Quantification in History

Konrad H Jarausch and Peter A Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

The concept of quantification is defined and the evolution of quantification as a methodological tool in history is traced.
Originating in the early modern period and gaining greater prominence in the nineteenth century, quantification in history
came of age in the 1960s. For a time, in the 1970s and early 1980s, quantitative approaches seemed poised to revolutionize
history as a field. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, other approaches and methods, often drawn from anthropology and
literature and inspired by postmodernism, began to surpass quantification in popularity, and since the late 1980s, quanti-
tative work in history has been increasingly marginalized. But over the past decade, postmodernist approaches have lost
momentum in history, and there have been some small victories by quantifiers, particularly in the field of economic history.
Yet despite the fact that the approach remains indispensable for answering certain kinds of historical questions and despite
the effective employment of quantitative approaches by many historically inclined scholars in other social sciences, the future
of quantification in the discipline of history itself remains uncertain.

‘Quantification’ refers to a specific method of historical
research that departs from the prevalent practice of textual
analysis by actually seeking to measure changes in the past.
Due to the mass of data to be handled and the complexity of
the calculations involved, the application of quantitative
methods usually has to be computer assisted. In contrast to
a mere illustration of certain tendencies by tables or graphs,
quantification tends to use analytical statistics to probe rela-
tionships between and among certain variables. Such statis-
tical analysis also requires a high degree of formalization in
the research design that formulates hypotheses to be tested
and tries to combine them into models. The final aim of the
quantitative approach is not just to explain a particular set of
developments but to understand broader processes of change
and make a theoretical contribution to some facet of historical
understanding.
The Rise of Quantification
Within historical research, the development of quantitative
methods was a product of a particular constellation during the
1960s. Already during the Enlightenment, some scholars had
sought to describe socioeconomic developments by compiling
time series, and by the middle of the nineteenth century
national governments took on the task of determining pop-
ulation trends through a series of censuses. Nonetheless, it took
the shift to the ‘new social history’ a century later to get
historians to employ quantitative data in systematic ways and
to direct historical interests away from affairs of state to mass
politics, societal changes, demographic transformations, or
economic growth. At the same time, the arrival of mainframe
computers, followed eventually by powerful PCs, made it
possible to handle large amounts of data and to use compli-
cated statistical procedures in customized form via statistical
packages such as SPSS or SAS. In order to explore these exciting
new subjects with novel techniques, historians became inter-
ested in the theoretical constructs of the social sciences,
borrowing eclectically from political science, sociology, or
demography and somewhat less so from economics. The result
of this interaction was the rapid development of a new hybrid,
combining elements of historical research with social scientific
analysis.
During the 1970s, this ‘social science history’ or ‘historical
social science’ was successfully institutionalized. In the United
States, the multitude of initiatives in history and the neigh-
boring disciplines combined in founding the Social Science
History Association in 1975, and made its annual meeting
a showcase of the most innovative work. In France, many of the
long-term community studies, produced by the Annales School,
turned quantitative, compiling detailed time series of pop-
ulation, prices, or wages and probing their interrelationship. In
Germany, the quantifiers linked with the theory-oriented
project of a Historische Sozialwissenschaft to create a vigorous
organization, called QUANTUM (Kocka, 1984). Within the
decade, a spate of new journals emerged to provide publication
outlets for the new work, such as the Journal of Social History,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, Social
Science History, Histoire et Mésure, and Historical Social Research.
New textbooks (Dollar and Jensen, 1971; Floud, 1979; Jarausch
and Hardy, 1991) as well as influential anthologies (Aydelotte
et al., 1972; Lorwin and Price, 1972) provided a powerful
platform for the propagation of quantitative research.
