A new explanation for what actually happened before and during the Industrial Revolution. Wages were rising all along, it being annual incomes that increased as a result of longer work years.

Economists Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf have uncovered new evidence to show that modern economic growth started in the late 16th Century – 200 years earlier than previously thought. They also argue that Britain’s early economic growth was driven by having longer work years.

In research published in the October 2019 issue of The Economic Journal, the authors challenge the widely held view, based on wage rates paid to British day labourers, that western societies began to grow rich as late as the 19th Century.

They re-estimate the starting point of modern economic growth by collecting wage data for historical British workers who worked for an annual stipend rather than the daily wages used by previous researchers.

The paper itself is here.

The reason we don’t believe it? The division is into paid labour and leisure. This is the same mistake that modern commentators make about the average workweek today. We’re all still working 40 hour weeks, what happened to Keynes’ promise of 15 hours?

The bit that’s missing is that we all work very much fewer hours - sufficient reduction to meet Keynes’ prediction in fact - in unpaid household labour.

We do not insist that the early modern explanation is the same but we’d want to see at least consideration of the point. Early medieval farming life was based upon a large measure of household production for consumption within the household. One way of looking at the post-Black Death wage economy - combined with enclosure and so on - is the replacement of that household labour with market labour.

Missing this gives odd results. This paper - and many before it - tries to say that the villein was working perhaps 150 days a year. Commentators like Greg Clark and Juliet Schur indicate that peasants had 70 holidays a year, confusing holiday with Holy Day. This misses that said villeins did some market work and some household. They might farm their own 30 acres (say) and also have to do work on the Lord’s land by way of rent payment. Counting only that work done for cash and rent misses all of that household production, both in terms of the work year and also consumption.

One obvious point is that animal owning peasants who only work 150 days a year rapidly become non-animal owning peasants. The initial claim about the work year doesn’t make logical sense that is.

What does make sense is if we divide the year, correctly, into the current four divisions. Personal time, household production, market labour, leisure. What this paper, as so many others, is measuring is the substitution of market labour time for that household production. Yes, this will lead to greater incomes but as a derivative, from the greater efficiency of market over household production, not from an increase in labour hours themselves.

Another way to make much the same point. What was that first major advance in that Industrial Revolution? Spinning. Whose labour was replaced by that Jenny? The household labour of most of the women of the country. For that’s where spinning was done, it was a major labour occupation but it is never recorded as being market labour when done inside the household.

As when we measure working hours today we must include both household and market labour so too must we when looking at history. Without doing so the past just doesn’t make sense.

The usual estimation is that the average working year rose to 3,000 hours or so when the machines arrived. It’s only possible to assume the rise if we ignore all the work the peasants had been doing in their own fields, their own houses. It being that household labour that declined - exactly the same as the story of this past century.