What is Historical Dialectic Materialism?

 

I was first introduced to the terms Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism in an advanced sociology course on Marxism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At the time, I didn't understand how important the concepts were to understanding Quantitative History. Hopefully, I can communiate my understanding in this post.

Notes

The drawing at the beginning of this post pictures Marx and the British museum in the process of researching. When I visited the Brisih Museum, I asked where Marx sat when he was writing and they didn't know but it was probably somewhere in the Socials Science section (reasonably). So, I sat in a chair there and contemplated!