INTRODUCTION

Few topics in economic history generate more controversy than the British industrial revolution – and arguably no debate in economic history is more famous than the ‘standard-of-living debate’. In the post-war period, the question of whether the early stages of modern capitalism led to an improvement or a decline in workers’ living standards became as hotly contested as many of the Cold War’s other theatres. Marxist historians argued that, in exchange for ever longer hours of grinding toil in the factories, the working classes had little to show by 1850 in terms of living standards except for a few cotton goods (Hobsbawm 1972). Optimists such as Max Hartwell pointed to gains in real wages and life expectancy, and to the move to the cities as the escape from the ‘idiocy of rural life’ (Karl Marx).

When O’Brien and Engerman (1981) discussed the issue in the first volume of The Economic History of Britain, they emphasised that future research would most likely have to focus on three topics: improvements in the measurement of real wages, of inequality, and of the changes in welfare not measured by income. Twenty years on, it appears that their intuition was remarkably prescient – two of these areas have contributed most to our reassessment of changes in living standards between 1760 and 1850. The issue of inequality, however, is too controversial to permit firm conclusions (Williamson 1985; Feinstein 1988). Consistent wage series by skill category have proven extremely difficult to compile, and there is no conclusive evidence that the share of total income paid to capital rather than labour moved significantly; the issue will therefore not be covered in this chapter.