lecture I describe what the past two years have changed for one working economic historian. Drawing on eight projects in various stages of completion – a published paper repaired, a PhD’s worth of data reassembled in two days, death notices stitched to nineteenth-century maps of sanitation, datasets joined that no single researcher could previously align – I show how AI tools collapse the cost of the dull but essential parts of research and widen the questions one scholar can plausibly take on. I then turn to public engagement, where the same tools shorten the path from a finding to a blog post, a podcast or a graphic novel, and bring the historian closer to readers outside the academy. I close with a provocation. Historians sit at the intersection of the social sciences and are uniquely placed to be the synthesisers of an AI-saturated age – but only if they are willing to let go of inherited frames and pick up the new instruments. The choice, as Mokyr might have put it, is whether to rebel.
About the speaker
Johan Fourie is Professor of Economics and Chair of Economics, History and Policy at Stellenbosch University, where he also directs LEAP, the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past. He teaches economic history to undergraduate and graduate students, and regularly publishes on the subject academically, through journal articles and book chapters, as well as popularly, as a columnist, blogger, and podcast host.
His book, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom (CUP), offers an accessible and engaging introduction to economic history from an African perspective. Its closing line – ‘The future belongs to those who believe in a better tomorrow’ – captures his conviction that economic history is fundamentally optimistic: we have the agency to build a more prosperous society.