War and Cliometrics in an Age of Catastrophes

In an essay exploring the role ofCliometricsrole of cliometrics and economic history in the context of broader disciplines of history and economics, Claude Diebolt and Michael Haupert point out that: Perhaps the biggest challenge facing economic history is that in its attempt to pursue truth, economic history is at the same time too vast and too small. In a historical sense, we try to accurately compile all the facts relevant to a given topic of study. The smaller the topic, the easier it becomes to gather and arrange all the relevant facts, and the more rigorous the result is likely to be. … But for the historian who aims to create general truths, the economic, like any other conventional division of the subject matter of history, is too narrow a conception. (Diebolt and Haupert 2018, 3) The search for general truths is compounded by the tendency for scholars to stay within the confines of their academic disciplines. Military historians write military history, economic historians worry about problems of economic history and development, and cliometricians stay focused on the use of economic theory and statistical methods to predict the past with ever greater precision. Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in the study of war and economics in the twentieth century.