Shooting in the Dark: Recovering the Jewish Farmers of an American Zion

Abstract

The authors argue that the publication of any new historical data series requires a formal estimate of its margins of error. We show how overall margins of error may be calculated for the standard forms of historical data series from information on the reliability of its components. The presentation of such margins of error should be transparent, allowing readers both to judge the estimate and to test the implications of applying different standards. An illustration is provided for Hoffmann's industrial output series for Britain, 1780–1831. The calculations emphasize the value of this approach to the recent debate on measuring growth rates during the British Industrial Revolution and suggest its merits more generally.     

Machiavelli's scientific method: a common understanding of his novelty in the sixteenth century

This paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge (scientia), could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon.