IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/wpaper/201308.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665

Author

Listed:
  • Neil Cummins
  • Morgan Kelly
  • Cormac Ó Gráda

Abstract

We use individual records of 920,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths running at five to six times their usual rate, but the impact on wealthier central parishes falls markedly through time. Tracking the weekly spread of plague before 1665 we find a consistent pattern of elevated mortality spreading from the same northern suburbs. Looking at the seasonal pattern of mortality, we find that the characteristic autumn spike associated with plague continued into the early 1700s. Given that individual cases of plague and typhus are frequently indistinguishable, claims that plague suddenly vanished after 1665 should be treated with caution. Natural increase improved as smaller plagues disappeared after 1590, but fewer than half of those born survived childhood.

Suggested Citation

  • Neil Cummins & Morgan Kelly & Cormac Ó Gráda, 2013. "Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665," Working Papers 201308, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201308
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4523
    File Function: First version, 2013
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Allen,Robert C., 2009. "The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521868273.
    2. Jeremy Boulton, 1996. "Wage labour in seventeenth-century London," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 49(2), pages 268-290, May.
    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. James Davies, 2021. "Economic Inequality and Covid-19 Death Rates in the First Wave, a Cross-Country Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 8957, CESifo.
    2. Utteeyo Dasgupta & Chandan Kumar Jha & Sudipta Sarangi, 2021. "Persistent Patterns Of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 59(2), pages 848-857, April.
    3. Madsen, Jakob B. & Robertson, Peter E. & Ye, Longfeng, 2024. "Lives versus livelihoods in the middle ages: The impact of the plague on trade over 400 years," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    4. van Besouw, Bram & Curtis, Daniel R., 2022. "Estimating warfare-related civilian mortality in the early modern period: Evidence from the Low Countries, 1620–99," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    5. Guido Alfani & Cormac Ó Gráda, 2018. "Famine and Disease in Economic History: A Summary Introduction," Working Papers 201803, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    6. Leigh Shaw‐Taylor, 2020. "An introduction to the history of infectious diseases, epidemics and the early phases of the long‐run decline in mortality," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(3), pages 1-19, August.

    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. Rota, Mauro & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2019. "Why was the First Industrial Revolution English? Roman Real Wages and the Little Divergence within Europe Reconsidered," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 400, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    2. Judy Stephenson, 2018. "Looking for work? Or looking for workers? Days and hours of work in London construction in the eighteenth century," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _162, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    3. Mario García-Zúñiga & Ernesto López-Losa, 2019. "Building Workers in Madrid (1737-1805). New Wage Series and Working Lives," Working Papers 0152, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    4. Robert C. Allen, 2019. "Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 72(2), pages 738-754, May.
    5. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2019. "Economic History: «An Isthmus Joining Two Great Continents»?," Rivista di storia economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 1, pages 81-120.
    6. Rota, Mauro & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2020. "Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices: New Data, New Results," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(4), pages 931-960, December.
    7. Mario García‐Zúñiga & Ernesto LóPEZ LOSA, 2021. "Skills and human capital in eighteenth‐century Spain: wages and working lives in the construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid (1737–1805)†," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(3), pages 691-720, August.
    8. DUDLEY, Leonard & RAUH, Christopher, 2018. "Innovation growth clusters: Lessons from the industrial revolution," Cahiers de recherche 2018-14, Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques.
    9. Schreiner, Lena & Madlener, Reinhard, 2022. "Investing in power grid infrastructure as a flexibility option: A DSGE assessment for Germany," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    10. Zamparelli, Luca, 2022. "On Labor Productivity Growth and the Wage Share with Endogenous Size and Direction of Technical Change," MPRA Paper 112684, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Pamfili Antipa & Vincent Bignon, 2018. "Whither Economic History? Between Narratives and Quantification," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(3), pages 17-36.
    12. Ferreira, Pedro Cavalcanti & Pessôa, Samuel & dos Santos, Marcelo Rodrigues, 2016. "Globalization And The Industrial Revolution," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(3), pages 643-666, April.
    13. Huning, Thilo R. & Wahl, Fabian, 2017. "Lord of the lemons: Origin and dynamics of state capacity," Hohenheim Discussion Papers in Business, Economics and Social Sciences 22-2017, University of Hohenheim, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences.
    14. Klas Rönnbäck, 2014. "Slave ownership and fossil fuel usage: a commentary," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 122(1), pages 1-9, January.
    15. O'Brien, Patrick, 2018. "Cosmographies for the discovery, development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge in pre-industrial Europe and Late imperial China: a survey and speculation," Economic History Working Papers 90534, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    16. Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, 2015. "The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(1), pages 3-28, Winter.
    17. Dakpogan, Arnaud & Smit, Eon, 2018. "The effect of electricity losses on GDP in Benin," MPRA Paper 89545, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Allen, Robert C., 2012. "Backward into the future: The shift to coal and implications for the next energy transition," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 17-23.
    19. Boško Mijatović & Branko Milanović, 2021. "The real urban wage in an agricultural economy without landless farmers: Serbia, 1862–1910," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(2), pages 424-448, May.
    20. Ewout Frankema & Marlous van Waijenburg, 2011. "African Real Wages in Asian Perspective, 1880-1940," Working Papers 0002, Utrecht University, Centre for Global Economic History.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Demography; Population economics; Health; Cities;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ucn:wpaper:201308. 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: Nicolas Clifton (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/educdie.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.