IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ehsrev/v71y2018i2p639-664.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Clark's Malthus delusion: response to ‘Farming in England 1200–1800’

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen Broadberry
  • Bruce M. S. Campbell
  • Alexander Klein
  • Mark Overton
  • Bas van Leeuwen

Abstract

Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income†based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen Broadberry & Bruce M. S. Campbell & Alexander Klein & Mark Overton & Bas van Leeuwen, 2018. "Clark's Malthus delusion: response to ‘Farming in England 1200–1800’," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 71(2), pages 639-664, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:71:y:2018:i:2:p:639-664
    DOI: 10.1111/ehr.12694
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12694
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ehr.12694?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. N. F. R. Crafts & C. K. Harley, 1992. "Output growth and the British industrial revolution: a restatement of the Crafts-Harley view," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 45(4), pages 703-730, November.
    2. Allen, Robert C., 2009. "Engels' pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the british industrial revolution," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 46(4), pages 418-435, October.
    3. Bernard Harris & Roderick Floud & Sok Chul Hong, 2015. "How Many Calories? Food Availability in England and Wales in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Research in Economic History, in: Research in Economic History, volume 31, pages 111-191, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    4. Robert C. Allen, 2009. "Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c.1620–c.18201," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 62(3), pages 525-550, August.
    5. Clark, Gregory & Werf, Ysbrand Van Der, 1998. "Work in Progress? The Industrious Revolution," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 58(03), pages 830-843, September.
    6. Broadberry,Stephen & Campbell,Bruce M. S. & Klein,Alexander & Overton,Mark & van Leeuwen,Bas, 2015. "British Economic Growth, 1270–1870," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107070783, January.
    7. Bruce M. S. Campbell, 2008. "Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.12901," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 61(4), pages 896-945, November.
    8. Clark, Gregory, 1992. "The Economics of Exhaustion, the Postan Thesis, and the Agricultural Revolution," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 52(1), pages 61-84, March.
    9. Ulrich Pfister, 2017. "The timing and pattern of real wage divergence in pre-industrial Europe: evidence from Germany, c. 1500–1850," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 70(3), pages 701-729, August.
    10. Groth, Christian & Persson, Karl Gunnar, 2016. "Growth or stagnation in pre-industrial Britain? A revealed income growth approach," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 264, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    11. Clark, Gregory, 2013. "1381 and the Malthus delusion," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 4-15.
    12. Voth, Hans-Joachim, 2001. "The Longest Years: New Estimates Of Labor Input In England, 1760–1830," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 61(4), pages 1065-1082, December.
    13. Gregory Clark, 2007. "The long march of history: Farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–18691," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 60(1), pages 97-135, February.
    14. repec:cge:wacage:2015 is not listed on IDEAS
    15. 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.
    16. Wallis, Patrick & Colson, Justin & Chilosi, David, 2016. "Puncturing the Malthus delusion: structural change in the British economy before the industrial revolution, 1500-1800," Economic History Working Papers 66816, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    17. Jutta Bolt & Jan Luiten Zanden, 2014. "The Maddison Project: collaborative research on historical national accounts," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(3), pages 627-651, August.
    18. Humphries, Jane & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2015. "The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 75(2), pages 405-447, June.
    19. Gregory Clark, 2018. "Growth or stagnation? Farming in England, 1200–1800," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 71(1), pages 55-81, February.
    20. Robert Allen, 2016. "Revising England's Social Tables Once Again," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _146, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    21. Nicholas Crafts & Terence C. Mills, 2017. "Six centuries of British economic growth: a time-series perspective," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 21(2), pages 141-158.
    22. E. A. Wrigley, 2006. "The transition to an advanced organic economy: half a millennium of English agriculture1," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 59(3), pages 435-480, August.
    23. Alessandro Nuvolari & Mattia Ricci, 2013. "Economic Growth in England, 1250-1850: Some New Estimates Using a Demand Side Approach," Rivista di storia economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 1, pages 31-54.
    24. Ian Blanchard, 1978. "Labour Productivity and Work Psychology in the English Mining Industry, 1400-1600," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 31(1), pages 1-24, February.
    25. Kelly, Morgan & Ó Gráda, Cormac, 2013. "Numerare Est Errare: Agricultural Output and Food Supply in England Before and During the Industrial Revolution," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 73(4), pages 1132-1163, December.
    26. Malanima, Paolo, 2011. "The long decline of a leading economy: GDP in central and northern Italy, 1300–1913," European Review of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 15(2), pages 169-219, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fiaschi, Davide & Fioroni, Tamara, 2019. "Transition to modern growth in Great Britain: The role of technological progress, adult mortality and factor accumulation," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 472-490.

    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. Stephen Broadberry & Bruce Campbell & Alexander Klein & Mark Overton & Bas van Leeuwen, 2012. "British Economic Growth, 1270-1870: an output-based approach," Studies in Economics 1203, School of Economics, University of Kent.
    2. Jane Humphries & Jacob Weisdorf, 2019. "Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(623), pages 2867-2887.
    3. Roger Fouquet & Stephen Broadberry, 2015. "Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(4), pages 227-244, Fall.
    4. Horrell, Sara & Humphries, Jane, 2019. "Children’s work and wages in Britain, 1280–1860," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 1-1.
    5. Gregory Clark, 2018. "Growth or stagnation? Farming in England, 1200–1800," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 71(1), pages 55-81, February.
    6. Rota, Mauro & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2019. "Expensive Labour and the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Stable Employment in Rural Areas," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 442, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    7. Broadberry, Stephen & Campbell, Bruce M.S. & van Leeuwen, Bas, 2013. "When did Britain industrialise? The sectoral distribution of the labour force and labour productivity in Britain, 1381–1851," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 16-27.
    8. 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.
    9. Nicholas Crafts, 2021. "Understanding productivity growth in the industrial revolution," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(2), pages 309-338, May.
    10. James Foreman-Peck & Peng Zhou, 2021. "Fertility versus productivity: a model of growth with evolutionary equilibria," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 34(3), pages 1073-1104, July.
    11. Stephen Broadberry & Bruce Campbell & Alexander Klein & Mark Overton, 2010. "British economic growth, 1300-1850: some preliminary estimates," Working Papers 10009, Economic History Society.
    12. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2016. "Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(1), pages 224-239, March.
    13. Paolo Malanima, 2018. "Italy in the Renaissance: a leading economy in the European context, 1350–1550," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 71(1), pages 3-30, February.
    14. 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.
    15. Stephen L. Parente & Luis Felipe Sáenz & Anna Seim, 2022. "Income, education and democracy," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 27(2), pages 193-233, June.
    16. Alexandra de Pleijt & Jan Luiten van Zanden, 2021. "Two worlds of female labour: gender wage inequality in western Europe, 1300–1800," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(3), pages 611-638, August.
    17. Koyama, Mark, 2012. "The transformation of labor supply in the pre-industrial world," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 505-523.
    18. Fochesato, Mattia, 2018. "Origins of Europe’s north-south divide: Population changes, real wages and the ‘little divergence’ in early modern Europe," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 91-131.
    19. Broadberry, Stephen, 2013. "Accounting for the great divergence," Economic History Working Papers 54573, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    20. Ho, Chi Pui, 2016. "Industrious Selection: Explaining Five Revolutions and Two Divergences in Eurasian Economic History within a Unified Growth Framework," MPRA Paper 73862, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    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:71:y:2018:i:2:p:639-664. 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.