Time and Work in England 1750-1830

by Hans-Joachim Voth

Did working hours in England increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution? In this important study, Hans-Joachim Voth addresses this question using rigorously analyzed statistical data. Drawing on this research, Voth has created six datasets for both rural and urban areas over the period
1750 to 1830 to reconstruct patterns of leisure and labor.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2001

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Makes extremely naive, albeit common, assumptions about the relationship of time and labor. Clock time with its uniform durations is not a reliable way to represent labor before the mid-19th century, so trying to use 18th-19th century records to represent labor in terms of clock time is a methodologically flawed approach to thinking about work in this period and one more likely to reproduce modern biases than shed any light.