Judy Stephenson's careful study, Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction 1660–1785, has implications that fundamentally revise much received knowledge of early modern English economic development. Through a tightly focused analysis of workers’ wages and contractors’ managerial techniques in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London building industry, Stephenson argues that much of the data that economic historians have used to construct their picture of wages, costs, incentives, and consumption are highly inaccurate. The implication of this work is that some of the most ambitious and influential interpretations of early modern English economic history are built on sand.

In her introduction, Stephenson clearly lays out the main claim and historiographical intervention. Against Robert Allen's assertion that high wages in London help explain why Britain industrialized first, she argues that wages were not in fact nearly as high as often accepted. Specifically, data taken from the accounts of London construction sites like St. Paul's Cathedral, extracted and published in series long used by economic historians as representative of southern England in general, in fact “are mostly not wages at all” (34). Rather, they were “prices for services, just one part of complex contracts that managed and mitigated risks” (34). In subsequent chapters Stephenson delves into these sources, the accounts of institutions with long-term urban building projects, and make the case that they were not records of direct payments to laborers and hence cannot be considered direct evidence of wages.

As explained in chapters 3–5, such payments were made to contractors who should be seen as sophisticated “entrepreneurs” (65) operating on large scales, and whose prices—though often expressed in terms of laborer per day—included hidden fees for overhead, interest, management, and profit. These were “purposeful organizational and contractual arrangements that apportioned and priced risk, minimized monitoring costs, mitigated hold-up problems and the effects of bilateral monopoly, and provided finance” (106). The precise costs of such work are inferred and reconstructed from archives that do not provide full accounting of these services. Readers may disagree with the assumptions underlying such reconstructions; for example, I question whether contractors’ foregoing interest should be accounted as a cost, or whether contractors would need both to pay themselves for their own time and generate an additional profit. But such reservations are possible because the discussion is admirably detailed and transparent. The payoff of such reconstructions, and of Stephenson's attention to day laborers in chapters 6–8, is the finding that London workers, both skilled and unskilled, made substantially less money that is generally accepted, and they probably also had less frequent employment. The “high-wage economy,” in sum, did not exist.

Beyond that crucial revision, there are a number of other implications to this study that are important even though not fully explored, potential interventions that remain implicit. Building contractors are presented here as sophisticated entrepreneurs who provided labor oversight and technical expertise, absorbed risk, and fronted capital. This could have significant implications for understanding the rise of capitalism in the early modern period, a subject currently explored primarily through state finance or colonial trade. If archives that we thought recorded casual labor in fact reveal highly managed firms, what else does this tell us about the period of the long run-up to England's industrialization? If unskilled wages are lower than thought, how can we then explain the thousands of immigrants who moved to London annually? Do these findings confirm the importance of women's work? Presumably men earning lower wages would have been unable to support families and to afford discretionary expenditure on decencies, minor luxuries, and entertainment that abounded in the capital, unless women also made significant contributions to household income. More broadly, how do lowered wage levels alter the picture of urban poverty, the impact of economic cycles, or the development of the middling sort? Abandoning the high-wage economy has broad implications for historians’ understanding of early modern Britain, but Stephenson does not engage here with the historiographies that would allow such implications to be explored, nor does she draw on any of the qualitative sources that could show how early modern people understood these dynamics.

While the quantitative research is meticulous, the book itself, as a publication, is done with less care. There are numerous items cited in the notes but omitted from the bibliography, various irregularities in citation style, typos, and text in footnotes copied verbatim from other notes in the book. The key argument and much of the discussion and evidence have been published elsewhere. For example, the claim that London wage series are inaccurate and distort our understanding of early modern English economic history in general, and the high-wage explanation for industrialization advanced by Allen in particular, was made in an article by Stephenson in the Economic History Review in 2018 and in a reply to Allen's response in the same journal in 2019 (Judy Z. Stephenson, “‘Real’ Wages? Contractors, Workers, and Pay in London Building Trades, 1650–1800,” The Economic History Review 71:1 [2018], 106–32; Stephenson, “Mistaken Wages: the Cost of Labour in the Early Modern English Economy, a Reply to Robert C. Allen,” The Economic History Review 72:2 [2019], 755–69). The arguments and much of the data also appear in a co-edited 2018 volume and in still further articles (John Hatcher and Judy Z. Stephenson, ed. Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages: The Unreliable Data, Sources and Methods that Have Been Used for Measuring Standards of Living in the Past [2018]). Given this, as well as the cost of this book and the limited care apparently taken by the publisher, most scholars with access to the journal articles will have little need for this volume. Though the book itself is dispensable, its interventions are of fundamental importance.