Compare methods

	Price History Reconstruction	Historical National Accounting
Field	Economic History	Economic History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1944	1962
Originator	International Scientific Committee on Price History (Beveridge, Hamilton, Posthumus); Ernest Labrousse	Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole; later Angus Maddison, Robert Allen, Stephen Broadberry
Type	Price-series compilation and indexing	descriptive-reconstruction
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	Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199227204
Aliases	Mercuriale-based price series, Commodity price indexing, Labrousse price history, Conjunctural price analysis	Historical GDP reconstruction, Pre-modern national accounts, Retrospective national accounting, Reconstructed historical accounts
Related	4	3
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 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.