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.