In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was considerable interest among the scientific and business communities in the relationship between work, fatigue, health and productivity. Study after study not only documented well-known relationships between occupation and disease...

Throughout the period 1871-1938, the average British worker was better off than the average German worker, but there were significant differences between major sectors. For the aggregate economy, the real wage gap was about the same as the labour productivity gap, but again there were important...