Robert Allen

• University of Oxford

This paper investigates the causes and the consequences of the emergence of agriculture in the Middle East. Agriculture has emerged in many parts of the world since the end of the last Ice Age about 15 000 years ago. The paper first surveys the Palaeolithic Period to understand why agriculture did not emerge earlier. Then the paper considers the pr...

Cross sections of coal prices in England for 1695, 1795, and 1842 are used to infer transportation rates by sea, river, canal, and road. The effectiveness of monopolies, the degree of market integration, and the patterns of regional supply of each mining district are then established. The growth rates of productivity in sea, river, and road transpo...

We test between cooperative and extractive theories of the origins of government. We use river shifts in southern Iraq as a natural experiment, in a new archeological panel dataset. A shift away creates a local demand for a government to coordinate because private river irrigation needs to be replaced with public canals. It disincentivizes local ex...

In the late ninth century, rural settlement, agriculture, and urbanization all collapsed in southern Mesopotamia. We first document this collapse using newly digitized archaeological data. We then present a model of hydraulic society that highlights the collapse of state capacity as a proximate cause of the collapse of the economy and a shortened h...

World Bank estimates put absolute poverty in Asia and Africa at 50–60% of the population in 1980 and at negligible levels in the developed world. This review investigates whether Asia was always so poor, as well as the history of poverty in today's rich countries. Poverty measurement methodologies are reviewed, and it is argued that a basic needs a...

Invention is an investment in which the costs of the Research and Development (R&D) project balance future returns. Those returns depend on objective factors like wage and capital costs but also on subjective factors because they are future projections. The more optimistic the inventor, the higher are the projected returns. Baumard uses Life Histor...

The Allen-Unger Database contains price series for commodities from locations in Europe from the late Middle Ages to 1914 and also from cities in the Americas, the Middle East and the Far East. It is also possible to search for series by date range, location and commodity or any combination of the three. Data are reported in Excel spreadsheets with...

Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider have assembled several large databases of spinners’ production and wages that they believe disprove my view that high wages led to mechanization in eighteenth‐century England. This reply examines their data and shows that they have little value for understanding the incentives to mechanize. In addition, I prese...

The paper measures real wages in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kursk over 1853-1937. Workers in construction and large scale industry are studied. For the imperial period and the NEP, new series of prices are collected from archival and printed sources, and these radically revise previous measures of inflation. Russian living standards grew little bet...

The invention of the power loom was a response to the increase in supply of yarn in the 1780s. This led to an expansion of handloom weaving and a rise in earnings in the 1790s, thereby, creating the “golden age”. The high earnings increased the profitability of developing the power loom by raising the value of the labour that it saved. Consequently...

Cambridge Core - British History after 1450 - The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain - edited by Roderick Floud

This article measures the size and incomes of six major social classes across the industrial revolution using social tables for England and Wales in 1688, 1759, 1798, 1846, and 1867. Lindert and Williamson famously revised these tables, and this article extends their work in three directions. First, servants are removed from middle- and upper-class...

This article examines Judy Stephenson's claim that institutional wage series such as those of Greenwich Hospital overstate the earnings of building workers by 20 to 30 per cent, and it is argued here that the conclusion is unpersuasive. Whatever adjustments to existing wage series are necessary in view of her new evidence would have no significant...

A new basis for an international poverty measurement is proposed based on linear programming for specifying the least cost diet and explicit budgeting for nonfood spending. This approach is superior to the World Bank's $1-a-day line because it is (i) clearly related to survival and well being; (ii) comparable across time and space since the same nu...

Global comparisons of previous social and economic upheavals suggest that what is to come depends on where you are now, argues Robert C. Allen.

The Industrial Revolution was a pivotal point in British history that occurred between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, and led to far reaching transformations of society. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction analyses the key features of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the spread of industrialization to other countries...

This paper discusses some of the criticisms recently raised by Rafael Dobado-González about our work on real wages in the Americas in the long run. Although addressing a series of issues, Dobado mainly questions our use of the welfare ratio methodology to assess standards of living in colonial Spanish America. In this article we explain how, despit...

This article responds to Humphries's critique of Allen's assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth-century Britain and its importance for explaining the industrial revolution. New evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy. It is also shown that the high wage economy provides a good explanati...

