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Why was the First Industrial Revolution English? Roman Real Wages and the Little Divergence within Europe Reconsidered

Why was the First Industrial Revolution English? Roman Real Wages and the Little Divergence within Europe Reconsidered

400/2019 Mauro Rota and Jacob Weisdorf
working papers,economic history

400/2019 Mauro Rota and Jacob Weisdorf

We compare early-modern Roman construction wages to Judy Stephenson’s downward-adjusted construction wages for London. We find that Roman workers earned at least as much as their London counterparts in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution, challenging the high-wage-economy explanation for why the Industrial Revolution was English and not Italian. We argue, however, that daily construction wages present a poor testing ground for the high-wage hypothesis, proposing instead that wages are compared among permanent employees in sectors less prone to seasonality and economic fluctuations than construction work.

Economic History