Trends in real wage rates, 1750-1790: a reply to Hunt and Botham

Abstract

In their recent article in this Review Hunt and Botham2 stress that a handful of good data may well be worth more than a roomful of econometric produce emerging from worse data, and have accordingly taken up arms against a new orthodoxy, said to be emerging from the pens of such as Lindert and Williamson, McCloskey, Crafts and Schwarz-the last named being particularly singled out for indulging in the vice of gradualism and 'wencentric' history. However flattering the association, I never intended to connect myself with all the views on the industrial revolution held by the 'new' economic historians. I was merely concerned with pointing out that if the various arguments for slow growth during the later eighteenth century were correct, then there was little scope for an improvement in living standards for most of the population, especially if we superimpose on this slow growth in average per caput income a redistribution of income away from the labouring poor.3 If there should turn out to be extensive evidence of growth in real incomes per head in many parts of England between I750 and I790 then the macro-economic data will need correction, or alternatively, the depression in real wages in other areas must have been very considerable.4 It would not be surprising to see considerable regional divergence in real wage rates during a period of rapid economic development, and there is no compelling reason to expect national averages to be particularly meaningful during the industrial revolution. If some areas did have rising real wage rates between I750 and I790, this fact is significant since, as Sdderberg has recently demonstrated, real wage rates were tending to decline in most towns of western and central Europe at the time,5 usually because food prices rose and wages failed to keep pace. Those searching for an industrial revolution rendered ever more elusive by the macro-economists will be glad to find evidence that some areas had a contrary experience: hence the significance of Hunt's claim that the geography of wage rates reversed itself fundamentally between the I760s and the I790s, with the midlands and north emerging with relatively high wage rates and the south (excluding London) with