Pat Hudson, FBA (born 1948) is a British historian and academic. She is a Professor Emeritus of History at Cardiff University.[1][2]
In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[3]
Hudson was born in 1948[4] in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire. In 1971, she was awarded a B.Sc. Economics from the London School of Economics and this was followed in 1981 by a PhD in Economic History from the University of York.[1][2]
Pat Hudson is a British economic historian and one of the world-leading authorities on the Industrial Revolution whose research has focused on the wider economic, social and cultural aspects of the industrialisation process. She has advanced and changed the field in a number of areas, including the formation of fixed and circulating capital and the role of the wool textile industry in British economic growth; proto-industrialisation, local history and micro history; the diversity of regional experience during industrialisation and the dynamic created by intra- and inter-regional specialisation and trade. She has also contributed to the critique of conventional measures of industrialisation and comparative economic growth and change over time (e.g. historical applications of national income accounting, GDP, and the Gini coefficient) and to the historiography of economic and social history in relation to time and space, particularly highlighting anachronistic and ethnocentric analysis. Her current work critiques the preoccupation with economic growth in economic history emphasising distribution (income and capital inequalities) and sustainability. Hudson served as President of the Economic History Society from 2001 to 2004 and subsequently as Director (2006–11) and Chair of the Governors (2011–17) of the Pasold Research Fund.[1][2][5]