Pre-industrial England Research Articles

The Town Plans and Sketches of William Stukeley

The eighteenth-century field archaeologist, William Stukeley, travelled widely throughout England to produce the numerous sketches and plans that illustrated his Itinerarium Curiosum. His work has generally not been seen as having made a serious contribution to the cartography or to the portrayal of the towns and landscape of preindustrial England, but the quality of his sketches and the relative accuracy of his town plans are explored here to suggest that this may be too harsh a view.

The Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain, and Their Colonies. By Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 448. $110.00, cloth; $39.99, paper.

The Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain, and Their Colonies. By Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 448. $110.00, cloth; $39.99, paper.

Climatic Conditions and Productivity: An Impact Evaluation in Pre-industrial England

Climatic Conditions and Productivity: An Impact Evaluation in Pre-industrial England

Climatic Conditions and Productivity: An Impact Evaluation in Pre-Industrial England

In this paper, we bridge economic data and climatic time series to assess the vulnerability of a pre-industrial economy to changes in climatic conditions. We propose an economic model to extract a measure of total productivity from English data (real wages and land rents) in the pre-industrial period. This measure of total productivity is then related to temperatures and precipitations. We find that lower (respectively higher) precipitations (resp. temperatures) enhance productivity. Further, temperatures also have non-linear effects on productivity: large temperature variations lower productivity. We perform counterfactual exercises and quantify the effects of large increases in temperatures on productivity, GDP and welfare.

Malthus in cointegration space: evidence of a post-Malthusian pre-industrial England

This paper re-examines the interaction between population growth and income per capita in pre-industrial England. Our results suggest that, as early as two centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, England had already escaped the Malthusian Epoch and entered a post-Malthusian regime, where income per capita continued to spur population growth but was no longer stagnant. Our formulation of a post-Malthusian hypothesis implies cointegration between vital rates (birth- and death rates) and income and builds explicitly on a simple model of Malthusian stagnation. We show that this hypothesis can be interpreted as an extension of the latter model where the negative Malthusian feedback effect from population on income, as implied by diminishing returns to labor, is offset by a positive Boserupian and/or Smithian scale effect of population on technology.

Picking winners? The effect of birth order and migration on parental human capital investments in pre-modern England

This paper uses linked apprenticeship-family reconstitution records to explore the influence of family structure on human capital formation in preindustrial England. We observe a small but significant relationship between birth order, resources and human capital investments. Among the gentry, eldest sons were almost never apprenticed. Outside the gentry, a large number of apprentices were eldest sons, even from farming families. This Implies a relatively large place for a child’s aptitude and interest in shaping their career compared to custom or inheritance practices, making the “middling sorts” behave much more as families do in presentday labour studies than the contemporary elites. We also find a surprisingly high rate of return migration, questioning the emphasis on neo-locality and suggesting that parents could anticipate benefiting directly from positive externalities arising from the training provided to children. This interpretation also fits well with our finding that if parents had died before indenture, apprentices were significantly less likely to return home.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

The price of human capital in a pre-industrial economy: Premiums and apprenticeship contracts in 18th century England

Training through apprenticeship provided the main mechanism for occupational human capital formation in pre-industrial England. This paper demonstrates how training premiums (fees) complemented the formal legal framework surrounding apprenticeship to secure training contracts. Premiums varied in response to scarcity rents, the expected productivity of masters and apprentices, and served as compensation for the anticipated risk of default. In most trades premiums were small enough to allow access to apprenticeship training for youths from modest families.

The Preventive Check in Medieval and Preindustrial England

England's post-Reformation demographic regime has been characterized as “low pressure.” Yet the evidence hitherto for the presence of a preventive check, defined as the short-run response of marriage and births to variations in living standards, is rather weak. New evidence in this article strengthens the case for the preventive check in both medieval and early modern England. We invoke manorial data to argue the case for a preventive check on marriages in the Middle Ages. Our analysis of the post-1540 period, based on parish-level rather than aggregate data, finds evidence for a preventive check on marriages and births.

Malthusian Dynamics in a Diverging Europe: Northern Italy, 1650–1881

Recent empirical research questions the validity of using Malthusian theory in preindustrial England. Using real wage and vital rate data for the years 1650-1881, I provide empirical estimates for a different region: Northern Italy. The empirical methodology is theoretically underpinned by a simple Malthusian model, in which population, real wages, and vital rates are determined endogenously. My findings strongly support the existence of a Malthusian economy wherein population growth decreased living standards, which in turn influenced vital rates. However, these results also demonstrate how the system is best characterized as one of weak homeostasis. Furthermore, there is no evidence of Boserupian effects given that increases in population failed to spur any sustained technological progress.

