The Malthusian intermezzo: Women's wages and human capital formation between the late Middle Ages and the demographic transition of the 19th century

Abstract

The paper offers a new explanation for ‘the great conundrum’, the acceleration of population growth in England in the second half of the 18th century. It is argued that it was not only population growth that was ‘different’ in England, but the stagnation of the rise of literacy and of human capital in general, seems to be an anomaly of this period. This ‘conundrum’ has been explained in the following way. It is demonstrated that in England the gender wage gap increased a lot during the early modern period, which was caused by: (a) the switch from post Black Death labour scarcity to labour surplus, which in particular harmed the economic position of women, and (b) changes in the structure of agriculture, leading to the rise of large-scale, capital intensive and labour extensive farms, which had a very limited demand for female (wage) labour. This is also suggested by the fact that on the Continent (in the Netherlands) a much smaller decline of female wages occurred, because there family farms continued to be quite important. Moreover, the decline of English wages had important effects on its demographic development. It helps to explain the decline of the average age of marriage of in particular women between 1600 and 1800, and the related increase in fertility that occurred in this period — resulting in a much faster rate of population growth after 1750 than elsewhere in Western-Europe. It also helps to explain the stagnation in human capital formation that occurred during the 18th and early 19th century — again a feature peculiar for the English development in these years. The explanation of ‘the great conundrum’ is therefore intimately linked to the changing position of women on the labour market and within marriage.