Was there an Industrious Revolution in Germany? Wages and labour markets on rural estates, 17th to 19th centuries

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Pfister
• Subject Area: Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449267598

The Industrious Revolution thesis starts with the presumption that the 17th and 18th centuries saw an improvement in the efficiency of foreign trade. This increased the diversity of the supply of consumer good, so that, assuming love-for-variety preferences, the overall utility of consumption increased. Households reacted to this in two ways: First, they substituted the production of subsistence goods (which are characterized by low diversity) with the production of market goods, in order to use the income thus generated to buy market goods. Second, the rise of the utility of total consumption caused a shift in the use of time from leisure to work; people became more diligent in order to consume more. The Industrious Revolution, so the thesis continues, was an important basis for the industrial development of Europe. This is because the profitability of research and development (R&D) efforts is positively correlated with the number of potential users and because the Industrious Revolution produced large groups of workers who produced marketable products. The growth in the number of potential users of new technology increased the profitability of R&D and thus stimulated technical innovation in manufacturing.This project focuses on a central aspect of the thesis, namely the long-term development of individual labour input measured as hours or days per year, which has not yet been investigated for Germany. To this end, the project compares wages for employment contracts of different durations, i.e. day wages of labourers and annual wages of servants in German agriculture from the 17th to the 19th centuries. If young people engaged in arbitrage between day labour and employment as a farmhand or maid, the ratio between annual wages and daily wages corresponds to the number of annual working days. This approach requires an analysis of rural labour markets not only in terms of the money wages for different types of work, but also in terms of the forms of payment in kind. Moreover, it is necessary to analyse the prevailing types of labour contracts, including their embedding in interlocking markets and agricultural institutions, which to varying degrees, depending on the region, also provide for forced labour (corvée labour, compulsory service as servant). To this end, the project undertakes local micro-analyses, which can be aggregated in different ways, on the basis of the account books of approximately twenty rural estates of noble families, which are spatially distributed throughout Germany, but show a certain concentration in North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants