Cliometrics or the Quantitative Projection of Social Sciences in the Past

The objective of this paper is quite modest: to outline some of the new devices being employed, at an international level, in cliometrics – the use of economic theory in general and model building in particular, the reliance upon quantification to buttress those models with historical data, the use of the historical discourse, and the use of statistical theory and econometrics to combine models with data in a single consistent explanation. The cliometric models are powerful in part because of their internal consistency, in part because, combined with statistical and econometric techniques, they can assure consistency be¬tween available data (quantification) and the causal assertions embedded in the model, in part because they may facilitate the derivation of conclusions not intuitively obvious from the outset (counterfactual speculation).