The Cambridge Economic History of Europe

New estimates of nominal earnings and the cost of living are presented and used to make a fresh assessment of changes in the real earnings of male and female manual workers in Britain from 1770 to 1870. Workers' average real earnings are then adjusted for factors such as unemployment, the number of their dependants, and the costs of urbanization. The main finding is that the standard of living of the average working-class family improved by less than 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s. This long plateau is shown to be consistent with other economic, political, and demographic indicators.

/pdf/pessimism-perpetuated-real-wages-and-the-standard-of-living-47ae9fgsfk.pdf

Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution

In this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change. We illustrate, from agricultural history, how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non‐market institutions. We also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change. In a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments, cultural endowments, technology, and institutions.

Toward a Theory of Induced Institutional Innovation

The familiar transaction-costs model is extended to allow for the varying costs and benefits of supervision and pain incentives on the one hand, and ordinary rewards on the other, in differentially effort- and care-intensive activities. Applied to unfree labor, this model accounts for the observed patterns of slave governance and manumission in extractive, industrial, agricultural, and service activities in antiquity and in the New World. Applied to free labor, it accounts for wage work on large estates in labor-surplus medieval England or modern Italy, the choice between bonuses and penalties in industrial contracts, and the growing paternalism of our own time.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022050700032307

Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective: A Model

This paper has two aims. One is to outline an interpretation of the modern rise of population, based on the experience of England and Wales. This interpretation1 was derived from investigations of population growth in the eighteenth2 and nineteenth centuries3 undertaken, it seems to us in restrospect, in the wrong order. The other aim is to examine the credibility of the interpretation in the light of the different circumstances which existed in four other European countries: Sweden, France, Ireland and Hungary. These countries were chosen because they differ considerably from England and Wales and from one another in such important respects as the period and rate of population growth, the levels of birth rate and death rate and the timing of agricultural and industrial development. It is an exacting test of an hypothesis to enquire whether it can be accepted, if necessary with modifications and reservations, under such different conditions.

An interpretation of the modern rise of population in Europe.

Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880

The workshop of the world : British economic history from 1820 to 1880

Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century.

Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Life and Labour Under the Squirearchy

The agricultural revolution, 1750-1880

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