The causes of the United States’ exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. American industrialization in the nineteenth century required tariff protection since the country's comparative advantage lay in agriculture. After 1895 surging American...

Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American contingents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities. From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse degrees of quality - covers various years between coloniza...

This history of the transition from organic to mineral fuels suggests a number of conclusions that may have parallels in the future: People respond to price incentives; science is important but not sufficient; human capital is important; cooperation is as important as competition; path breaking technologies take a long time to mature.The future, ho...

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, and 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965 and 1990. Frontier and econometric production function...

Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. The industrial revolution was Britain's path...

‘The great divergence’ considers gross domestic product (GDP) and standards in living to show the prosperity gap between rich and poor countries. The present division between rich and poor largely emerged since 1500. Between 1500 and 1800 was the mercantilist era with Europe being the wealthiest continent. Industrialization and de-industrialization...

In “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” I calculated that the spinning jenny was profitable to install in England in the 1780s but not in France. My calculations assumed that a spinner using a wheel in a domestic setting worked a total of 100 days per year and spun 100 pounds of coarse cotton (one pound per day). The jenny raised labor product...

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of buildi...

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conven...

Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital an...

In this paper, we examine the changes in per-capita income and productivity from 1700 to modern times, and show four things: (1) that incomes per capita diverged more around the world after 1800 than before; (2) that the source of this divergence was increasing differences in the efficiency of economies; (3) that these differences in efficiency wer...

This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India. It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other countries. Calculation of the profitability of adopting...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the 19th century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the share of profits in national income expanded at the expense o...

The productivity of agriculture in England and the Yangtze Delta are compared c.1620 and c.1820 in order to gauge the performance of the most advanced part of China vis-à-vis its counterpart in Europe. The value of real output is compared using purchasing power parity exchange rates. Output per hectare was nine times greater in the Yangtze Delta th...

A Farewell to Alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world. These include (1) the preindustrial world was in a Malthusian preventive check equilibrium, (2) living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the last 100,000 years, (3) bad institutions were not the cause of economic backwardness, (4) successful econo...

This paper examines the recent decentralization of governance in Indonesia and its impact on local infrastructure provision. The decentralization of decisionmaking power to local jurisdictions in Indonesia may have improved the matching of public infrastructures provision with local preferences. However, decentralization has made local public infra...

This paper reassesses the widely held belief that English land traded at a price that exceeded its economic value in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A model of the real estate market is developed that incorporates economic and social motives for land ownership as well as the effects of strict settlements. New information on the history of...

Historical studies of the real wage allow us to track the divergence in the world of economics since the Middle Ages and changes in the distribution of income during the Industrial Revolution. Before the 19th century, the real wage moved inversely to the population. Since then it has increased dramatically.

Essays by internationally prominent economists examine long run cross-country economic trends from the perspective of New Comparative Economic History, an approach pioneered by Harvard economist Jeffrey G. Williamson. The innovative approach to economic history known as the New Comparative Economic History represents a distinct change in the way th...

The paper compares Feinstein`s and Clark`s consumer price and real wage indices for the British industrial revolution. The sources for their weights and component price series are evaluated. While some of Clark`s innovations are improvements, many of his changes degrade the price index. A new price index is developed using the best components of Cl...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the share of profits in national income expanded at the exp...

The paper compares the standard of living of labourers in the Roman Empire in 301 AD with the standard of living of labourers in Europe and Asia from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Roman data are drawn from Diocletian`s Price Edict. The real wage of Roman workers was like that of their counterparts in the lagging parts of Europe and...

* This paper is part of the NSF grant funded project "Global Prices and Income 1350-1950" headed by Peter Lindert and the Spinoza-premium project on Global Economic History funded by NWO (The Netherlands). We want to thank Peter Lindert for suggestions and encouragements at every stage of this paper. We also want to thank Kishimoto Mio and Lillian...

As early as 1611 Bowhead whales resident between the east coast of Greenland and the island of Spitzbergen were the subject of intensive commercial hunting effort by Dutch, German and British whalers. By 1911 there was no significant, permanent population of Bowhead whales living in these waters. To understand the relationship between the commercia...

