EH.Net Abstracts in Economic History

                EHS Abstract Submission
                    (c) 1996 EH.Net
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              Name:  Gregory Clark
             Email:  gclark at ucdavis.edu
       Institution:  Department of Economics, University of California, Davis
 
         Co-author:  Ysbrand Van der Werf, Department of Economics, UC-Davis
 
             Title:  The Industrious Revolution or the Bourgeois Middle Ages?
 
  Internet Address
of abstracted work:  
 
           By mail:  
                     Gregory Clark
                     Department of Economics
                     University of California, Davis, CA 95616
                     USA
 
          Language:  English
 
          Abstract:
   Full time manual workers in England in 1850 supposedly worked 3,000 hours
per year.  Did medieval workers do as much?  Or was the Industrial
Revolution preceded by an "industrious revolution" which transformed
leisurely pre-industrial work rhythms into the harried pace of industrial
society?  There are no direct records of pre-industrial work hours.  But
this paper develops ways of estimating	hours worked, mainly by rural
workers, from different forms of wage payment.	These measures on balance
suggest that the English worked almost as hard in 1300 as they did at the
end of the Industrial Revolution, and much harder than anthropologists
estimate for other pre-industrial societies.  The "bourgeois" virtue of
hard
work was present at least among rural laborers in England by the late
middle
ages.  We show this implies that medieval England was far more economically
developed than generally thought
 
      Bibliography:  August 1996
 
           Subject:  P
 Geographical Area:  4
    Country/Region:  England
       Time Period:  3