In his classic works on the industrious revolution, Jan de Vries argues that demand for new consumer goods trigged eighteenth century Europeans to work more. This implies that industrious behaviour and new consumption patterns were two parallel and interdependent processes that preceded the industrial revolution. However, there is an alternative explanation for any increase in labour output on household level, namely that the labourers were forced to work more to meet ends. An indication of this could be that day labourers' relative wages decreased over time. In this article, we investigate this by studying wages from annual and casual labour in southern Sweden and compare their levels with consumption baskets.
We exploit a large historical shock to the Danish labour market to provide evidence of how restrictions on labour mobility increase monopsony power and thereby reduce wages. By severely limiting the possibility of the rural population to work beyond their place of birth, the reintroduction of serfdom in 1733 aimed to increase monopsony power and secure cheaper labour in the countryside. Using a unique data source based on the archives of estates from the eighteenth century, we test whether serfdom affected the wages of farmhands more strongly than other groups in the labour market, and results based on a difference-in-differences approach reveal evidence consistent with a strong negative effect following its introduction. This is confirmed when we use a different control group from the Swedish province of Scania. We also investigate whether one mechanism was that boys with rural backgrounds were prevented from taking up apprenticeships in towns and find suggestive evidence that this was indeed the case.
under siege: surviving plague in an early modern city (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+363. 39 plates. 4 maps. 9 figs. 4 tabs. ISBN 9780300196344 Hbk. £30.00)How did an early modern city experience and respond to epidemics? John Henderson's study of Florence during the plague of 1630-1 offers an illuminating and deeply researched case study of public health, government, and society that makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of premodern epidemics. His case study is an important one. Florence was a wealthy, urban community with considerable state capacity and abundant resources that operated at the cutting edge of European public health in the seventeenth century.
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