Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution’ before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

Robert Allen and Jacob Weisdorf

No 10-14, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Consumer Revolution; Cost-of-Living Index; Day Wages; ‘Industrious’ Revolution; Industrial Revolution; Labour Supply; Standard of Living (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J43 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300–1830 (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuiedp:1014

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