Dove va la storia economica? Metodi e prospettive, secc. XIII-XVIII (Where is Economic History Going? Methods and Prospects from the 13th to the 18th Centuries) (review)

In 1410, Francesco Datini, the son of Marco, better known to economic historians as the merchant of Prato, died, leaving behind the largest business archives of late medieval Europe, including over 120,000 letters received from partners and agents from across Europe and the Mediterranean. On the 500th anniversary of his death, the International Institute named after Datini devoted its annual conference to a broad-ranging assessment of the methods and perspectives adopted by economic historians of pre-industrial Europe (with marginal interest in the Ottoman Empire).

The volume is divided into four sections. The first, entitled "Old and New Insights in the Different Linguistic Regions: The Topics," contains eight chapters, each one concerning the varying fortunes and changing topical interests in the field, as seen from the academic scholarship in each of the main European languages and in Turkish. With a few exceptions (namely, Jan de Vries' confidence in the healthy condition of Dutch economic history), most of the authors lament a decline in interest in economic history among academic historians. They are often able to document this decline with quantitative surveys of peer-review journals' output and the relative representation of economic historians among university faculty. This section is the only one followed by a discussant's rejoinder—a useful tool that helps readers to reflect critically on several, disjointed contributions.

In his remarks, Marco Belfanti counterbalances the general pessimism by stressing the success of business history and the scholarship on recent economic phenomena and crises. He also maintains that "the golden age" of the economic history of pre-industrial Europe (which he dates to the decades between 1960 and 1990) coincided with a time when economic history provoked debates among a wider audience because of its methodological innovations. But Belfanti mainly hints at the question of how we might make that moment come alive again (with reference to the need for more collaboration among national historiographies and continued archival research). This theme looms large over the volume as a whole but is never addressed in a sustained fashion. The second section ("Old and New Insights: Tools") collects ten chapters, each devoted to one type of primary source used by economic historians—government records, notarial deeds, literary texts, maps, the visual arts, archeological digs, and the private collections of noble families and merchants.

The third section ("Old and New Insights: Relationships with Other Subjects") seeks to address the controversy surrounding the use of economic theory and quantitative methods (which emerges elsewhere as well). Paolo Malanima emphasizes the importance of both approaches and thus implicitly responds to Alberto Grohmann, whose earlier chapter bemoans the growing recourse to "economic and mathematical models" and "large data bases" at the expense of the use of "archival documents" (34-35). Mark Thomas states that "the economic history literature of early modern Europe was richly quantitative long before formal statistical methods became de rigeur" (430). He then examines the specific statistical methods that have had the greatest impact in the field—regression analysis of cross-section data and time series—but he also discusses nonparametric and spatial analysis, including Geographical Information Systems (gis). Guillaume Daudin continues this assessment by charting the use of different quantitative methods in journals accessible via jstor and by summarizing important insights gained through econometrics about specific topics. Supposing that "we all aspire at being foxes rather than hedgehogs" (458), Daudin offers a balanced account of the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative methods, which he examines in their broad variety, to include the "analytical narratives" advocated by new institutional economic historians whose ambition is "to extract generalizations from case studies" (471).

The volume ends with an eclectic "Concluding Round Table." Its first three chapters trace the representation of scholarship on the pre-industrial period in three academic journals...