Research Contributions
The first field transformed by quantitatively oriented work was
the new political history, which differed from its predecessor by
its attention to collective phenomena (Bogue, 1983). For
instance, Michael Kater investigated the rise of the Nazi
movement in Germany by analyzing its membership files,
indicating precisely which social stratum, religious group,
gender, region, etc. joined the bandwagon at what time. For
democratic societies like the United States, Lee Benson’s or Alan
Bogue’s analysis of electoral behavior proved quite productive,
since comparing returns over time made it possible to establish
which polls were the critical elections when party realignments

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 19 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62147-5 695
696 Quantification in History
were transformed by ethno-cultural or other factors. For
parliaments without party discipline, Thomas B. Alexander’s
roll-call analysis also offered a powerful instrument for estab-
lishing who actually voted with whom, indicating what
networks dominated legislative behavior. This retro-projection
of political science methods gradually provided a firmer
empirical basis for an analysis of the transformation of mass
politics in the last two centuries.
The second area that was deeply affected by quantitative
methods and conceptual borrowing from sociology was the
new social history (Stearns, 1985). As ‘history from the bottom
up,’ this perspective examined previously untouched serial
records such as police files, employment registers, or draft
books in order to infer from the behavior of ordinary people
what they might have felt and thought. The appeal of this effort
was the diffusion of its topics, since the labor history of the
Tillys included subjects as different as proletarian living
conditions and workers’ collective efforts at protesting through
strikes. Another question, treated, for example, by Hartmut
Kaelble, concerned the pattern of social mobility, comparing
the relative openness of societies to upward or downward
movement over time or across borders. A related issue was the
societal impact of education that required an analysis of the
enrollment and composition of schools or universities in order
to get at changes in educational opportunities (Ringer, 1979).
These quantitative probes produced much new and sometimes
conflicting information about the lower orders, the make-up of
institutions, and basic trends in societal transformations.
A third area propelled by computer-assisted source collec-
tion and statistical analysis was the field of historical demog-
raphy (Hareven and Vinovskis, 1978). For time periods before
national censuses, the demographers faced the challenge of
reaggregating vital statistics from the ground up by converting
parish registers into reliable measures of natality, nuptiality, or
mortality. Under the direction of Anthony Wrigley, the Cam-
bridge population project established the outlines of a pop-
ulation history for England, while the demography center in
Umea undertook a national project of quantifying church
records so as to explain demographic changes in Sweden.
American demographers like John Demos and Tamara Hareven
instead combined individual life-event data to scrutinize the
development of family structures from extended via stem to
nuclear families and the like. Other scholars such as Roderick
Floud and Richard Steckel studied changes in the height and
stature of military recruits or slaves in order to develop more
accurate measures of biological well-being and social depriva-
tion. This historical demography amassed a source base for the
prestatistical era and produced interesting interpretative
concepts for explaining the population transition.
The final area in which quantification transformed research
priorities and methods was the new economic history (Davis
and Engerman, 1987). Redirecting attention away from entre-
preneurship, ‘cliometrics’ as it was also called inspired efforts to
establish indicators of national production and income for the
prestatistical age as well as to transform information from
manuscript censuses into published form. In the United States,
a heated debate revolved around the profitability of slavery,
with Robert Fogel’s and Stanley Engerman’s claims producing
much controversy, due to their combination of economic and
moral argumentation. Much attention also focused on the key
factors of economic development, such as railroads, with some
scholars actually arguing that their impact had been exagger-
ated. In Europe, discussions revolved around the pattern of
industrialization instead, with some specialists like Sidney
Pollard proposing a more complex regional diffusion model.
On the whole, the quantitative impulse made economic history
more rigorous and theoretical, but removed it at the same time
further from the mainstream of historical debate.
By the 1980s, these signal contributions had managed to
overcome traditionalist skepticism and to establish quantifi-
cation as a new and growing subfield within the historical
discipline. Though they were sometimes difficult to read for the
layperson, high-quality monographs convinced reluctant
granting agencies to fund major collective initiatives such as the
Philadelphia Social History Project, directed by Theodore
Hershberg. The number of articles with graphs and tables in
respected historical journals began to reach almost one-quarter
(Kousser, 1989). Opinion surveys of the profession suggested
that most scholars expected quantification to be here to stay.
