Abstract

This paper examines labour’s organisation and labour’s reward in Catalonia before the first Industrial Revolution. Using new quantitative evidence on urban wages, it first shows that agricultural and urban real wages did not decrease during the last five decades of the pre-industrial period, despite increasing commodity prices. Secondly, it performs an econometric test that shows that wage responses reflected a condition of labour market integration, with occupational and spatial mobility. New data on the characteristics of immigration in Barcelona have been assembled to reinforce previous findings, and to provide new information on the push factors that inclined labourers to migrate. The paper’s aim is both to test issues long discussed in the literature on labour markets (taking Catalonia as the case study), and to provide new data that may help future research.