What difference does the explicit incorporation of institutional analysis make to the writing (and for that matter the reading) of economic history and of history in general? Writing history is constructing a coherent story of some facet of the human condition through time. Such a construction exists only in the human mind. We do not recreate the past; we construct stories about the past. But to be good history, the story must give a consistent, logical account and be constrained by the available evidence and the available theory. A brief answer to the question is that incorporating institutions into history allows us to tell a much better story than we otherwise could. The precliometric economic history actually was built around institutions, and in the hands of its most accomplished practitioners it managed to provide us with a picture of continuity and institutional change, that is, with an evolutionary story. But because it was built on bits and pieces of theory and statistics that had no overall structure, it did not lend itself to generalizations or analysis extending beyond the essentially ad hoc character of individual stories. The cliometric contribution was the application of a systematic body of theory – neoclassical theory – to history and the application of sophisticated, quantitative techniques to the specification and testing of historical models.