Showing papers by "Jane Humphries published in 2019"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.
Abstract: The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low-productivity, low-wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.
69 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day and found that the current global downturn in labour's share is not exceptional but fits within the range of historical fluctuations.
Abstract: Estimates of historical workers' annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but underestimate labour incomes during the Industrial Revolution. Our revised estimates indicate that modern economic growth began more than two centuries earlier than commonly thought and was driven by an 'Industrious Revolution'. They also suggest that the current global downturn in labour's share is not exceptional but fits within the range of historical fluctuations.
60 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined changes in children's economic value as key to economic and demographic trends in Britain but there has been little data with which to examine these putative effects, and presented data on payments, both in cash and in kind, made to 3873 children from 1280 to 1860.
16 citations
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TL;DR: This article used a family perspective to quantify the labour inputs required from women and children in circumstances when men's earnings alone were insufficient to secure a decent standard of living, and so to register the historical relevance of the male breadwinner model.
Abstract: We use new estimates of men, women, and children's wages in combination with cost-of-living indices to explore family living standards across six centuries of English history. A family perspective enables us to quantify the labour inputs required from women and children in circumstances when men's earnings alone were insufficient to secure a decent standard of living, and so to register the historical relevance of the male breadwinner model. We employ a life-cycle approach where pre-marital savings help married couples manage increasing numbers of dependent children as well as other periods of economic pressure. We find that the male breadwinner model was generally insufficient for a 'respectable' standard of living; women and sometimes children were required to contribute and, even then, couples still faced poverty during old age. However, with the exception of the pre-Black Death period and the first half of the 17th-century, child labour was not essential and in the early modern era and old-age poverty was in retreat. We reconcile our findings with evidence of a surge in child-labour in the late 1700s and early 1800s, with reference to early modern economic growth, and its association with industriousness and consumerism, twin developments which served to stimulate the Industrial Revolution.
1 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used archival and printed primary sources to construct the first long run series of wages for hand spinning in early modern Britain and found that spinners' wages were low even compared with other women workers and did not follow a trajectory which could explain the invention and spread of the spinning jenny.
Abstract: In our earlier paper we used archival and printed primary sources to construct the first long-run series of wages for hand spinning in early modern Britain. Our evidence challenged Robert Allen’s claim that spinners were part of the ‘High Wage Economy’, which he sees as motivating invention, innovation, and mechanisation in the spinning section of the textile industry. Here we respond to Allen’s criticism of our argument, sources and methods, and his presentation of alternative evidence. Allen contends that we have understated both the earnings and associated productivity of hand spinners by focussing on part-time and low-quality workers. His rejoinder is found to rest on an ahistorical account of spinners’ work and similarly weak evidence on wages as did his initial claims. We also present an expanded version of the spinners’ wages dataset, which confirms our original findings: spinners’ wages were low even compared with other women workers and did not follow a trajectory which could explain the invention and spread of the spinning jenny.