Economic History Seminar

Du 26/09/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00

Salle R1.13, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

RIDOLFI Leonardo (University of Siena)

Six centuries of real wages in France from Louis IX to Napoleon III: 1250-1860

A notable feature of the evolution of real wages in the pre-industrial period is their tendency to diverge in the North Sea Area from the rest of Europe by the early modern period. However, while this evidence lies its empirical foundations in the study of a large sample of leading European cities, the development of real wages from a broader national perspective is still largely unexplored. Using a newly constructed dataset, I take a step in this direction presenting new series of real wages for male agricultural laborers and construction workers in France from 1250 to 1860. I show that the overall picture is more complex than a “Little divergence thesis” would suggest since cross-national comparisons of real wages point to the coexistence of both divergence and convergence phases before the late eighteenth century. I also find that regional and sectoral differences are key to understand the evolution of real wages and I identify the major stages of this process.