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Abstract: To what extent should we conceive of early modern wage data as the outcome of competitive labour markets?  Records of eighteenth-century English wage payments exhibit absolute nominal wage rigidity over many decades, alongside significant dispersion in wages paid for the same type of work in the same location. These features of pre-industrial wage payments have been obscured by the construction of real wage series, which introduce variation in the deflator. In this paper we show that the standard explanations for wage movements in economic history cannot explain the nominal wage patterns observed in the data. We suggest that these wages indicate a labour market characterised by a monopsonistic framework of imperfect competition. We discuss the implications for the eighteenth-century British economy and research into long-run wages more generally.  

The Economic and Social History series for Hilary Term 2022 is convened by Stephen Broadberry and Mattia Bertazzini.

For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact stephen.broadberry@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.