Quantitative methods and Economic History

This paper makes the point that quantitative methods should be part of the toolkit of all economic historians. In the first part I will show that quantitative methods have been obviously important in the rise of economic history as a field up the 1980s. In a second part, I will illustrate through examples that quantitative methods coming from various social sciences can provide use new ways of thinking about economic history issues. In the last part, I will show that while there are legitimate reasons to be worried about the limitations of quantitative methods, they can still be a very useful and fruitful way of doing economic history in a pluralistic scientific environment.