Erratum to: Prices, wages and fertility in pre-industrial England

Erratum to: Prices, wages and fertility in pre-industrial England

Elderly, Family, and Age Support in Rural Galicia at the End of the Ancien Régime.

[elderlyold agefamily and age supportsocial and family reproduction ]] The attempt to ascertain the form and nature of familial age support in the past or, what comes to the same thing, the real degree of dependence or independence of the elderly vis-à-vis their families, relatives, and close ones, has led to a huge controversy among historians. But, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in rural areas otherwise as disparate as those of Galicia, inland Spain, Navarre, south Italy, preindustrial England or rural Belgium, the social, and economic functions in relation to age support within the household showed themselves capable of adapting to suit the particular needs of the different type of families prevailing in each one. This adaptation capacity in turn bore a close relationship to the greater or lesser role played by elderly household heads in the social and familial reproduction processes occurring in their home areas.

Survival of the richest? Social status, fertility and social mobility in England 1541-1824

We use data collected by the Cambridge Group to investigate and explain differences in fertility by socio-economic group in pre-industrial England. We find, in line with results presented by Greg Clark, that wealthier groups did indeed have higher fertility until the 1700s. We demonstrate that this had to do with earlier age at marriage for women. We then turn to the likely social and economic impact of this, considering Clark's hypothesis that ‘middle-class values’ spread through English society prior to the Industrial Revolution. Through the construction of social mobility tables, we demonstrate that the children of the rich were indeed spreading through society, but they were small in number relative to poorer sections of society, and moreover the children of the poor were also entering the middle classes.

Prices, wages and fertility in pre-industrial England

To shed light on the economic-demographic mechanisms operating in the epoch of pre-industrial economic stagnation, a two-sector Malthusian model is formulated in terms of a cointegrated vector autoregressive model on error correction form. The model allows for both agricultural product wages and relative prices to affect fertility. The model is estimated using new data for the pre-industrial period in England, and the analysis reveals a strong, positive effect of agricultural wages as well as a nonnegative effect of real agricultural prices on fertility. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that there is strongly decreasing returns to scale with respect to labour in the agricultural sector and approximately constant returns to scale in the manufacturing sector. The analysis provides evidence in favour of the usual Malthusian model, as invoked by unified growth theories such as e.g. Galor and Weil (Am Econ Rev 90:806–828, 2000).

Prices, Wages and Fertility in Pre-Industrial England

A two-sector Malthusian model is formulated in terms of a cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model on error correction form. The model allows for both agricultural product wages and relative prices to affect fertility. The model is estimated using new data for the pre-industrial period in England, and the analysis reveals a strong, positive effect of agricultural wages as well as a small and, surprisingly, positive effect of real agricultural prices on fertility. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that there is constant returns to scale with respect to labour in the manufacturing sector and strongly decreasing returns to scale in the agricultural sector.

LIVING BY DESIGN: C. R. ASHBEE'S GUILD OF HANDICRAFT AND TWO ENGLISH TOLSTOYAN COMMUNITIES, 1897–1907

Shortly before C. R. Ashbee transplanted a hundred and fifty Cockneys to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 to form a utopian arts-and-crafts community, two other back-to-the-land settlements were also established, one located outside the market town of Stroud, a mere bicycle ride away from Ashbee and his guild. These Tolstoyan colonies – Purleigh, founded in 1896 in Essex, and Whiteway, founded in 1898 in the Cotswolds – fostered goals of fellowship and the simplification of life, as had been modeled by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States and Edward Carpenter in Britain. Yet, whereas Ashbee was inspired by the model of William Morris and nostalgia for a pre-industrial England, English Tolstoyans looked not to craft, but to a less Aesthetic “bread labor” as a respite from modernity's corruption. Visiting Whiteway in 1904, Ashbee observed the Tolstoyans’ struggles to live off the land and commented, “they hold the other end of the stick we are ourselves shaping at Campden” (qtd. in MacCarthy 100). As his metaphor implied, both groups shared utopian aspirations, but Whiteway's settlers had sought the perfection of life from another vantage point and through other means. Ashbee regarded the austerity of their lives with distance and, as we will see, even with some distaste. Nevertheless, some features of the guildsmen's lifestyle at Chipping Campden mirrored those at Whiteway. This essay uses memoirs and fictions by C. R. Ashbee, his spouse, Janet Ashbee, and the Tolstoyans to disentangle the threads of “Aestheticism” and “simplification,” and to mark places of their conflation.

