Pre-industrial England: The Uzbek connection

Gregory Clark has been at it again. In a recent paper with Joseph Cummins and Brock Smith, the neo-Malthusian enfant terrible of early modern English economic growth (or its absence) uses occupational evidence in wills to find a share of 60% of England's labour force in agriculture in both 1652-60 and 1560-79. This comes as no great surprise to those of us who've long held that the proportion was around half by 1700: in fact the new 17th-century estimate seems generous rather than shockingly low.

The paper gives some indication of the shares of some of the non-agricultural activities which by 1600 must have occupied something around half a million countryfolk, twice the urban labour force. But instead of pursuing this promising line of enquiry the authors go on to conjure up an estimate of per capita income based on agricultural employment shares and GDP in developing countries in 2007. England around 1600 had, we are told, a per capita income similar to Uzbekistan today, solely on the basis of a similar share occupied in agriculture - this from the scholar who (with considerable justification) condemned Angus Maddison's projections as "fictions... based not on empirical evidence, but on unsubstantiated and demonstrably implausible theories of the nature of life in pre-industrial societies". It's unclear quite what the Uzbekistan of 2007 is meant to tell us about pre-industrial England, except that most of its inhabitants by 1560 lived far above subsistence levels, which is hardly news. It's a promising paper, sadly derailed by its lead author's over-keenness to demonstrate the absence of significant per capita income growth before the Industrial Revolution.

Much the same goes for Clark's other new paper, on employment shares and income in the England of 1381. This time there's some of the occupational detail missing for the later period (like the author I was quite taken by the finding that 2.5% of those occupied in the sampled parishes were engaged in brewing) - and there's a real surprise, in the conclusion that only 55% of the labour force worked in agriculture (62% if all those returned as "labourers" and the like are assigned to farming), far lower than the 75% widely assumed to have been so occupied. The sample size is small - fewer than 3% of rural parishes and only two boroughs - and may over-represent smaller (non-borough) country towns at the expense of more strictly rural districts. But it's a thought-provoking illustration of the extent of late medieval rural crafts and commerce.

There's little evidence though for Clark's assertion on the basis of erratic wage and price data that English income per capita in 1381 averaged 94% of the 1817 level: again we're asked to put our faith in "modern data on income and farm shares across poorer countries" extrapolated according to a formula which yields an income elasticity of food demand "consistent with cross-sectional evidence for England in 1862" (at the end of what Greg and his then co-authors once aptly termed the "British food puzzle" of rising incomes and sluggish food demand in the Industrial Revolution period).

Taken together, these two papers offer a valuable insight into the English occupational history being researched elsewhere under Shaw-Taylor and Wrigley. It's frustrating that rather than use their occupational data to reconstruct the dimensions of real economic activity, the authors instead veer off into a mechanistic equation of occupational shares (and only one occupation at that) with GDP. Hopefully there'll be more detailed and nuanced investigation to follow.

A dearth of Londoners

Just reading Mark Huberty on 17th-century London coal consumption, I was struck by the following:

Nevertheless, the data present an empirical puzzle. In 1600, London appears to have imported around 200,000 tons of of coal per annum for a population of approximately 100,000 people. In 1700, it imported around 500,000 tons for 500,000 people. In per capita terms, then, coal consumption appears to have fallen.

I think I can clear this up. I know of no estimate that puts London's population as low as 100,000 in 1600: the baptisms recorded in the Bills of Mortality indicate a minimum of 180,000 even before allowance for unrecorded births (my own preference is for something rather higher given rapid English population growth in 1500-1650 and near-stagnation in 1650-1730 coupled with a generally-accepted London population of 350,000 c.1650). To reach a population of 100,000 you probably have to go back at least to the 1550s. So it's likely that per capita consumption during the 17th century either remained stable or rose slightly (shipments in 1600 were probably rather under than over 200,000 tons and in 1700 conversely somewhat over 500,000 tons). So there's a definite slowing from the high per capita growth rates of the late 16th century - possibly related in part to movement of industry - but no significant drop in the absolute level of demand per head.

I think it's probably correct to say that the Fire of 1666 had little effect on London-wide take-up per capita: the coal data support the impression of slow growth in the late 17th-early 18th centuries, but beyond the exceptional impact of the 1665 Plague this is probably related to demographic developments not unique to London (as one would expect given the limited area affected by the conflagration). The already large volume of shipments does support the suggestion that coal use was the norm by the early 17th century, while the growth of shipments implies that this was a recent development (perhaps most marked in the quarter-century after 1580) associated with the metropolis's rapid expansion: indeed one might speculate whether that expansion would have been possible without the new wonder-fuel from the north given the prior claim of the south-east's million or so rural & small-town inhabitants to the region's stretched woodfuel resources.

What-o-philia??

Blame the late Angus Maddison who coined the term to denote his own fondness for historical number-crunching. Strictly it's "love of figures", though in reality it's curiosity about the dimensions of the past and present: How big? How many? How much bigger is it now than it was then? How quickly did it get there?

So what does a chiffrephile do? Well, they count and estimate, calculate and occasionally guess where there's nothing else to go on. They spend a lot of their time picking apart other people's numbers while hoping nobody notices the glaring holes in their own alternative method and results. And sometimes they'll try to make sense of what they've come up with, occasionally successfully.

This blog is in part a memorial to Maddison's own part in fuelling my own nascent chiffrephilia. It's also going to be a place for trying to come up with better data, as was Maddison's declared intention in publishing his own aggregates.

This then is a blog about quantity in history, from our earliest guesstimates up to the present. There'll be lot of picking apart others' findings, and hopefully I'll be able to offer better ones. And perhaps people with better numbers will come along and demolish mine. That's how we learn more.