Late marriage as a contributor to the industrial revolution in England

James Foreman‐Peck and Peng Zhou
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: James S. Foreman-Peck

Economic History Review, 2018, vol. 71, issue 4, 1073-1099

Abstract: Was the European marriage pattern an important contributor to England's precocious economic development? This article examines this question by embedding the possibility in a historically substantiated demographic‐economic model, supported by both cross‐section and long time series evidence. Persistent high mortality and powerful mortality shocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lowered life expectations. Subsequently increased life expectancy reduced the number of births necessary to achieve a given family size. Fewer births were achieved by a higher age at first marriage of females. Later marriage not only constrained population growth but also provided greater opportunities for female informal learning, especially through ‘service’. In a period when the family was the principal institution for socializing future workers, such learning was a significant contributor to the intergenerational transmission and accumulation of human capital. This article shows how, over the centuries, the gradual induced rise of human capital raised productivity and eventually brought about the industrial revolution. Without the contribution of late marriage to human capital accumulation broadly interpreted, real wages in England would not have increased strongly in the early nineteenth century and would have been much lower than actually achieved for several centuries.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12651

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:71:y:2018:i:4:p:1073-1099

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0117

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History Review is currently edited by Stephen Broadberry

More articles in Economic History Review from Economic History Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().