UPDATE (01/12/2017): the article can now been accessed in a ‘ahead of print’ online version on the following URL https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/1/17-0477_article In a recent blogpost on the current outbreak of plague in Madagascar, historian Monica Green wrote the following quote: ‘I see dead people. That’s my job. I’m a historian.’ This is also true for me,…

Sometimes economic and social historians have to get creative when trying to answer interesting questions using historical data. One of the things we would really like to know is how skilled and/or educated people were in the past. Education, or more commonly in the economic history literature – human capital, is an important determinant of…

A new working paper just went up on our sister site the CGEH (Centre for Global Economic History). Written by Jan Luiten van Zanden, of our own group, together with Emanuele Felice of the University of Chieti-Pescari it explores new estimates of Gross Domestic Product – GDP (so how much an economy produces) for 15th century…

Recently we did a hive mind exercise with the group of scholars who work in the Economic and Social history group at Utrecht University. I had been asked to look at a research methods course manual for second year undergraduate students, and provide a recommendation for an article that was quantitative in nature, reflected recent…