The welfare and quality of life of people in the past is one of the most important areas of historical enquiry and the standard of living of populations is one of the leading measures of the economic performance of nations. Wages, and the living standards that are derived from them, have been at the heart of economic and social history since the nineteenth century and have featured prominently in many of the disciplineâs great controversies and debates. Just as more than half a century ago Hartwell , Hobsbawm and a host of others disagreed about the welfare of the working classes in industrial revolution England,1 so Postan , Harvey and Hilton disputed the severity and causes of the subsistence crises of the early fourteenth century.2 Statistics claiming to measure living standards by the price of labour and its subsistence are necessary underpinnings for economic ideas about relative development and âpoverty and progressâ across the globe, commentaries and explanations of the advancement of northern Europe and the backwardness of the south after 1700, the speed of technological change and the Great Divergence between Asia and north-western Europe. Indeed, it has increasingly been argued that measurements of real wages are all that is needed to work out an international development pecking order, since â[a] high wage economy was likely to be industrialized; a low wage one was notâ.3
Wages and real incomes also supply the statistical backbone for enduring Malthusian ideas about the lack of progress before industrialisation, for studying inequality and whether growth was led by consumption or production.4 They have played a crucial role in helping to provide explanations of many complex areas of social and demographic history, such as the reasons why populations rise and fall and the relative roles played by birth and death rates, the impact of industrialisation on the welfare of the working classes, the causes and consequences of changes in diet, nutrition and health, the incidence of social protest, the dispensing of charity, the operation of the poor law and much more besides.
Yet, how reliable are the wage and income data that for decades have provided the long-run measurements of the standard of living that underpin such vast sweeps of history? The chapters in this volume add materially to a rising tide of evidence and argument that indicate that they are unreliable and beset by weaknesses, biases, inaccuracies and misapprehensions. While also rehearsing long-standing criticisms, these chapters present a wide range of powerful new evidence and reasons why the virtually universal dependence on the now conventional historical wage rates and real wages, embodied in such recent landmark works as Robert Allenâs 2001 study of the real wages of European building workers from the middle ages to the First World War, Gregory Clarkâs 2007 study of the real wages of English casual agricultural labourers from 1209 to 1869, and the Great Divergence debate, is misguided.5 At its core, this book challenges the fundamentals of the construction of âreal wagesâ across seven centuries and many countries of the world, and questions whether the sources and methodology currently used are capable of providing reasonably accurate knowledge of the welfare of populations of the past. It also suggests a range of improved methods and new data for revising the existing series and compiling new.
Prices and consumption are, of course, essential components of any calculation that turns money wages into real wages and thence into standards of living, and they receive attention in many of the following chapters. However, the balance of this book is tilted towards the study of wages and the income derived by working people from their labour . This is because the need for substantial improvements in the recording of prices, the analysis of household budgets and the construction of baskets of goods tailored to the consumption habits of people with differing levels of income has been widely accepted and is being addressed, whereas knowledge and understanding of wages and incomes have lagged behind as historians and economists cling to notions developed in the 1950s and before of the representativeness of day wages largely restricted to the fields of building and agricultural labouring.6
Clear bias in the most popular sources has habitually been ignored in the search for more data to feed advancing econometric modelling. The accounts kept by big, rich institutions are the most consistent, continuous and prolific for the recording of wages and prices, but unfortunately they are not representative of the generality of employers and employment or of consumers and consumption. The character of these institutions meant that they tended to hire certain types of workers to perform certain types of work on particular terms of employment, and to purchase and consume goods and services that were exceptional in quantity, kind and price. Moreover, the extraction of data from the accounts of the past requires considerable care because the paymasters, comptrollers, auditors, bailiffs and treasurers who kept them were not adhering to any general accounting standards. There were no reporting conventions, nor were there any regulated bodies who monitored the gathering of consistent and correct statistics. Records were kept by officers for the purposes of their own organisations, and the results are as varied and as idiosyncratic as one might expect. However, all too often the difficulties inherent in such records have been brushed aside as the burgeoning literature continues to treat them as if they provide accurate records of pay and earnings.
The easy availability of a relative abundance of seemingly precise and consistent data in the form of a male daily wage paid in cash has triumphed over confronting the formidable difficulties set in the way of gaining a more accurate picture by tackling sub-contracting, piece rates, bonuses, non-pecuniary rewards and supplements, by-employments, seasonal variations in the availability of work and the wages received for it, the substantial contributions made to most household budgets by the earnings of women and children, the subsistence and profits made from holding land and livestock and much more besides. The over-reliance on what are taken to be a precise and easily manipulated male day wage has also led to an exaggeration of the importance of wages and wage labour , especially in pre-modern centuries and economies. Not only was a considerable amount of hired labour , and in some industries the majority, paid by the piece rather than by the day, the bulk of labour powering huge swathes of the economy, and in particular farming, came from family enterprises and the self-employed and relied heavily on female labour as well as male.7 More than this, the social, moral and customary context of the wage was vitally important. Even when the records state the precise sum paid for a dayâs work, it does not necessarily mean that it was paid promptly and fully in cash, or that it comprised the whole of the transaction.8
The study of historical living standards has been blighted by a widening gulf between the ability to process huge quantities of data and the quality of the data that are processed. Since the 1960s many fields of economic history have been revolutionised by âcliometricsââthe use of statistics, economic theory, econometric analysis and data processingâto ma...