1949–
the British economic historian whose three-position taxonomy of NEP's failure shaped the historiographical debate
Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered: rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice.
Mark Harrison is a British economic historian who studied economics at Cambridge and modern history at Oxford, and taught at the University of Warwick from 1975, researching the Soviet economy for over four decades. His 1980 paper 'Why Did NEP Fail?' identified three positions in the historiographical debate (rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice), a taxonomy that has structured assessments of NEP ever since. His work expanded into the economics of warfare, state secrecy, and coercion, earning the Alec Nove Prize for Accounting for War (1996) and producing Secret Leviathan (2023), a landmark study of information control under Soviet communism.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1974Temporary Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1975Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1985Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1993Reader, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1998Professor of Economics, University of Warwick
- 2004Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
- 2019Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick; Fellow of the British Academy (2020)
Related historical events
The economics of coercion and secrecy: the archival turn
Until the 1980s Harrison's work centred on the NEP controversy and on wartime economic statistics. From the 1990s he developed a separate research programme asking what coercion and secrecy did inside the Soviet economy. This turn was bound up with his early access, as a Western economist, to Russian archives after the collapse of the USSR. He went on to examine the transaction-cost setting in which Soviet forced labour operated in the early Cold War, how the state security organs contracted informers in the 1960s and 1970s, and how counter-intelligence functioned inside a command economy. In this work coercion is analysed not only as a quantity of violence but as a problem of information and incentives.
The most contentious strand concerns preventive repression. In work published in 2023 he traced who was targeted by preventive repression, and under what conditions, in Soviet-ruled Lithuania; the 2023 book Secret Leviathan treated information control as a central institution of the Soviet system. This body of research rests on records he consulted directly, including the archives of the Lithuanian KGB, and differs from his early NEP work in translating repression into the analytical language of the costs of regime maintenance and information asymmetry. That these studies explain the economic rationality of coercion and secrecy does not justify that coercion; Harrison presents them as an analysis of how a repressive system actually worked.