Even if some critics still bemoaned the spottiness of graduate
training in this area, the rapid rise of quantitative methods in
historical research had been impressive and their future pros-
pects seemed secure.
The Culturalist Challenge
During the decade of the 1980s, however, the seemingly
unstoppable progress of the quantitative history ‘project’ began
to stall (Johnson, 1989). By the middle of the decade, the
number of quantitative journal articles and the frequency of
graduate courses in quantitative techniques suddenly began to
drop precipitously (Reynolds, 1998; Ruggles, 2012). This trend
has continued ever since, and over the past 20 years (plus or
minus five!) quantitative history has become increasingly
marginalized, as a variety of other methods rose to promi-
nence, making so-called quants seem rather quaint. Ironically,
the demise of quantitative history has occurred simultaneously
with the development of enhanced technology, more complete
datasets, and increasingly sophisticated models and methods,
which, taken together, have rendered quantitative history
potentially more useful than ever before.
The factors responsible for this loss of attention are still
being debated vigorously. Some scholars attribute the prob-
lems afflicting quantitative history to the initial overselling of
the method by insufferable practitioners who promised more
insights than their research was able to deliver. These critics,
comprising largely traditionalists, have always been suspicious
of the proposition that history had anything to learn from the
social sciences and have long bristled at heady sentiments such
as that expressed by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who predicted
in 1967 that in the future “the historian will be a programmer
or he will be nothing” (Rabb, 1983). The most famous (or
infamous) of such critiques is almost certainly that of Carl
Bridenbaugh, who in his American Historical Association
presidential address in 1962 stated that “[t]he finest historians
will not be those who succumb to the dehumanizing methods
of the social sciences,” nor those who “worship at the shrine of
that Bitch-goddess, QUANTIFICATION” (Bridenbaugh, 1963).
In later years, other skeptics such as Bernard Bailyn and

Lawrence Stone were more subtle, calling not for the explicit
abandonment of quantification, but instead for a revival of
narrative history.
Another reason was the cultural turn of many younger
historians who rejected both the materialist premises and the
positivist vision of most practitioners of quantitative history.
To these critics, quantitative representations of the past were at
once too cold, too remote, too impersonal, and too abstract.
Large datasets were said to dehumanize, and ‘soulless’ quanti-
fiers were assumed to be ready, like Marx’s bourgeoisie, to
drown all human sentiments “in the icy water of egotistical
calculation” (Coclanis, 1992). Moreover, in making fetishes of
rigor and precision, quantitative historians purportedly
attempted to exact more from the vast, vague, largely
unknowable past than historians had any right to claim.
Instead, the past was reconfigured as a foreign country, to
invoke the title of historian David Lowenthal’s influential 1985
book (Lowenthal, 1985).
The changing demographics of the historical profession,
particularly in the United States, also served to reinforce the
trend toward qualitative approaches. As history opened up to
women and minorities – groups, generally speaking, less
inclined to pursue quantitative approaches to the past –
quantitative history could be expected to decline in a relative
sense. Just as women and minorities have been underrepre-
sented in the hard sciences over the years, they have proven less
interested in the more social scientific sides of history. Though
both groups have embraced social history as a vehicle for their
identity politics, relatively few of their members can be found
in fields such as economic history, historical demography, or
quantitative political history.
During the 1980s, many historians turned instead to
cultural anthropology for methodological inspiration. Reject-
ing the rigorous, formal, and remote data-driven ‘truths’ sought
by quantifiers, scholars interested in experience and meaning
preferred in-depth microstudies, whether of single villages,
small groups, or even well-documented individuals. Gradually,
‘thick description’ came to trump ecological regression, crude
death rates, and multiple R-squares, no matter how robust! The
philosophical basis of this shift to anthropology was the rise of
postmodernism, which deprecated the rationalism, univer-
salism, and empiricism of historical social science. By the late
1990s, the ascendancy of cultural studies thus left quantifiers
off in a corner silently counting all by themselves.
