scholarly journals Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Joachim Voth

Witnesses' accounts are used to analyze changes in working hours between 1750 and 1800. Two findings stand out. The article demonstrates that the information contained in witnesses' accounts allows us to reconstruct historical time-budgets and provides extensive tests of the new method. Estimates of annual labor input in 1749/63 and 1799/1803 are presented. It emerges that the number of annual working hours changed rapidly between the middle and the of the eighteenth century. These findings have important implications for the issue of total factor productivity during the Industrial Revolution.

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 881-906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Griffiths ◽  
Philip A. Hunt ◽  
Patrick K. O'Brien

An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the Industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, industrial development conformed to a pattern of Smithian growth, as manufacturers diversified their output in response to an expanding domestic market for consumer goods.


1995 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. F. R. Crafts

The British Industrial Revolution is reviewed in the light of recent developments in modeling economic growth. It is argued that ”endogenous innovation” models may be useful in this context particularly for understanding why total factor productivity growth rose only slowly. ”Macroinventions” were central to economic development in this period, however, and these are best seen as exogenous technological shocks. Although new growth theorists would easily identify higher growth potential in eighteenth-century Britain than in France, explaining the timing of the acceleration in growth remains elusive. A research agenda to develop further insights from new growth ideas is proposed.


2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1065-1082 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Joachim Voth

Based on six sets of witnesses' accounts from the North of England and London over the period 1760 to 1830, new estimates of male labor input during the Industrial Revolution are derived. I present a new method of converting witnesses' activities into estimates of labor input, and derive confidence intervals. Working hours increased considerably. Moderate gains in per capita consumption during the Industrial Revolution have to be balanced against this decline in leisure. This adds further weight to pessimistic interpretations: I calculate that consumption per capita, adjusted for changes in leisure, remained essentially unchanged between 1760 and 1830.


2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (622) ◽  
pp. 2267-2294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerben Bakker ◽  
Nicholas Crafts ◽  
Pieter Woltjer

Abstract We develop new aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth estimates for the USA between 1899 and 1941, and sectoral estimates at the most disaggregated level so far, 38 industries. We include hard-to-measure services, and a refined measure of sectoral labour quality growth. The resulting data set supersedes Kendrick (1961), showing TFP growth lower than previously thought, broadly based across industries, and strongly variant intertemporally. The four ‘great inventions’ that Gordon (2016) highlighted were important but less dominant in TFP growth than their predecessors in the British industrial revolution. The findings also make it unlikely the 1930s had the twentieth century's highest TFP growth.


Economies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Nicholas Tsounis ◽  
Ian Steedman

A new method of identifying the sources of output growth and measuring total factor productivity (TFP) is proposed, with an application to data from the Greek economy. The price accounting approach, based on the full industry equilibrium (FIE) framework introduced by Opocher and Steedman, where technical progress not only increases outputs relative to inputs but also reduces output prices relative to input rewards, is used. The contributions of this paper are that, first, it amends the FIE TFP measurement approach to account for heterogeneous labor inputs, imported inputs, and indirect taxes, and applies the method to real-world data from the Greek economy; second, it provides a comparison of the results with those found by the use of the neoclassical approach to TFP measurement arguing that the FIE approach measures better sectoral TFP change, and third, it provides an estimate of the effects of sectoral research and development (R&D) expenditures and R&D diffusion from other sectors on TFP change for the Greek economy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-293
Author(s):  
Paul Giles

Paul Giles, “‘By Degrees’: Jane Austen’s Chronometric Style of World Literature” (pp. 265–293) This essay considers how Jane Austen’s work relates to “World Literature” by internalizing a chronometric style. Examining the emergence of the chronometer in the eighteenth century, it suggests how Austen drew on nautical frames of reference to combine disparate trajectories of local realism, geographical distance, and historical time. The essay thus argues that Austen’s fiction is interwoven with a reflexive mode of cartographic mapping, one that draws aesthetically on nautical instruments to remap time and space. This style involves charting various fluctuations of perspective that reorder history, memory, and genealogy, while also recalibrating Britain’s position in relation to the wider world. Moving on from an initial analysis of Austen’s juvenilia and early novels, the essay proceeds in its second part to discuss Mansfield Park (1814) in relation to Pacific exploration and trade. In its third part, it considers Emma (1815) in the context of comic distortions and the misreadings that arise from temporal and spatial compressions in the narrative, a form heightened by the novel’s reflexive wordplay. Hence the essay argues that Austen’s particular style of World Literature integrates chronometric cartography with domestic circumstances, an elusive idiom that also manifests itself in relation to the gender dynamics of Persuasion (1817) and the unfinished “Sanditon,” as discussed in the essay’s concluding pages. This is correlated finally with the way Austen’s novels are calibrated, either directly or indirectly, in relation to a global orbit.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Sharmistha Nag ◽  
Debarpita Roy ◽  
Laxmi Joshi ◽  
P. C. Parida ◽  
Hari K. Nagarajan

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document