Following completion of graduate school in the 1970s, I taught European (including British) economic history to graduate and undergraduate students for more than a decade. My more recent teaching and research has had a primarily U.S. focus, but over the years I kept track of the important revisions to the data and narrative provided by Bob Allen, Stephen Broadberry, Nick Crafts, Greg Clark, Knick Harley, Joachim Voth, and many others. Reviewing this book is an opportunity to take stock of how the contours of the subject have changed over the intervening decades.
In the half century since the publication of the first edition of Deane and Cole, an enormous amount of research in economic history has given us much richer foundations for thinking about the trajectory of British demographic and economic growth since the Domesday Survey. This new book, likely to be a reference and text for students of this history for the next several decades, provides detailed coverage across six centuries—from the late thirteenth to the late nineteenth.
British Economic Growth: 1270–1870 is divided into two parts. The first, somewhat longer, includes five chapters that develop the estimates of population and sectoral output (agriculture, industry, services) used to produce a long running series of GDP per head, the book's centerpiece. The authors provide a more or less complete road map to sources and they are clear about assumptions and where and why they preferred one source or method to another. Their care in documentation will be invaluable for future scholars.
Part II, Chapters 6–11, focuses on analysis, interpretation, and controversies, and covers inconsistencies between series on real wages rates and the authors’ preferred series on GDP per head, consumption bundles, particularly at the lower end, inequality, labor productivity, and finally, Britain's relative position over time with respect to other sometimes dynamic regions, in particular Italy, Spain, the Low Countries, China (under the Song dynasty), and Japan. Each chapter includes a summary, and the last chapter of the book is itself a summary of the book. Although this leads to some repetition, it will be useful for students who wish to know the book's general argument in an area, without necessarily getting down to bedrock.
Deane and Cole (British Economic Growth, 1688–1959, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, 1969) was assigned reading for my graduate class. They told a story consistent with the notion of a quickening and acceleration of growth in the late eighteenth century that marked the birth of the world's First Industrial Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965, 1979), to use the title of another book by Phyllis Deane that I required for undergraduates. At the time, the period before the late seventeenth century was more in the statistical shadows. We knew the broad contours of population and living standard growth in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, but what exactly was happening in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seemed something of a blur, with our impressions of it as likely formed by film, television, or literature as by disciplined empirical analysis.
It would be impossible, even had I the space, to do full justice to the abundance of data and interpretation offered here. The narrative in this new book revises and extends Deane and Cole in many important respects. But the analysis will not be without controversy. This is particularly so for the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries; the interpretations of the twelfth, thirteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries perhaps somewhat less so. The output per head series developed in the book identifies a sharp increase in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries following the famines and plague epidemics, then a long period of relative constancy until the last third of the seventeenth century when there is a very sharp increase which slows somewhat in the eighteenth century but then, accelerates in the nineteenth. The most notable contrast here is with Greg Clark, who argued provocatively that nothing much happened (England did not escape the Mathusian economy) until the nineteenth century.
The authors spend the entire Chapter 6 defending their estimates of output per head as superior to those built up from the income side, which rely heavily on series of real wage rates, which vary much more substantially than output per head between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. But their defense of output per head is not fully persuasive. In particular, it does not acknowledge the role different rates of capital accumulation or war expenditure may play in vitiating this variable as a proxy for living standards (p. 248). In addition, their interpretation of and what they mean by the industrious revolution needs clarification.
Their main objection to the real wage series is its failure to incorporate variation over time in days worked per year. In trying to reconcile the output per head trajectory with evidence on wage rates, which form the basis for an alternate narrative offered by Greg Clark and others, in which standards of living do not surpass those experienced in the 1400s until the last decades of the nineteenth century, the authors focus on how many days per year laborers were able to work. But it matters, setting aside the possibility the economy is demand constrained, whether an increased quantity of labor supplied is due to income effects, substitution effects, or preference shocks. If people wake up one day and want to work more for the same wage (Max Weber, anyone?) increased labor supply (everything else equal) will tend to drive down real wages (preference shock). If positive technological change brings forth new products and new processes, increasing real wages, and causes workers to supply more labor, we have substitution effects, my interpretation of deVries’ Industrious Economy (The Industrious Economy: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). That is very different from a scenario in which immiseration forces more labor from individuals as a strategy of meeting minimum subsistence requirements (income effects stabilize output per head in the face of declining wage rates).
We normally assume work has some disutility. Output per head in the U.S. South declined after the Civil War as women withdrew some of their field labor. We do not use this observation to conclude they were worse off after emancipation. In the concluding chapter, the authors summarize their views about what happened in England: “High daily real wage rates gave labourers the option of working less, which further reduced the supply of labour and placed additional upward pressure on wage rates. Low daily real wage rates, on the other hand, were an incentive to work harder, which in turn further depressed the rate at which labour was remunerated” (p. 415, also p. 276). The authors appear to have decided that, at least with respect to laborers, it's all income effects. It may well be that at these historical junctures, and at these income levels, substitution effects were thoroughly dominated, but the assumption should be explicit. Finally, unless I completely misunderstand the authors’ logic, the above passage twice conflates movements along a labor supply curve with shifts of it. The book aims to be definitive, but some of the interpretation is likely to remain contested terrain.
All in all, British Economic Growth: 1270–1870, provides a rich feast for students and scholars. Practicing economic historians will want this book in their library.
