Published Papers

Biographical Sketch

Teaching: Approaches to History

Unpublished Papers

Data: Wage and Price History

The following links are to excel spreadsheets with data underlying my 'Great Divergence' paper and later papers on the same theme.  The links to 'labourers' and 'craftsmen' bring together the silver wages of these workers, the consumer price indices, and the corresponding welfare ratios.  Next are links to files named for cities and countries.  These spreadsheets provide the original data from which 'labourers' and 'craftsmen' were computed. 

The European city files follow a standard format.  Each has three sheets.  The first sheet, called 'prices,' shows the original price data exactly as they appeared in the source, the conversion to silver prices per metric unit (in this panel missing data have been interpolated), the estimation of bread prices from grain prices and wages, and finally the consumer price index expressed both in silver prices and in local units of account.  Details of the calculation are given in my 'Great Divergence' paper.  The second sheet shows daily wages in both units of account and silver.  The third sheet shows the silver value of the currency and records notes on the sources and procedures.  The city files contain price series that were not used in the 'Great Divergence' indices.  The opportunity has been taken to add some new data and update the calculations.  As a result, there are some small differences between some of the price indices in the city spreadsheets and those in 'labourers' and 'craftsmen.'

The format for the India file is somewhat different and explained on its introduction page.

Dictionary of Historical Weights and Measures

Teaching: Economic Growth in History

Research in Power Point

Enclosure and the Yeoman

Marxist Transitions

I gave five lectures at the summer school in Paris on 7 - 11th July 2008 financed by the European Science Foundation and the European Commission (Marie Curie RTN, 'Unifying the European Experience').  The theme of the school was Economic and Social Inequalities in Historical Perspectives.  The theme of the lectures was to examine the interaction between technology, social institutions, and income distribution by reviewing the famous stages and transitions of Mars's theory of history.