Abstract
The welfare and quality of life of people in the past are among the most important areas of historical enquiry, and the standard of living of populations is one of the leading determinants of the economic performance of nations. Yet, the chapters in this volume argue that the long-run series of wages and real incomes that have for decades habitually provided the means by which these phenomena are measured, as well as the foundations of much of the writing of economic and social history across the centuries and the countries of the world, are extremely unreliable. One by one the authors systematically expose the multiple weaknesses, inaccuracies and misapprehensions of the standard wage and income data and expose the gulf that exists between the ever-increasing ability to process huge quantities of data, facilitated by spectacular advances in statistical techniques and computer technology, and the poor quality of most of the raw material that is routinely processed.
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Notes
- 1.
The early years of the debate are surveyed in Taylor ed. (1975), The Standard of Living in Britain During the Industrial Revolution.
- 2.
Surveyed in Campbell ed. (1991), Before the Black Death.
- 3.
K. Deng and P. K. O’Brien, ‘The Tyranny of Numbers’, Chapter 3 below.
- 4.
Clark (2007), A Farewell to Alms, pp. 1–16.
- 5.
Allen (2002), ‘The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War’; Clark (2007), ‘The Long March of History’; Broadberry and Gupta (2006), ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence’; Allen et al. (2011), ‘Wages, Prices and Living Standards in China 1738–1925 in comparison with Europe, Japan and India’.
- 6.
It should also be noted that the chapters in this book do not deal in detail with alternative measures of the standard of living and welfare, such as height, health, education and forms of government. For these approaches see Crafts (1997), ‘Some Dimensions of the ‘Quality of Life’ during the British Industrial Revolution’ and Floud et al. (2011), The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development.
- 7.
For the vital contribution of female labour see Burnette (2011), Gender, Work and Wages and Erickson (2008), ‘Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London’.
- 8.
See the chapters below by C. Muldrew and S. King and C. Muldrew.
- 9.
van Zanden (2009), ‘The Skill Premium and the ‘Great Divergence’
- 10.
See below, pp. 23–4, 27, 107, 233.
- 11.
Boulton, (1996) ‘Wage Labour in Seventeenth Century London’, p. 268.
- 12.
Scholliers and Schwarz eds (2003), Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe. See also the chapters by CÂ Muldrew and S King and C Muldrew below.
- 13.
Blonde and Hanus (2010) ‘Beyond Building Craftsmen’.
- 14.
Broadberry et al. (2015), British Economic Growth 1270–1870, pp. 257–8, 264
- 15.
Humphries and Weisdorf (2015), ‘Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850’; Humphries and Weisdorf (2017), ‘Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England’
- 16.
Woodward (1981), ‘Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England’.
- 17.
Woodward (1995), Men at Work.
- 18.
Hassell Smith (1989), ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth-Century England’; Yamamoto (2004), ‘Two Labour Markets in Nineteenth-Century English Agriculture’.
- 19.
See, for example, below, pp. 45–53 and pp. 123–36.
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Hatcher, J., Stephenson, J.Z. (2018). Introduction. In: Hatcher, J., Stephenson, J. (eds) Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96962-6_1
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