Clio and the Economist: Making Historians Count

Abstract

Cliometrics has been with us for half a century. At least it was in 1960 that the word itself was coined by Stanley Reiter to describe a style of quantitative history that linked clio, the muse of history with measurement or more succinctly metrics. Three years earlier a joint session of the Economic History Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Income and Wealth was held in Williamstown, Massachusetts and many practitioners date the birth of cliometrics to those meetings. The task issue of the Journal of Economic History in 1957 was headed the integration of economic theory and economic history and contained some of the fruits of the pioneers' discussions and a summary of the proceeding by Simon Kuznets.Regular workshops of cliometricians date from 1960 and the discipline laid strong foundations over the following decade, most especially in the USA. Fogel (1964) published Railroads and Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, which stimulated intensive methodological debate among historians worldwide. Very quickly the British Economic History Society commissioned a paper by Fogel 'The new economic history: its findings and methods' which was published in the Economic History Review in 1966. The 'new economic history' and 'econometric history' were at that time alternate labels for cliometrics.The explicit connecting of economics with economic history was the hallmark of cliometrics as it developed in the USA. Reiter himself was a mathematical economist whose work included collaboration with economic historian Hughes to produce a paper, 'The First 1945 British Steamships' (Hughes andReiter, 1958) published by the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1958. That paper, along with a celebrated paper of two economists, Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, 'The economics of slavery in the Antebellum South', which also appeared in 1958 in the Journal of Political Economy are often associated with the birth of cliometrics (Conrad and Mayer, 1958). In a wider context the growth of cliometrics drew on the longer established traditions of quantitative economic history, and on concurrent developments in the social sciences and computing during the 1960s.

Cliometrics and Time Series Econometrics: Some Theory and Applications

“…Cliometrics has been with us for half a century and its original hallmarks were the links between economics and economic history see Greasley and Oxley (2010b). However, the use of econometric methods has become more common in quantitative economic history.…”

Is economic history changing its nature? Evidence from top journals

“…The Cliometric Revolution started in 1958 with an article by two economists on the efficiency of American slavery in the Journal of Political Economy (Conrad and Meyer 1958). They were followed by several young scholars with economics training who approached big issues in American economic history with then stateof-the-art economics and econometrics (Andreano 1970;Lyons et al 2007;Greasley and Oxley 2010;Diebolt and Haupert 2021). 1 Douglass North and Robert Fogel obtained new and provocative results, which attracted much interest among economists and earned them the Nobel Prize in 1993.…”

Discipline identity in economic history: Reflecting on an interdisciplinary community

“…Efforts to bridge the divide have been made and the evidence can be seen in texts such as Economics and the Historian (Rawski et al, 1996) and Making History Count. A primer in quantitative methods for historians (Feinstein and Thomas, 2002) and, less gently, in articles such as 'Clio and the economist: Making historians count' (Greasley and Oxley, 2010).…”