INTRODUCTION

Suppose that a deadly plague had swept through Britain in 1860, exterminating its entire population of 23 million people. Suppose then that immediately thereafter a sea-borne group of 23 million unschooled Eskimos (Inuit) had come upon Britain and settled the initially unpopulated area, but still possessing all the buildings, machinery and materials of the mid-Victorian economy at its height. One would expect a massive fall in the production of the economy to occur, given the unsuitability of Eskimo skills for the mid-Victorian environment and economy of Britain. This should be attributed to a mismatch of skills, not to some inherent naïveté of the Eskimos. Indeed, an analogous transference of the mid-Victorian British population north of the Arctic Circle would result in a similar initial drop in output relative to Eskimo levels, and survival itself would be at stake, given the unsuitability of Victorian English skills for subsisting in an Arctic environment.

Just how large the fall would be is of course subject to considerable speculation. One can get some sense of possible magnitudes by looking at the difference between the actual share of national income going to labour in Britain c. 1860 and the share that labour would have received if paid at unskilled wage rates. Labour’s share of national income for Britain in 1856 has been estimated at 57.8 per cent (Matthews et al. 1982: 164). Gross domestic product for the United Kingdom in 1860 has been put at £683 million (Feinstein 1972: T4). The United Kingdom working population in 1860 was around 12.98 million people (Feinstein 1972).