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Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300–1830
Author(s) -
ALLEN R. C.,
WEISDORF J. L.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.014
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1468-0289
pISSN - 0013-0117
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00566.x
Subject(s) - industrial revolution , consumption (sociology) , economics , scope (computer science) , labour economics , work (physics) , working hours , demographic economics , market economy , sociology , political science , social science , law , engineering , mechanical engineering , computer science , programming language
It is conventionally assumed that the pre‐modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.