Economic and Social History is a two-part discipline with its immanent connections , as the doyen of our guild Wolfgang Zorn once said, “partly in the correlation of mind and nature in the human life […], partly in the morphogenesis of ‘structures’ and long-term transformations of a social system”. Therefore the focus of Economic and Social Historical analysis lies on the ‘short-term stories’ of individuals and social groups as economically acting beings and their form of life in limited and unlimited spaces, as well as the ‘long-term stories’ of their economical and social institutions and systems.

The subject itself is old, its methods are subject to fluctuations, like the methods of all Arts and Sciences and they have changed, since 1900 “in the disguise of cultural history” (Rolf Walter). Economic and Social History originated from the historical contexts of the arising Economic Sciences in the 19^th century, precisely from the older and the younger ‘Historische Schule der Nationalökonomie’ (‘Historical School of Economics’) established by Wilhelm Roscher (1817-1894) and Bruno Hildebrand (1812-1886), but also from the ‘Vereins für Socialpolitik’ (‘Association for Social Policies’) established in 1872 by Gustav von Schmoller (1838-1917), Karl Bücher (1847-1930) and Lujo Brentano (1844-1931), still existing and significant today. The autonomy of Economic and Social History as a historical and academic field in Germany began in 1903 with the newly founded ‘Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte’ (VSWG) and the first chair for Economic History, taken by Bruno Kuske, at the Kölner Handelshochschule in 1909 (17 years after Harvard University). Initially the still existing VSWG understood itself as as the pan-European organ for the young discipline. In this journal historians like Georges Espinas (Paris), Henri Pirenne (Gent, 1862-1935) or Paul Vinogradoff (London) published just as often as German Economic and Social Historians around the famous co-editor Georg von Below (Freiburg/Br., 1858-1927).

Although Fritz Rörig, a man from Southern Germany, who accessed the world of the Hanseatic League and its economy in Lübeck, taught at the University of Kiel between 1923 and1935, the chair for Economic and Social History at Kiel was not constituted until 1995/6. We, the members of staff of this chair, are dedicated to research and teaching of Economic and Social History mainly of the Late Middle Ages (13^th-16^th centuries), thereby adding to the teaching of the chair for Medieval History and Auxiliary Sciences of History. By our research topics we are primarily examining the economies and life forms of inhabitants, citizens and aristocrats of European towns in the Late Middle Ages in all aspects. We are interested in the important processes of change in political, economical and social structures that led to the development of towns as corporations of coequals since the late 12^th century, i.e. in the nearly unbelievable history of the urbanisation of Germany and Europe, which happened in the midst of a feudal world. We are fascinated by the history of those, who permanently lived in small or large towns, or those who merely used them as alternating bases in their mobility, like the poor and beggars, the rich and mighty, children and elderly people, maids and servants, wage labourers, yarn spinners and weavers, housewives and artisans, nuns and clerics, merchants and idlers, councilmen and town lords. We are also interested in topics of Environmental History, which are mirrored in towns in processes of inner urbanisation, as the joys and sorrows inflicted by the forces of nature and as the struggle to save a nutritional basis. We are working on the pressing questions of the limitation of medieval households, be it the hopeless economies of the poor and the institutions of poor relief, founded out if religious causes, be it the households of the grocers and merchants, well documented in their preserved ledgers, or the budgets of entire towns. We are examining the highly differing motifs of the feudal lords of the towns in privileging or opposing evolving urban associations, thereby questioning the functions of towns and markets for their rule. And this all relates to the corresponding relevance of spaces, humans and economies in central places of lordship and the aristocratic spheres of noble-princely courts.