Author Description

"Did working hours in England increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution? Marx said so, and so did E.P. Thompson; but where was the evidence to support this belief? Literary source are difficult to interpret, wage books are few and hardly representative, and clergymen writing about the sloth of their flock did little to validate their complaints." "This study calls more than 2,800 witnesses to the bar of history to answer the question: 'what were you doing at the time of the crime?'. Court records from both urban and rural areas over the period 1750 to 1830 are used to reconstruct patterns of labour and leisure during the Industrial Revolution." "During this time, England began to work harder - much harder. By the 1830s, both London and counties in the North had experienced a considerable increase - of approximately 20 per cent - in the length of the annual working year. What drove these changes was not longer hours per day, but the demise of 'St. Monday' and a large number of religious and political festivals. In many professions, the working year appears to have been almost as long as it was in the 'dark satanic mills'." "The rise in labour input was crucial for economic growth during the Industrial Revolution. The new estimates for labour input derived from the courtroom evidence strongly suggest that productivity growth may have been zero or even negative for most of the period 1760-1830. This reinforces the new orthodoxy on the Industrial Revolution. To an important extent, output growth was driven by abstention, not ingenuity - and principally by abstention from leisure. The new findings presented in this study imply that gains in living standards were even smaller than previous studies had assumed. What gains in per capita consumption existed were bought at the price of a reduction in leisure."--Jacket.