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…

I have been looking into books for teaching quantitative historical methods to undergraduate students. In general the experience with exposing history students to numerical content is mixed. I therefore need a book that doesn’t presume that students would want to take a quantitative approach and which somehow makes numbers come alive in the way that…