North, Douglass C.

North, Douglass C. (Cecil) (1920–  ) economic historian; born in Cambridge, Mass. As an editor of the Journal of Economic History in the 1960s, he supported the new discipline, cliometrics, which applies economic and quantitative methodology to history resulting in significantly different interpretations of the past. A member of the faculty at Washington University (St. Louis) from 1950, he wrote widely about the importance of institutions in a field that has concentrated on markets. His books include Structure and Change in Economic History (1981). In 1993 he and Robert Fogel, whose work he first published in his journal, were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for their contribution to economic history.