Abstract
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern, and that medieval coping strategies were hindered by providence, superstition, fear, and panic. We use the medieval disasters context to demonstrate that medieval economic history can contribute to big narratives of our time, including climate change and inequality. This contribution can be in (1) investigating the root causes of vulnerability and resilience, and recovery of societies over the long term (moving disaster studies away from instant impact focus) and (2) providing the social context needed to interpret the massive amount of “big data” produced by historical climatologists, bioarchaeologists, economists, and so on.
Highlights
New Pressures Facing Medieval Economic HistoryThe so-called cultural or linguistic turn that history took in the late 1980s had a strong impact on the practice of economic and social history
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront
The top five economic history journals are mostly ranked in the top five positions for the “History of Social Sciences” category, whatever form of measurement one wishes to take, while in the broader category of “History,” the Economic History Review is second to only the American Historical Review in terms of five-year impact factor and “Article Influence Score.”1 In addition, very recent literature has posited that economic history is gaining ground in respectability and visibility within economics, at least in the United States, shown by a growing share of historical studies in leading economics journals (Abramitzky 2015)
Summary
The so-called cultural or linguistic turn that history took in the late 1980s had a strong impact on the practice of economic and social history. In the remainder of this article, it is suggested that one way of doing this is for medieval economic historians to empirically test hypotheses derived from other disciplines of the social sciences, and help build convincing long-term narratives. We substantiate this point by elaborating upon the example of a field that medieval economic history may be further invigorated by, namely, disaster studies. It is demonstrated that whatever new figures might be uncovered over the long term in this era of “big data” and digitalization, for example from the burgeoning fields of historical climatology or bioarchaeology, this data will only make sense and have value by assessment within specific historical contexts—contextual conditions that medieval historians in particular have a very good understanding of
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