This book seeks to fill an important gap in the economic history of England. Craig Muldrew patches together evidence from a variety of sources to investigate the living conditions of agrarian farmers in England on the eve of industrialization. In general, the lack of attention to the material living conditions of the agrarian sector is an important gap in our knowledge of the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution—while the share of the population engaged in farming was declining during this period, the workers in this sector were producing more per acre but not enough to keep prices from rising. Even more, more people were working on someone else's land at the end of this period. How did this affect their lives, productivity, and consumption?

Although Muldrew does not frame it as such, his book is really about the macroeconomic production function for England from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. He first begins the book by making an important clarifying point: the assumption that “poor” and “agrarian laborer” were one in the same is a modern phenomenon, contemporaneous discussions do not confuse the two classes. Muldrew then seeks to document the inputs (namely food) and outputs (consumption) of agrarian households. This is an organic production function—the food consumed by workers fueled their productivity in the fields and their ability to purchase consumer goods in the market.

Especially of note to economic historians, Muldrew makes two points. The first concerns the large literature on the relationship between diet and productivity before the Industrial Revolution. Muldrew uses a variety of sources to empirically analyze what was eaten by the families in this sector. I was particularly impressed with Muldrew's clever use of data to obtain reasonable estimates of the amount of meat, beer, milk, vegetables, and other foodstuffs over this time period. In addition to the estimates we derive from aggregate measures of agricultural production, Muldrew makes novel use of recipes, contemporaneous advice about healthly diets, descriptions of food preparation, and other sources in a detailed description of the narrative record to analyze how food was used and prepared to develop his estimates. This is, in my view, the most novel contribution of the book. Sketching out the nutritional value of historical diets is very difficult, and one must make a number of assumptions about wastage and the quality of the food eaten to derive estimates. While he must make some assumptions, the methodological approach is new: Muldrew makes a major advance by separating what was eaten from how it was prepared and consumed. These two pieces of nutrition form the bulk of the book.

He makes a convincing argument that agrarian households ate bread, beer, meat, vegetables, dairy, fruit, sugar, and spices in a manner that led to a surplus of calories available to work, and to work very hard. He argues that there were certainly enough to engage in the work necessary to produce the food that they did. Muldrew concludes that individuals were consuming roughly 3,000 calories per day in 1600 and 4,000 per day in 1800. These estimates are much larger than those drawn from aggregate estimates based on total agricultural production. While Muldrew views this finding as contradictory to the work of Robert Fogel, who estimated lower levels of calories, I view it as complementary. Fogel's arguments about nutritional adequacy are about net nutrition and Muldrew's lack of evidence about the disease environment still gives plenty of room for Fogel's argument to be consistent with the evidence if diseases and infection were endemic. Even with abundant calories, high rates of disease and infection can cause malnourishment. Similarly, Muldrew does not account for the feedback between diets and diseases over this time period, which Fogel has argued were in a positive feedback loop.

The second point that Muldrew makes is that, contrary to the idea of an industrious revolution, the increased consumption of agrarian households was not very large. The fact remains that consumption did increase over a period of rising food prices, so material living standards did improve somewhat. Using a large number of inventories of household items drawn from probate records, Muldrew finds that the number of items owned by households increased modestly from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the value grew somewhat modestly over the same time period. In general, there was a modest move to higher-quality items, but few of the households possessed luxury items as those in upper classes did. While the use of the probate records is novel, Muldrew does make one error in inference—having a large sample does not imply a representative one. Muldrew's conclusions almost certainly hold for a sizable share of agrarian households, but we do not know if they should be extended to agrarian households in general, who were unlikely to use the probate court. Even with this caveat, the finding does question the extent of the industrious revolution in consumption.

Muldrew pulls this analysis together by documenting how families were able to manage this transition to a somewhat higher standard of living given the rise in food prices. He finds that the labor and wages paid to other household members became increasingly important during this time period. The hidden gem in this book is the fact that Muldrew documents the changes in household production (where more secondary and tertiary household members contributed to the home) that are heavily documented for industrial families and shows that they also apply to agrarian families before the Industrial Revolution. To the extent that there was an industrious revolution, it was in the changing family composition of earnings.

Overall, Muldrew's work is a fascinating blend of sharp, theoretically informed analysis of the historical record to answer open questions in the literature. Scholars interested in agricultural productivity, nutrition, consumption, and household production would do well to follow Muldrew's example of creative and transparent use of primary sources. Muldrew is to be commended for his skill with the sources and his creative use of them. While his analysis does not completely overturn the existing narrative, it does offer an empirically grounded base for further exploration.