IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ehsrev/v56y2003i2p265-299.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rehabilitating Arthur Young

Author

Listed:
  • Liam Brunt

Abstract

Young was the most prolific and quantitative agricultural writer in England in the eighteenth century. Generally highly regarded by his contemporaries, his reputation among British agricultural historians is at an all‐time low. This article charts and explains Young's fall from grace. It rebuts the criticisms made of his methods and writings, and shows that Young is a well‐informed, accurate, reliable, and reasonable historical source. It demonstrates that the Farmer's tour is based on a broadly representative sample of English farms during the industrial revolution and argues that modern techniques of data analysis can overcome any errors or biases in Young's data.

Suggested Citation

  • Liam Brunt, 2003. "Rehabilitating Arthur Young," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 56(2), pages 265-299, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:56:y:2003:i:2:p:265-299
    DOI: 10.1046/j.1468-0289.2003.00250.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-0289.2003.00250.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1046/j.1468-0289.2003.00250.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lindert, Peter H. & Williamson, Jeffrey G., 1982. "Revising England's social tables 1688-1812," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 385-408, October.
    2. Allen, Robert C. & Ó Gráda, Cormac, 1988. "On the Road Again with Arthur Young: English, Irish, and French Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 48(1), pages 93-116, March.
    3. Joyce Burnette, 1997. "An Investigation of the Female–Male Wage Gap During the Industrial Revolution in Britain," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 50(2), pages 257-281, May.
    4. Clark, Gregory, 1987. "Productivity Growth without Technical Change in European Agriculture before 1850," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 47(2), pages 419-432, June.
    5. Feinstein, Charles H., 1998. "Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 58(3), pages 625-658, September.
    6. Gregory Clark, 2001. "Farm Wages and Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution: England,1670–1869[This resea]," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 54(3), pages 477-505, August.
    7. Allen, Robert C, 1982. "The Efficiency and Distributional Consequences of Eighteenth Century Enclosures," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(368), pages 937-953, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Joyce Burnette, 2004. "The wages and employment of female day‐labourers in English agriculture, 1740–1850," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 57(4), pages 664-690, November.
    2. Moshe Justman & Karine Beek, 2015. "Market forces shaping human capital in eighteenth-century London," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(4), pages 1177-1202, November.
    3. Robert Allen & Robert C. Allen, 2007. "Pessimism Preserved: Real Wages in the British Industrial Revolution," Economics Series Working Papers 314, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    4. Stokey, Nancy L., 2001. "A quantitative model of the British industrial revolution, 1780-1850," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 55(1), pages 55-109, December.
    5. Alex Trew, 2014. "Spatial Takeoff in the First Industrial Revolution," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 17(4), pages 707-725, October.
    6. Mohajan, Haradhan, 2019. "The First Industrial Revolution: Creation of a New Global Human Era," MPRA Paper 96644, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 17 Jul 2019.
    7. Nico Voigtländer & Hans-Joachim Voth, 2006. "Why England? Demographic factors, structural change and physical capital accumulation during the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 11(4), pages 319-361, December.
    8. Kopsidis, Michael & Wolf, Nikolaus, 2012. "Agricultural Productivity Across Prussia During the Industrial Revolution: A Thünen Perspective," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 72(3), pages 634-670, August.
    9. Gregory Clark, 2010. "The macroeconomic aggregates for England, 1209–2008," Research in Economic History, in: Research in Economic History, pages 51-140, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    10. Jane Humphries, 2013. "The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 66(3), pages 693-714, August.
    11. Liam Brunt & Edmund Cannon, 2013. "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the English Corn Returns as a data source in economic history, 1770-1914," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 17(3), pages 318-339, August.
    12. Brunt, Liam & Cannon, Edmund, 2015. "Variations in the price and quality of English grain, 1750–1914: Quantitative evidence and empirical implications," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 74-92.
    13. Angeles, Luis, 2008. "GDP per capita or real wages? Making sense of conflicting views on pre-industrial Europe," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 147-163, April.
    14. Broadberry, Stephen & Van Leeuwen, Bas, 2010. "British Economic Growth and the Business Cycle, 1700-1870: Annual Estimates," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 20, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    15. Blum, Matthias & McLaughlin, Eoin, 2019. "Living standards and inequality in the industrial revolution: Evidence from the height of University of Edinburgh students in the 1830s," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 185-192.
    16. Nicholas Crafts, 2021. "Understanding productivity growth in the industrial revolution," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(2), pages 309-338, May.
    17. Robert Allen, 2016. "Revising England's Social Tables Once Again," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _146, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    18. José Joaquín García-Gómez & Antonio Escudero Gutierrez, 2018. "The Standard of Living of the Workers in a Spanish Industrial Town: Wages, Nutrition, Life Expentancy and Heigth in Alcoy (1870–1930)," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 140(1), pages 347-367, November.
    19. Ian Gazeley & Sara Horrell, 2013. "Nutrition in the English agricultural labourer's household over the course of the long nineteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 66(3), pages 757-784, August.
    20. Deborah Oxley, 2003. "‘The seat of death and terror’: urbanization, stunting, and smallpox," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 56(4), pages 623-656, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:56:y:2003:i:2:p:265-299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ehsukea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.