This essay first introduces historical pragmatics, addressing it origins and data problems. It then briefly sketches some of the work carried out on various topics: discourse markers, speech acts, and politeness, and finally, it surveys new perspectives. Historical pragmatics (HP) is a field of study that investigates pragmatic aspects in the history of specific languages. It studies various aspects of language use at earlier stages in the development of a language; it studies the diachronic development of language use; and it studies the pragmatic motivations for language change. HP has established itself as an independent field of inquiry since the mid-nineteen-nineties, and various conceptualizations of the field have since been proposed.