The article analyses the rapid development of the Soviet economy during the first three Five Year Plans. A simulation model is used to determine the importance of three distinctive Soviet institutions/policies - the concentration of investment on heavy industry, the collectivisation of agriculture, and the use of ambitious output targets in conjunc...

Estimates of employment structure, agricultural output, and agricultural labour productivity are developed for the leading European countries from 1300 to 1800. The employment estimates are developed from estimates of the total, urban, and rural populations. The output estimates are derived by positing a demand curve for agricultural goods.

Sustained growth in both incomes and life spans are the hallmarks of modern development. Fluctuations around trend in the former, or business cycles, have been a traditional focus in macroeconomics, while similar cyclical patterns in mortality are also interesting and are now increasingly studied. In this paper, I assess the welfare implications of...

The Soviet Union grew rapidly by comparison with other countries at a similar stage of development in the 1920s. It is unlikely that the Tsarist economy would have done so well had the 1917 revolution not occurred. Recalculations of national income since 1928 indicate that growth was not confined to investment or military equipment but included con...

The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. Why did Europe experience industrialization and modern economic growth before China, India, or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic history and one that has provoked intense debate. The established view,...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy during the industrial revolution and shows that they contain a story of dramatically increasing inequality between 1800 and 1840: GDP per worker rose 37%, real wages stagnated, and the profit rate doubled. The share of profits in national income expanded at the expense of labou...

In this article we investigate the possibility that a regulatory regime designed to maximize the profitability of the early Dutch whaling industry could have simultaneously guaranteed the biological sustainability of the eastern Arctic Bowhead whale. We find that policies with economic profit as the sole objective could have saved the whales, as we...

Introduction British agriculture developed in a distinctive manner that made important contributions to economic growth. By the early nineteenth century, agricultural labour productivity was one third higher in England than in France, and each British farm worker produced over twice as much as his Russian counterpart (Bairoch 1965; O’Brien and Keyd...

El cercamiento de los campos abiertos (open fields) se considera como un progreso porque sustituyó el régimen de propiedad comunal por uno de propiedad privada. Sin embargo, las instituciones comunales propias de los campos abiertos repartían los riesgos de la experimentación agrícola e incrementaban la tasa de innovación. Por esta razón, los open...

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...

The timing of the English agricultural revolution is investigated using three indicators: output growth implied by a demand curve, crop yields calculated from probate inventories, and productivity as indicated by real rents. All three indicators imply that the agricultural revolution took place between 1600 and 1750 rather than between 1750 and 180...

September, 2002One of the most provocative assertions in Ken Pomeranz=s Great Divergence is the claim that Ait seems likely that average incomes in Japan, China, and parts of southeast Asia were comparable to (or higher than) those in western Europe even in the late eighteenth century@ (Pomeranz 2000, p. 49). This assertion represents a radical dep...

This paper traces the history of prices and wages in European cities from the fourteenth century to the First World War. It is shown that the divergence in real incomes observed in the mid-nineteenth century was produced between 1500 and 1750 as incomes fell in most European cities but were maintained (not increased) in the economic leaders.

The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. Why did Europe experience industrialization and modern economic growth before China, India, or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic history and one that has provoked intense debate. The established view,...

The editors and the Association wish to thank the following individuals who were program committee members, chairs, or discussants at the 2000 Economic History Association Meetings:

Globalization and History is an impressive book. It asks a big question: What was the economic impact of globalization in the late nineteenth century? To answer it, Kevin O Rourke and Jeff Williamson deploy new data principally purchasing-power-parity-adjusted real wages and land values for major economies in Europe and the Americas and analyze the...

The reasons for the rapid growth of the Soviet Union before roughly 1970 and for its subsequent growth slowdown are analysed. The concentration of investment on heavy industry and soft budget constraints explain most of the growth in the 1930s. The growth slowdown was due to disastrous investment decisions following the elimination of surplus labou...

In this paper we argue that the bowhead whale stock resident off the east coast of Greenland was hunted to the brink of extinction by 1828 due to the rapid increase in British productivity levels after 1750. A delay-difference recruitment model is used to reconstruct the size of the whale population and establish the chronology of its demise. A sim...

