Looking for work? Or looking for workers? Days and hours of work in London construction in the eighteenth century

Judy Stephenson

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper provides new information and data on how work and pay actually operated for skilled and semi-skilled men on large London construction projects in the early 1700s, and for the first time, offers detailed firm level evidence on the number of days per year worked by men. Construction workers' working days were bounded by structural factors of both supply and demand, men worked a far lower number of days than has been assumed until now. This has implications for our understanding of the 'industrious revolution', and industrialisation.

Keywords: England 18C; industrial revolution; industrious revolution; labour input; living standards; wages, building craftsmen. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J4 J6 N33 N63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-01-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84828/1/MPRA_paper_84828.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Looking for work? Or looking for workers? Days and hours of work in London construction in the eighteenth century (2018)
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:pra:mprapa:84828

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).