Parish Records as Data: Mining Religious Documents for Demographic History
How baptisms, marriages, and burials in church registers become the raw material for reconstructing populations that left no statistical accounts of themselves.
Literacy Measurement: How Signature Rates Reveal Educational Progress
What can millions of signatures and X marks teach us about education, inequality, and economic development?
Reconstructing Medieval Living Standards: What Price Data Reveals About Daily Life Before Capitalism
Fragmentary medieval price records and wage rolls reveal surprising truths about material life before capitalism—truths that challenge both romantic and dystopian assumptions.
Birth Spacing and Fertility Control: Detecting Deliberate Family Limitation
Statistical forensics reveals when couples began choosing smaller families—centuries before they could admit it.
Counting the Dead: How Mortality Statistics Transformed Public Health
How the systematic counting of deaths created the empirical foundation for evidence-based public health intervention
Urbanization Metrics: Tracking the Long March to Cities
Decoding millennia of urban growth through quantitative analysis reveals why cities emerged where they did and what their size distributions tell us about society.
Grain Prices and Famine: The Statistical Signature of Subsistence Crises
How price series reveal market integration, institutional response, and the quantifiable pathway from harvest failure to demographic catastrophe.
The Great Divergence in Numbers: When and Why the West Pulled Ahead
Statistical evidence reveals how tiny growth differentials compounded across three centuries to create the modern wealth gap between nations.
Social Mobility Through the Centuries: Measuring Who Rises and Falls
Centuries of data reveal social mobility follows remarkably consistent patterns across vastly different societies, challenging assumptions about both progress and decline.
Measuring Empire: Quantifying the Costs and Benefits of Colonial Rule
Fiscal records and trade statistics reveal colonial extraction measured in trillions, while showing empire enriched narrow elites on both sides of the imperial divide.
Height as History: What Human Stature Reveals About Past Living Standards
Skeletal remains and military records reveal hidden welfare dynamics that challenge our understanding of economic progress and inequality across centuries.
The Malthusian Trap Revisited: Why Pre-Industrial Living Standards Barely Changed for Millennia
Centuries of wage-price data reveal why technological progress failed to improve living standards until humanity finally achieved escape velocity from the population-resource trap.
The Cliometric Revolution: How Economics Transformed Historical Research
How a mid-century methodological insurgency reshaped historical inquiry and what its controversies reveal about interdisciplinary knowledge production.