Introduction: new advances in quantitative business history

The texts presents a special issue of Revista de Historia Industrial-Industrial History Review devoted to quantitative business history. After a brief overview of the role and position of quantitative approaches in the methodological debate in business history, we summarise some of the salient points of the articles included in this special issue. These articles highlight the valuable use of quantitative datasets and methods in business history. They also testify to the critical contribution of quantitative analyses in the historical investigation of topics in business strategy and the study of causal relationships between foundational elements of the business and financial systems. The papers also reveal the laborious process of constructing historical datasets suitable for quantitative analyses.