Compare methods

	Price History Reconstruction	Historical Inequality Reconstruction
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1944	2011
Originator	International Scientific Committee on Price History (Beveridge, Hamilton, Posthumus); Ernest Labrousse	Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson
Type	Price-series compilation and indexing	Inequality estimation from grouped data
Seminal source	Labrousse, E. (1944). La crise de l'economie francaise a la fin de l'Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution. Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN: 9782130436201	Milanovic, B., Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (2011). Pre-Industrial Inequality. The Economic Journal, 121(551), 255-272.
Aliases	Mercuriale-based price series, Commodity price indexing, Labrousse price history, Conjunctural price analysis	Social table inequality estimation, Inequality possibility frontier, Extraction ratio analysis, Milanovic-Lindert-Williamson method
Related	4	4
Summary	Price history reconstruction is the foundational empirical craft of assembling long, continuous series of commodity prices and wages from the scattered archival record—account books of hospitals, colleges and monasteries, official market price postings known in France as mercuriales, customs and tithe records, and merchants' ledgers. Institutionalised by the International Scientific Committee on Price History in the interwar years, with William Beveridge, Earl Hamilton and N. W. Posthumus assembling national series, and given analytical depth by Ernest Labrousse's study of the conjuncture of the French Old Regime, the method turns raw quotations into standardised, spliced and weighted price indices. These series are the bedrock on which real-wage analysis, monetary history, and the study of economic crises all rest. Labrousse's anatomy of the cyclical movement of grain prices—and its role in the coming of the French Revolution—showed how price history could illuminate not just secular trends but the short-run conjunctures that shaped social and political upheaval.	Historical inequality reconstruction estimates how unequally income was distributed in pre-industrial societies that left no household surveys, by exploiting social tables—contemporary or reconstructed enumerations of social classes with their populations and average incomes, in the tradition of Gregory King's 1688 anatomy of England. Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson developed the modern framework, computing a Gini coefficient from these grouped data and then placing it in context with two further concepts. The inequality possibility frontier defines the maximum inequality a society could sustain once everyone must receive at least subsistence; because poor societies have little surplus above subsistence to redistribute upward, their feasible inequality is constrained. The extraction ratio—actual inequality divided by this maximum—measures how fully the elite extracted the available surplus. Together these tools let historians compare not just raw inequality but the rapacity of ruling classes across societies of vastly different average income.