This article examines the evolution of English living standards during the early phase of industrialization (1760–1850). We take a multi-dimensional perspective and apply an indicator that combines four key dimensions of well-being: material living standards, health, working time, and inequality. Contrary to other composite measures of well-being, our welfare metric draws on standard economic theory to aggregate its underlying components. We find decreasing welfare during the late eighteenth century due to rising working time and income inequality, despite improving health. After 1800, workers’ conditions improved when real wages started to rise, although the cumulative effect was not substantial by 1850.
We investigate the demographic effects of forced labor under an extractive colonial regime: the Cultivation System in nineteenth-century Java. Our panel analyses show that labor demands are strongly positively associated with mortality rates, likely resulting from malnourishment and unhygienic conditions on plantations and the spread of infectious diseases. An instrumental variable approach, using international market prices for coffee and sugar for predicting labor demands, addresses potential endogeneity concerns. Our estimates suggest that without the abolition of the Cultivation System average overall mortality in Java would have been between 10 and 30 percent higher by the late 1870s.
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