Recent Developments
In a general sense, the spiral has continued downward for
quantitative history over the past 10 years, but, when examined
more closely, the overall pattern – and prognosis – for the
approach becomes far more complicated. On the one hand,
there is abundant evidence that quantitative approaches
continue to languish among historians. With such trends as the
‘history of emotions,’ today few articles and books emanating
from scholars in history departments employ quantitative
methods; history courses in quantitative methods – and,
indeed, those that once taught them – have largely been
mothballed, and few departments display interest in, much less
privilege, the quantitative skills of applicants to their graduate
Quantification in History 697
programs. Some associations and journals have withered and
died – the British-based Association for History and Com-
puting and its journal History and Computing, most notably –
and there are virtually no job listings for quantitative histo-
rians (Anderson, 2008).
On the other hand, excellent historical work employing
quantitative methods continues to appear, albeit generally by
social scientists working with historical data. Economic histo-
rians, the vast majority trained as economists and working out
of departments of economics, have produced an impressive
body of work over the past decade, and an exceptional new
journal – Economics and Human Biology – has become the
principal venue for quantitative work in historical anthropo-
metrics (Coclanis, 2010). Some of the interest among
economic historians was spurred by the so-called Great
Recession (2007–09), which led many economists to look
anew at earlier periods of severe economic distress (particularly
the Great Depression of the 1930s, but also the depressions of
the 1870s and 1890s).
Quantitative history has flourished as well over the last
decade in disciplines other than economics. Indeed, what
(quantitative) historian Steven Ruggles has labeled QUASSH
(quantitative social science history) is booming in allied social
sciences, with top journals in demography, sociology, political
science, and geography frequently featuring historical work
with a quantitative bent (Ruggles, 2012). Nor does this trend
begin and end with the traditional social sciences. For example,
the emergence of new fields such as digital humanities and
historical information science that place heavy emphasis on
computing and on electronic-data storage and retrieval has
proven a boon to quantitative history. Moreover, many
historically minded linguists and specialists in literature have
embraced quantitative methods in their work, with Stanford’s
Franco Moretti probably the most notable – and certainly
controversial – of the literary scholars going the quantitative
route (Moretti, 2005). Thus, if all is not well in history
department corridors for quantitative approaches to the past,
such approaches are more than holding their own in other
preserves of the academic realm.
The Continued Importance of Quantification
The current disregard of quantitative methods in the discipline
is unfortunate, since quantification continues to be an essential
technique for historical research. Some questions can best be
answered through recourse to what Sir William Petty referred to
in the seventeenth century as ‘Number, Weight, or Measure,’
and it is more than ‘physics envy’ that has drawn scholars to
quantitative analyses of the past. Even after conceding that
many early practitioners were a bit overly zealous in their
claims, it seems fair to suggest that quantitative history can
provide the methodological discipline, intellectual rigor, and
moral purpose that subjectivist forms of history often lack.
With all due respect to such influential postmodernist thinkers
such as Baudrillard and Lyotard, not every aspect of the past is
positional, free-floating, and contextual. Moreover, historians
are better trained to handle and preserve data from the past
than social scientists who often take figures at their face value.
The challenge therefore is not to abandon quantification to the
698 Quantification in History
social scientists, but to create a constructive dialogue between
quantitative and qualitative methods (Grossbart, 1992; Has-
kins and Jeffrey, 1990; Hudson, 2000).
