War and Cliometrics in an Age of Catastrophes

Roger Ransom ()
Additional contact information
Roger Ransom: University of California

A chapter in Handbook of Cliometrics, 2024, pp 2127-2164 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In an essay exploring the role ofCliometricsrole of cliometrics and economic history in the context of broader disciplines of history and economics, Claude Diebolt and Michael Haupert point out that: Perhaps the biggest challenge facing economic history is that in its attempt to pursue truth, economic history is at the same time too vast and too small. In a historical sense, we try to accurately compile all the facts relevant to a given topic of study. The smaller the topic, the easier it becomes to gather and arrange all the relevant facts, and the more rigorous the result is likely to be. … But for the historian who aims to create general truths, the economic, like any other conventional division of the subject matter of history, is too narrow a conception. (Diebolt and Haupert 2018, 3) The search for general truths is compounded by the tendency for scholars to stay within the confines of their academic disciplines. Military historians write military history, economic historians worry about problems of economic history and development, and cliometricians stay focused on the use of economic theory and statistical methods to predict the past with ever greater precision. Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in the study of war and economics in the twentieth century.

Keywords: Catastrophes; Cliometrics; War (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-35583-7_57

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031355837

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-35583-7_57

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().