How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A....

Estimates are developed of the major macroeconomic aggregates – wages, land rents, interest rates, prices, factor shares, sectoral shares in output and employment, and real wages – for England by decade between 1209 and 2008. The efficiency of the economy 1209-2008 is also estimated. One...

How much of Britain's high living standards and military power compared to its competitors in 1850 should be attributed to Britain having first experienced the Industrial Revolution? Examining data on real wages in the north and south of England, the Netherlands and Ireland in the Industrial...

The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Ricardo all demanded its abolition. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted...

Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, the empirical support for this vital assumption in the preindustrial world is weak. Here we examine the...

The paper uses building workers’ wages 1209-2004, and the skill premium, to consider the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Real wages were trendless before 1800, as would be predicted for the Malthusian era. Comparing wages with population, however, suggests 1640 actually...

The paper forms three series for English farm workers 1209-1869: nominal day wages, the implied marginal product of a day of farm labour, and the purchasing power of a days’ wage in terms of farm workers’ consumption. These series suggest that labour productivity in English agriculture was...

English fertility history is generally regarded as having been composed of two re-gimes: an era of unregulated marital fertility, from at least 1540 to 1890, then the modern era, with regulated marital fertility, lower for higher social classes. We show there were in fact three fertility regimes...

Occupations listed in wills reveal that as early as 1560 effectively only 60% of the English engaged in farming. Even by 1817, well into the Industrial Revolution, the equivalent primary share, once we count in food and raw material imports, was still 52%. By implication, incomes in...