ABSTRACT
The economic historian, even more than his colleagues in other fields of historical inquiry, has a liking for documentary evidence—a marked tendency to prefer archives to annals and other literature. The historian will of course be aware of the insights, and even information that books can give him, and he will appreciate the relevance to his researches of the image of a society as reflected in the works of its authors and compilers. But whenever possible he will direct his main attention to the contemporary and immediate evidence or traces of historical events, in their original form, not as transmitted—and therefore transmuted—by a literary intermediary. The modern economic historian relies very largely on published and unpublished documentary and statistical materials. In the West, even the medievalist has at his disposal a mass of records, public and private, lay and ecclesiastical, central and local, on which to base his study of economic structures and economic change.
