Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

Abstract

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.