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Unsatisfied with the traditional history, d'Avenel focused on quantitative data to understand the past. He built series of prices of multiple goods and services from 1200 onwards to document long-term changes in incomes and prices as a result of the technical progress and in inequalities as captured by the top 1%. Criticised by some contemporary historians, his data were used by Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Ragner Frisch or Alfred Marshall and are still exploited. His analysis fertilised various fields in particular the Annales School and his findings on social evolutions attract the interest of 21st-century social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines wine output and slave labor productivity in the Dutch and British Cape Colony, leveraging annual tax censuses. We document a substantial increase in wine production, but, despite substantial institutional changes over more than a century, we find surprisingly stable median wine yields. Exploiting the farm-level nature of our data, we observe increasing heterogeneity in wine yields, suggesting that some farmers were able to realize productivity increases. We show that efficient slave labor utilization was a critical driver of productivity enhancement, largely unaffected by external factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine‐readable data liberated by digitisation—alongside tools and exemplar studies—there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side‐lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science. The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We calculate, for the first time, farm-level wheat productivity for Cape Colony settler farmers in 1825. We can do so because we now have access to a fully transcribed tax census for that year. Although there is some variation in wheat productivity across the Colony, probably a result of the varying environmental factors, we find much larger variation within districts. We perform various tests to explain this large variation. We find, surprisingly, that slave labour has no explanatory power. Khoe labour, however, helps to differentiate farmers according to their productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Contemporary history, economic history and economics: a dialogue of the deaf? The application of econometric model transformed the economic history. This new approach has attracted a lot of interest on economists. Initially, from early Sixties, they applied the formal mathematical approach to re-interpreting the past with new tools and theory. This pushed the economic history towards cliometrics and historical economics. Secondly, since the early years of the 21st century, economists have started to look for the historical roots of current economic outcomes, dealing with the persistent studies, and publishing their works in top economics journals. On the contrary, traditional economic historians seems marginalized: business historians and global ones created their associations and journals, that interact actively with contemporary historians and their methods. The training path, the integration of economic history under economics, the structure of the top 5 journals in the discipline, and the formal approach separate a new dialogue between disciplines. Only an opening towards the complexity of history, the use and critics of sources as a base process for building databases as well as the creation of new interpretative syntheses could change the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the argument for renewed cliometrics that could serve history. Over the past century, history and economics have grown relying on each other, but an imbalance has appeared, as the space between history and economics has been occupied by the latter. Consequently, historians have tended to shun these fields of inquiry. I begin my analysis with a discussion of the complex set of separate domains that lie between history and economics, and I determine certain salient features that define them—in particular, the search for nomothetic explanations. I examine the reception of economic method by historians and point out that it has suffered both from this nomothetic angle and from the implicit presumption that economics is only applicable to the economy. Stressing the distinction between understanding and explaining in the philosophy of history, I show that, for historians, explaining should remain in the realm of history. I then propose that economics be considered a methodological auxiliary for understanding, a form of new cliometrics, which does not attempt to offer explanations. I also discuss some examples of using microeconomics as a critical methodology in the study of ancient Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We give an overview of the origins of the Cliometric revolution, its place within the larger economic history discipline, and what we see as the future of cliometrics and economic history, not as separate disciplines, but as complementary approaches to the study of economic growth in the long run.

Using inventions with a high degree of recombinant novelty as proxy for radical technologies, this work provides a long-run quantitative analysis of the relationship between radical technologies and productivity growth. The empirical analysis is based on a cliometric approach and relies on Granger's causality to test the sign and direction of causality between the flow of radical technologies and productivity levels, in the USA between 1920 and 2000. At the aggregate level, results show that radical technologies cause a temporary acceleration of productivity growth and explain a considerable part of productivity variations. At technology-field level, the analysis indicates that productivity growth is driven by a few technological fields, mainly concentrated in science based sectors and in the sectors of specialized suppliers of capital equipment. Finally, with respect to the controversial issue of the endogeneity of radical technologies, at the aggregate level we find no causal relationship running from productivity to radical technologies, suggesting that these are exogenous. However, at technology-field level, we find a few endogenous technologies. Most of these are "demand-driven" as their flow increases when productivity grows, but they have no impact on productivity. Only in one technological field, the flow of radical technologies increases when productivity decreases and, at the same time, has a positive impact on productivity. This latter case may explain why technological revolutions and the whole process of long-run economic development are partly endogenous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we illustrate what the contours of “Cliophysics” are. The term was coined by the “Cliometrics and Complexity” (CAC) team, composed of economists and physicists, and hosted by the Complex Systems Institute of ENS Lyon (IXXI). Cliophysics consists in the application of methodological tools from Complexity and Econophysics to the field of Economic history. More precisely, this new scientific challenge aims at combining Cliometrics, i.e. the application of economic modelling and econometrics to the field of Economic history, together with Complexity analysis and Econophysics. In this article, we highlight how using statistical signal processing, topological analysis and network analysis can enrich Cliometrics. To that end, we present three case studies taken from the research agenda developed within the CAC Team: 1) An original research in Cliophysics involving coïncidence analysis based on symbolic time series, aiming to revisit the classical standards of the link between public debt and economic growth in Economic history; 2) An approach in Cliophysics involving topological representations of asset markets networks, aiming to detect homogeneous eras of international monetary regimes; 3) An approach in Cliophysics involving the segmentation of multivariate time series derived from assets returns, aiming to allow for the identification of the structural breaks in the history of global capital markets. We provide evidence that Cliophysics 1) reveals new stylized facts in Economic history, 2) unveils key moments in the history of capital flows, different from the conventional view, and 3) fills a gap in historical analysis, by focusing on “structure matters in Economic history”.