Why was the First Industrial Revolution English? Roman Real Wages and the Little Divergence within Europe Reconsidered

Mauro Rota and Jacob Weisdorf

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: We compare early-modern Roman construction wages to Judy Stephenson’s downward-adjusted construction wages for London. We find that Roman workers earned at least as much as their London counterparts in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution, challenging the high-wage-economy explanation for why the Industrial Revolution was English and not Italian. We argue, however, that daily construction wages present a poor testing ground for the high-wage hypothesis, proposing instead that wages are compared among permanent employees in sectors less prone to seasonality and economic fluctuations than construction work.

Keywords: Construction Work, Convergence, Divergence, Industrial Revolution; Living Standards; Prices, Wages. JEL Classification: J3, J4, J8, I3, N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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