Was there an ‘industrious revolution’ before the industrial revolution? An empirical exercise for England, c. 1300-1830
本研究通过计算农村和城市日工为购买基本消费品所需的工作年数，并与实际工作年数比较，发现农村工人存在两次“勤勉革命”，但均源于经济困难，而非消费革命；城市工人则因实际工作年数与所需工作年数差距扩大，为消费革命提供了空间。
It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious’ revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious’ revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.