Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Tool for Social and Economic Analysis

Abstract

Economists have, in the past generation, become deeply concerned with the problem of economic growth. Of late years, as traditional economic models have demonstrated inadequacies, economists have become increasingly interested in the social and cultural inputs necessary for growth in economic productivity. Human, value-related factors, particularly education, role definition, and the place of science and technology, have taken a place beside the more traditional categories of the economist and economic historian. But these human factors, important though all admit them to be, are, especially in historical contexts, not usually amenable to quantitative methods of datagathering. It is difficult, on the one hand, to evaluate and sample such elusive factors, and on the other hand to define their precise role in social change.