Compare methods

	Counterfactual Historical Reasoning	Historical National Accounting
Field	History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1964	1962
Originator	Robert Fogel (rigorous cliometric form); Max Weber and Geoffrey Hawthorn (philosophical foundations)	Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole; later Angus Maddison, Robert Allen, Stephen Broadberry
Type	conceptual-analytic	descriptive-reconstruction
Seminal source	Fogel, R. W. (1964). Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN: 9780801805547	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204
Aliases	What-if history, Counterfactual analysis, Minimal-rewrite counterfactuals, Plausible-world reasoning	Historical GDP reconstruction, Pre-modern national accounts, Retrospective national accounting, Reconstructed historical accounts
Related	3	3
Summary	Counterfactual historical reasoning is the disciplined practice of asking what would have happened had some past condition been different, in order to assess whether that condition truly mattered. Every causal claim in history, that a railway, a war, an institution, or an idea made a difference, implicitly compares the actual world to a counterfactual one in which the supposed cause is absent. Counterfactual reasoning makes that comparison explicit and subjects it to rules: alter the antecedent minimally, keep the rest of the world as it plausibly would have been, and reason carefully toward the likely consequent. In its rigorous cliometric form, exemplified by Fogel's railroads study, the consequent is quantified as a social saving. But the general method is broader and conceptual, governed by criteria of minimal rewrite, plausibility, and explicit antecedent-consequent structure, and it underwrites causal inference throughout history, not only in its quantitative, economic variant.	Historical national accounting is the systematic reconstruction of a country's gross domestic product and its components for periods that predate official statistical offices. Where modern statisticians collect contemporaneous surveys, the historical accountant must assemble output from surviving fragments: tithe records, customs ledgers, probate inventories, guild accounts, harvest yields, and wage books. The method adapts the conventional output, income, and expenditure approaches of national accounting to the constraints of incomplete archival evidence, building value-added estimates sector by sector and reconciling them into an internally consistent whole. Pioneered for Britain by Deane and Cole and refined by Maddison, Allen, and the Broadberry school, it has produced annual GDP series stretching back to the medieval period. The resulting estimates anchor virtually all quantitative debate about long-run growth, the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence between Europe and Asia.