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The siege of political history did not stop there. Serial history, quantitative history and new economic history extended these critiques. The crisis of 1929 had already drawn attention to the economic phenomenon, and alongside new theories, such as Keynesianism, new approaches to economic history emerged. Ernest Labrousse (1895-1988) was associated with the "Annales," but his studies were more focused on the analysis of statistical series, leading to what Pierre Chaunu (1923-2009) would later term serial history. In the United States, authors such as Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) pioneered a new current that sought complete autonomy from history. This variant distinguished itself through the use of advanced statistical methods, marking the beginning of what became known as quantitative history. In the 1950s, the "New Economic History" emerged in the U.S., which can be simply defined as a discipline focused on studying past economic facts using models tested according to rigorous econometric criteria.
The new economic history emphasised absolute quantification and employed a hypothetical form known as the "counterfactual." Due to its methodology, this approach greatly fascinated historians and impacted political history, which could never achieve such scientific status since it was based on the unique, the singular, and the unrepeatable. Furthermore, the new economic history brought forth two Nobel prizes in economics (awarded to Douglas North and Robert Fogel in 1993), for their innovative research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional changes. Fogel's work revealed something surprising: in his studies on slavery in the United States, he concluded that the profitability of slave labour could be historically proven, suggesting that economic motives were not the primary cause for its abolition. If slavery in the South was shown to be highly lucrative, why was a violent and deadly civil war waged to end such an institution? In other words, these authors highlighted the limits of economics while underscoring the importance of decision-making factors.
