Labor, wages, and living standards in Java, 1680–1914

Abstract

The development of living standards in Java has long been a subject of scholarly interest. A number of scholars have suggested that between  and  Southeast Asian living standards declined significantly. The present article contributes to these issues by calculating long-term real wages for Java between  and , following Allen's subsistence basket methodology. New data on wages and prices were collected from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives and connected to data on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resultant long-term real wage developments show a slightly different picture of Javanese living standards than that which has emerged from the literature to date.

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

“…Allen, Murphy, and Schneider, ‘Colonial origins’; Allen, Bassino, Ma, Moll‐Murata, and van Zanden, ‘China’; Arroyo Abad, Davies, van Zanden, ‘Spanish America’; Bassino and Ma, ‘Japanese unskilled wages’; Broadberry and Gupta, ‘Early modern great divergence’; Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Structural impediments’; Özmucur and Pamuk, ‘Ottoman Empire’; Pamuk and Shatzmiller, ‘Islamic Middle East’; du Plessis and du Plessis, ‘Happy’; Rönnbäck, ‘Gold Coast’; de Zwart, Globalization ; de Zwart and van Zanden, ‘Java’.…”

The French economy in the longue durée: a study on real wages, working days and economic performance from Louis IX to the Revolution (1250–1789)

“…12 For a detailed description of the use of regression analysis for the treatment of price and wage data see the seminal contributions of Clark (Clark, 2004(Clark, , 2005. Similar techniques have been recently adopted by several authors, including among the others De Zwart and Van Zanden (2015). 13 Estimations are conducted assuming robust standard errors.…”

Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

“…Thus, similar questions linger with these studies as are encountered by proponents of the collapse approach: namely, if the advantages of industrialization set Europe on a course to surpass the rest of the world, why have developmental disparities persisted in spite of the proliferation of industrial production globally? If 5 A decidedly non-exhaustive list of examples, both academic and work aimed at more general audiences, include: Van Zanden and colleagues' depiction of the specific trajectories undertaken by different early modern states who were part of, or left behind in, the economic Great Divergence (Arroyo Abad and van Zanden 2014;Bassino et al 2019;Li and Van Zanden 2012;Zwart and Zanden 2015); Kamen's study on how the rise of the Spanish Empire was supported by their promotion of trans-regional trade networks and favourable economic structures (Kamen 2003); Kennedy's study on the mobility, flexibility, and adaptability of early Islamic political and military administration during their rapid advance out of Arabia in the 7 th century CE (Kennedy 2008); Lomas' work highlighting how the rise of Republican Rome was bolstered by the formalization of political administration and law (Lomas 2018), themes echoed in Everitt's (Everitt 2012) and Manning's (Manning 2018) explanation of the subsequent rise of the Empire after the Republic's fall; Chang (Chang 2007) and Lewis (Lewis 2007) on how administrative reform and organizational capacity gains made during the tumultuous Warring States period and the early phases of imperial China laid the foundation for subsequent Empire-building and the stability of imperial rule in the region; Trigger, Kemp, and O'Conner's contribution tracing early Egypt's transformation from a disconnected, tribal, and relatively unstratified society in Pre-Dynastic times to a stable, centralized, and unified state by the early Dynastic period (Trigger, Kemp, and O'Connor 1983), or more recently Moreno Garcia's (Moreno Garcia 2020) description of how early Dynastic leaders reaped material and organizational benefits from institutions favouring resource growth while remaining flexible and relatively diffuse with respect to powerful regional elites; Covey (Covey 2006; on how Inca rulers pursued a sustained policy of consolidation, ideological justification of authoritarian and bellicose rulers, and state-led development of economic output which promoted their imperial expansion from the Peruvian highlands; and countless others.…”