Quantitative methods and Economic History

Abstract

This paper explores the relations between quantitative methods and economic history. More specifically, it does three things. First, it uses JSTOR to study the history of the use of quantitative methods in economic history. There was a very large increase in their use from the 1960s to the 1980s. They have since remained popular in economic history while the rest of the history has left them aside. Second, it assesses the importance of quantitative methods for the developpement of economic history. Their rise coincide in part with the success story of Cliometrics, but there was a much older quantitative economic history. It has been criticized for a long time for two reasons: numbers give a partial vision of reality and they do not allow to answer the real interesting questions. These criticisms should be taken seriously, and economic history should probably use quantification as a possible metaphor alongside other rhetorical toos. Third, it reviews a number of quantification methods which are not widely used in economic history. It presents new things that could be quantified (texts, life histories and geographic information), new way of transforming data into information (network analysis and the long list of non-regression multivariate analysis), and new way of establishing links between variables (qualitative comparative analysis, event history analysis and multi-level analysis).