History and Economic Life: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Economic and Social History Sources

History and Economic Life offers students a wide-ranging introduction to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to interpreting economic history sources from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.

Having identified an ever-widening gap between the use of qualitative sources by cultural historians and quantitative sources by economic historians, the book aims to bridge the divide by making economic history sources more accessible to students and the wider public, and highlighting the need for a complementary rather than exclusive approach. Divided into two parts, the book begins by equipping students with a toolbox to approach economic history sources, considering the range of sources that might be of use and introducing different ways of approaching them. The second part consists of case studies that examine how economic historians use such sources, helping readers to gain a sense of context and understanding of how these sources can be used. The book thereby sheds light on important debates both within and beyond the field, and highlights the benefits gained when combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to source analysis.

Introducing sources often avoided in culturally-minded history or statistically-minded economic history courses respectively, and advocating a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, it is an essential resource for students undertaking source analysis within the field.

Georg Christ is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK. His research focuses on the late medieval eastern Mediterranean and Veneto-Mamluk trade and political relations, the history of knowledge management and the late medieval socio-economic transition.

Philipp R. Rössner is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK, and Member of the Young Academy, Saxon Academy of Sciences. His publications and research interests are in late medieval and early modern German cultural and monetary history, history of capitalism, history of the Reformation, eighteenth-century Scotland, history of political economy and pre-classical economic reasoning (Cameralism, ‘mercantilism’).