Urban Development and Agrarian Change in Early Modern Europe The paper assesses neo-liberal and neo-Marxist theories dealing with agricultural institutions and productivity growth. Both argue that English institutions (enclosures and capitalist agriculture) were particularly conducive to development. Labour and total factor productivity indices are...

Estimates of the employment structure, agricultural output, and agricultural labour productivity are developed for the leading European countries from 1300 to 1800. The employment estimates are developed from estimates of the total, urban, and rural populations. The output estimates are derived by positing a demand curve for agricultural goods. 2 S...

In this paper we argue that the expansion of the British whaling industry at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century led to the collapse of the Dutch industry and the permanent depletion of the eastern arctic Bowhead stocks. A set of endogenous variables have been simulated, using a system of equations which explic...

New estimates of the growth in total and per capita consumption are developed for the Soviet Union during the first three Five-Year Plans. These estimates show that consumption per head rose 27 percent from 1928 to 1937. The gains were confined to the urban population and to those moving from the countly to the city. In the standard interpretation,...

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This paper analyzes the theory that Soviet farm marketing was so price unresponsive that rapid industrialization within the framework of the NEP would have been choked off by rising farm prices and inadequate sales. A model of farm marketing is developed for the period 1913–1928 and is embedded in a general equilibrium model for the Soviet economy....

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

New estimates of the growth in total and per capita consumption are developed for the Soviet Union during the first three Five-Year Plans. These estimates show that consumption per head rose 27 percent from 1928 to 1937. The gains were confined to the urban population and to those moving from the country to the city. In the standard interpretation,...

This book traces the shift from medieval to modern institutions in English agriculture. It explores their importance for productivity growth, income distribution, and the contribution of agriculture to British economic development. Robert C. Allen's pioneering study shows that, contrary to the assumption of many historians, small-scale farmers in t...

Part 1 The rise of the Yeoman and the landlord's agricultural revolution: enclosure in the South Midlands enclosure and depopulation the rise of the Yeoman the disappearance of the Yeoman in the open fields. Part 2 Enclosure and productivity growth: the adoption of modern methods yields and output employment and labour productivity rent increases a...

Sustained growth in both incomes and life spans are the hallmarks of modern development. Fluctuations around trend in the former, or business cycles, have been a traditional focus in macroeconomics, while similar cyclical patterns in mortality are also interesting and are now increasingly studied. In this paper, I assess the welfare implications of...

The distinctive feature of English agricultural development was the rapid growth in labor productivity. This paper explains that growth in terms of the rise in grain yields and reductions in employment due to the increase in farm size. Estate surveys and the land tax assessments are used to measure changes in farm size over the 17th and 18th centur...

In their day Arthur Young's tours of England, Ireland, and France represented a revolutionary approach to agricultural research. Here we avail of one part of the wealth of statistical data collected by Young—that on grain yields—to provide a comparative perspective on agricultural technique and progress in these countries around 1770 to 1850. We sh...

An improvement on Mark Overton's method of computing crop yields from probate inventories is proposed. Harvesting costs are explicitly allowed for and a new procedure for eliminating cost-of-production valuations is offered. Applying these methods to a sample of Oxfordshire probate inventories generates higher yields than Overton's investigation of...

We show that the length of compulsory education has a causal impact on regional labour mobility. The analysis is based on a quasi-exogenous staged Norwegian school reform, and register data on the whole population. Based on the results, we conclude that part of the US-Europe difference, as well as the European North-South difference in labour mobil...

Sustained growth in both incomes and life spans are the hallmarks of modern development. Fluctuations around trend in the former, or business cycles, have been a traditional focus in macroeconomics, while similar cyclical patterns in mortality are also interesting and are now increasingly studied. In this paper, I assess the welfare implications of...

Investigates the causes of Britain's relative decline as an iron and steel exporter in the late 19th century, and the concominant emergence of Germany and the United States as successful exporters. Britain's mid 19th century dominance of export markets was due to its superior technical efficiency and low raw material costs, and to the high excess p...

This paper measures the growth and relative levels of total factor productivity in the American, British, French, Belgian, and German mineral fuel pig iron industries from 1840 to 1909. The American history was peculiar in that there was little productivity growth betwen 1840 and 1870 and then rapid growth until 1890. Regression models are develope...

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the consumer revolution and the 'industrious' revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. We assume that workers stabilized...