Standards of Living and Industrialisation

Abstract

Generations of students of modern British economic and social history have wrestled with ‘the standard of living debate’. Not for nothing has Peter Mathias [4] called it the ‘most sustained single controversy in British economic history’. Under the guise of the ‘condition of England question’ it obsessed men of the mid-nineteenth century as diverse as Engels, Disraeli, Chadwick and Macaulay, while in the twentieth century it has been central to the work of such distinguished historians as Ashton, Clapham, Hartwell, Hobsbawm and Thompson. Many different intellectual approaches have been used in the debate; this essay considers a new way of describing changes in the standard of living by measuring the height of the British population in the past.