Saturday, October 12, 2019

"How many days a year did people work in England before the Industrial Revolution?"

From the introduction to 2016's Dear Boomers and Gen Xers: "If You’re Over 40, Working More Than 25 Hours a Week Could Be Affecting Your Intelligence...":
As I noted in a 2011 rant against some of Jared Diamond's work, the life of a medieval peasant was not so completely filled with drudgery as some popular histories might lead one to believe:
...Painting the image of hunter-gatherer superiority he makes no mention of the agricultural peasants of the middle ages who worked between 180 and 260 days per year, the rest of the time being taken up with Sundays, feast days, holidays,  fair days etc.
On top of that, in a world where light was either by sun or by fire, the winter workday north of, say, the 45th parallel, was reasonably short.

Of course it wasn't all Holiday partaaay--famine, pestilence and war made their periodic visits--but the actual time spent working was most likely less than at present, at least for those folks who are currently attached to the workforce....
And from the Economic History Society's The Long Run blog, September 19:

By Judy Stephenson (University College London)
The full paper that inspired this blog post will be published on The Economic History Review and is currently available on early view here

DomeConstruction09
St Paul’s Cathedral – the construction of the Dome. Available at <https://www.explore-stpauls.net/oct03/textMM/DomeConstructionN.htm>
How many days a year did people work in England before the Industrial Revolution? For those who don’t spend their waking hours desperate for sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries, this question provokes an agreeable discussion about artisans, agriculture and tradition.

Someone will mention EP Thompson and clocks or Saint Mondays. ‘Really that few?’ It’s quaint.
But, for those of us who do spend our waking hours desperate for sources to inform wages and GDP per capita over seven centuries the question has evolved in the last few years into a debate about productivity and when modern economic growth began in an ‘industrious revolution’. A serious body of research in economic history has recently estimated increasing numbers of days that people worked from the late seventeenth century. Current estimates are that people worked about 270 days a year by 1700, rising to about 300 after 1750.

The uninitiated might think that estimates of such important things like the working year would be based on some substantive evidence, but in fact, most estimates of the working year that economic historians have been using for the last two decades don’t come from working records at all. They come from court depositions where witnesses told the courts when they went to and left work, or they come from working out how many days a worker had to toil to afford a basket of consumption goods.

This approach, pioneered by Jacob Weisdorf and Bob Allen in 2011, essentially holds welfare as a constant throughout history, and it’s the key assumption made in a new paper on wages forthcoming from Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf. Unsurprisingly for historians familiar with material showing the miserable conditions under which the poor toiled in eighteenth century Britain, this calculation frequently leads to a high number of days worked. It also implies that Londoners, due to higher day wages, may have had slightly more leisure than rural workers. Both implications might appear counterintuitive....MUCH MORE