Communities of time-keeping in pre-industrial England and Wales: Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800

Communities of time-keeping in pre-industrial England and Wales: Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800

Religious Orders and Growth Through Cultural Change in Pre-Industrial England

We advance the hypothesis that cultural values such as high work ethic and thrift, “the Protestant ethic” according to MaxWeber, may have been diffused long before the Reformation, thereby importantly affecting the pre-industrial growth record. The source of pre-Reformation Protestant ethic, according to the proposed theory, was the Catholic Order of Cistercians. Using county-level data for England we find empirically that the frequency of Cistercian monasteries influenced county-level comparative development until 1801; that is, long after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The pre-industrial development of England may thus have been propelled by a process of growth through cultural change.

The determinants of income in a Malthusian equilibrium

This study constructs a simple, two-sector Malthusian model with agriculture and industry, and uses it to identify the determinants of income in a Malthusian equilibrium. We make standard assumptions about preferences and technologies, but in contrast to existing studies we assume that children and other consumption goods are gross substitutes. Consistent with the conventional Malthusian model, the present theory shows that productivity growth in agriculture has no effect on equilibrium income. More importantly, we also show that equilibrium income varies, not just with the death rate as has recently been demonstrated in the literature, but also with the level of productivity in the industrial sector. An empirical analysis using data for pre-industrial England lends support to both hypotheses.

Survival of the Richest? Social Status, Fertility, and Social Mobility in England 1541-1824

We use data collected by the Cambridge Group to investigate and explain differences in fertility by socio-economic group in pre-industrial England. We find, in line with results presented by Greg Clark, that wealthier groups did indeed have higher fertility until the 1700s. We demonstrate that this had to do with earlier age at marriage for women. We then turn to the likely social and economic impact of this, considering Clark’s hypothesis that ‘middle class values’ spread through English society prior to the industrial revolution. Through the construction of social mobility tables, we demonstrate that the children of the rich were indeed spreading through society, but they were small in number relative to poorer sections of society, and moreover the children of the poor were also entering the middle classes.

Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain Eric Schneider (bio) Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. By Joyce Burnette. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+377. £55. This book is the most forceful argument to date that gender wage differences and occupational sorting during the Industrial Revolution were based on market responses to real differences between male and female productivity, not on gender discrimination or custom. Joyce Burnette argues that productivity differences between the genders can be explained by two key factors. Most important, men's greater strength gave them a productivity advantage over women in manual labor, which resulted in men receiving higher wages for their greater productivity. Differences in human capital between men and women also contributed to the gender wage gap. Burnette sees strength as exogenous to the economic system because it was a product of biology, and human capital as endogenous because men and women had different incentives to invest in human capital. Thus, women earned approximately one-half to two-thirds the salaries of men performing the same task for equal periods of time because they were less productive. This argument challenges earlier historiography, which has emphasized the role of ideology, gender discrimination, and custom in determining women's wages. Burnette argues that ideological concepts of "women's work" rarely limited the industries in which women could work. Instead, conceptions of women's work reflected natural and efficient occupational segregation and were later harnessed by male unions in noncompetitive markets to justify the exclusion of women. Gender discrimination did not influence wages because men and women were given equal piece-rate wages for producing the same goods. Finally, women's wages were not set by custom because they varied over time and were responsive to regional economic pressures. Burnette also argues that, in competitive labor markets, occupational sorting based on strength decreased the gender difference in wages by allowing women to specialize in low-strength industries where they could [End Page 195] be more productive. This was the most efficient outcome for women and the economy as a whole. However, women were sometimes excluded from industries where labor markets were less competitive by men's distributional coalitions, which used ideological and discriminatory language to justify their attempt to maintain higher wages by excluding women. This outcome was less efficient for women and the economy. Of particular interest to the readership of this journal will be Burnette's discussion of how technological change shifted occupational structure. Because hand spinning in preindustrial England required little strength, women had a comparative advantage and performed most spinning work. Even with several substantial improvements in spinning technology in the early years of the Industrial Revolution—the spinning jenny and throstle—women continued to dominate the spinning industry because these new technologies were not strength-intensive. However, with the invention of mule-spinning, a task requiring a great deal of strength, women were pushed out of the spinning industry because men had a greater comparative advantage. After men became dominant in mule-spinning, they created unions and successfully excluded women after the self-actor decreased the strength requirements necessary to operate the machine. Thus new technology that either increased or decreased strength requirements could significantly influence occupational sorting in the economy. I agree with Burnette that strength did create real differences in productivity between men and women, but these productivity differences could have had an endogenous as well as exogenous determinant. For example, Burnette too readily dismisses the influence of gender inequality in the distribution of food in the household, which has been shown to leave women in a weaker and less-productive state than men. Therefore, it may not be possible to remove gender roles and ideology from gender differences in productivity and wages, even if wages were determined by the marginal product of female and male labor. In addition, in order to definitively prove that wage differences were determined by productivity differences and not by custom, Burnette would have to show quantitatively that wage differences were greater for occupations where strength was more important than in occupations where strength was not important. This is a difficult task given the paucity and nature...