An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians

by Roderick Floud

The description for this book, Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians, will be forthcoming.

220 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1973

Reviews

[子涵]

Somewhat disappointing. The “methods” are roughly a first class on applied statistics, while the historian’s unique perspective on quantitative methods is missing. Readers with a non-statistical background might as well go directly to Statistics (Freedman et al., 1997), and others may get to know about Chayanov’s works (solid descriptive analyses of cross-sectional data). The matter is that quantitative historical research by economists is poor, with many assumptions directly contradicting historical facts (e.g., the classic paper examining the impact of sweet potatoes on the peasant revolts of the late Ming Dynasty in ancient China. The fact is that sweet potatoes did not spread to the northwest where peasant revolts were concentrated at that time), and many have a schematic and fragmented view of history. Quantitative history requires the participation of historians (a somewhat ironic statement) and a set of methodologies for handling and using the material that are generally accepted. The closest part of this book is the introduction, and I look forward to more works that really get to the heart of the matter.

[Eric Pecile]

If you are fancying doing any sort of historical analysis that will touch upon quantitative data, this manual is the optimal reference for those new to handling numerical data sets. Very dry, but an excellent and in some cases necessary point of reference for organizing figures in historical analysis.