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Use and Misuse of Price History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Earl J. Hamilton
Earl J. Hamilton
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 4 , Supplement S1 , December 1944 , pp. 47 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1944

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References

1 Since nothing could be gained from the wanton destruction of old account books, they suffered little from the type of warfare that prevailed prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Wars and revolutions have not prevented Mexico from having, in the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, the leading economic archives in the New World. Documents in the archives of Belgium, “the cockpit of Europe,” enabled Henri Pirenne and his students to enrich and revise medieval economic history. By far the best price records extant are in Italy—the battleground of Europe since the Middle Ages. I am willing to hazard the guess, based on a partial exploration, that the richest price data in any archive of western Europe are in the account books deposited in the Archivio di Stato at Florence, which have never been used by a price historian. Since they are housed in the same building with the Galleria di Arte e Uffici, apparently they have survived the battle of Florence. But with aerial bombardment, long-range artillery, robot bombs, and total war— undiscriminating in their selection of victims—historical records run great risks. Too voluminous and unappreciated to find refuge in underground vaults, price records now face greater hazards in total war than do diplomatic and political archives, which are subject to the triple danger of transportation in wartime, destruction by the vanquished, and robbery by the victor.

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5 Price historians have not infrequently discovered, to their dismay, at the end of a quarter century or more of assiduous labor that previously compiled index numbers based on the quotations of a very few articles—sometimes only two.or three—haphazardly thrown together from heterogeneous sources for widely scattered years have disclosed the trend of prices almost as accurately as their laboriously constructed indices from homogeneous series embracing monthly or quarterly quotations for dozens of commodities.

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