Price History Reconstruction
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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
- Allen, R. C. (2001). The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War. Explorations in Economic History, 38(4), 411-447. · DOI 10.1006/exeh.2001.0775
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.