The utility, indeed, the necessity of quantitative history
seems more compelling in light of important new develop-
ments in the field. Technological constraints have eased
considerably, for example, as miniaturization and digitaliza-
tion in the electronics industry have advanced. Today’s
personal computers, programmable calculators, and other
platforms offer tremendous power and, thus, computational
possibilities to quantitative historians. Similarly, new devel-
opments in statistical packages, spreadsheets, GIS (geographic
information systems) programs, text analysis and retrieval
software, file-sharing packages, and the like have vastly
expanded the array of data-gathering and analytical tools that
can be used in quantitative research on historical questions.
The increasing availability of new and/or enhanced sources
and datasets also presents unprecedented research opportuni-
ties. Materials readily retrievable from established institutions
such as the ICPSR (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and
Social Research) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and data available
online from the World Bank, the International Money Fund
(IMF), the Eurostat (EU), and other governmental, quasigo-
vernmental, and nongovernmental organizations and agencies
are transforming the nature (and sites) of scholarly production.
The online version of the millennial edition of the Historical
Statistics of the United States, datasets assembled by Yale’s
Cambodia Genocide Program, the University of Minnesota
Population Center’s IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Micro
Sample) Project, drawn from US census records, and the East
German central cadre files – to cite but four examples – are of
similar scholarly importance, and have tremendous potential
as teaching tools. Various research projects undertaken under
the auspices of, or promoted by the now defunct Association
for History and Computing, founded in England in 1987, have
proven extremely useful as well (Anderson, 2008).
At the same time, quantifiers have in recent years developed
more sophisticated methods, allowing them to analyze and
interpret historical questions with greater sensitivity and
precision. Economic historians, for example, have used game-
theoretical approaches, complex experimental approaches in
laboratory settings, and advanced econometric techniques to
excellent effect, and anthropometric historians have employed
important new procedures from auxology and biostatistics to
facilitate their reconstruction of our biological past (Komlos,
1992; Steckel, 1995; Steckel and Rose, 2002). Economic and
social historians, along with historical sociologists, have also
employed regression analysis in more subtle and refined
ways, using temporally recursive regression procedures, when
appropriate, instead of standard time-series regression tech-
niques. And psephologists – political scientists specializing in
election analysis – are using increasingly powerful analytical
tools in their analyses of historical voting data.
Other quantitative historians have begun to ‘push the enve-
lope’ in different ways, in so doing, often trespassing on the
territory of scholars in other social sciences or even in the
humanities. Thus, as procedures such as social network analysis
(SNA), event-structure analysis (ESA), and quantitative language
analysis are successfully employed in answering historical
questions – quantitative analyses of major ‘texts’ in order to
produce so-called semantic grammars, for example – non- and
anti-quantifiers ignore the results at their peril (Anderson, 2008).
In addition, quantitative historians’ recent incorporation of
spatial relationships into historical analysis through spatial-
effects regression models and the like has produced similarly
impressive results (Griffin and van der Linden, 1998).
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the future
prospects of quantification in history are therefore indistinct.
Clearly, individual quantitative historians, among the profes-
sion’s most avid proponents of scientific rationalism, univer-
salism, and empiricism, are continuing to expand the frontiers
of their research and are still making important contributions.
But whether or not the interest of mainstream historians will
return to quantification and the subfield as such will ever
again recapture the excitement and energy it possessed in the
1970s remains an open question. The relative popularity of
various approaches does not just depend on the quality of
their scholarly work but on the larger tides of intellectual
fashion. However, one unexpected development offers some
cause for optimism: Though quantitative historians are
hanging on for their professional lives, historically inclined
political scientists, economists, demographers, and sociolo-
gists are winning kudos in their respective disciplines by
bringing quantitative methods to bear on the past.
See also: Anthropology and History; Data Bases and Statistical
Systems: Archives and Historical Databases; Economic History;
Event History Analysis: Applications; Historical Thought and
Historiography: Current Trends; History and the Social
Sciences; Hypothesis Testing: Methodology and Limitations;
Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in History;
Measurement Theory: History and Philosophy; Network
Analysis; Postmodernism: Methodology; Slaves and Slavery,
History of; Social Mobility, History of.
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