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Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Carole Shammas
Carole Shammas
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201
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Abstract

The proportion of a household's budget spent on diet has commonly served as an important measure of material welfare. This paper pulls together data concerning trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draws comparisons with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage assessments, a new source for estimating the proportion of outlays devoted to diet, is examined. The impact on food expenditures of new commodities and other dietary shifts is also explored. The findings call into question earlier estimates of the proportion of total expenditure devoted to food and drink in the pre-industrial period and the assumption that food expenditures are always inelastic.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 89 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

1 On Engel studies see Stigler, George J., “The Early History of Empirical Studies of Consumer Behavior,” Journal of Political Economy, 42 (04 1954), 95–113;Google ScholarWilliamson, Jeffrey G.,“Consumer Behavior in the Nineteenth Century: Carroll D. Wright's Massachusetts Worker in 1875,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 4 (Winter 1967), 98–135;Google Scholar and more recently, Dubnoff, Steven, “A Method for Estimating the Economic Welfare of American Families of any Composition: 1860–1909,” Historical Methods, 13 (Summer 1980), 171“80.Google Scholar

2 Brown, E. H.Phelps“Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates,” in Essays in Economic History, vol 2, edited byCarus-Wilson, E. M. (New York, 1962), pp. 179–96.Google ScholarA new version of the Phelps-Brown and Hopkins figures for 1500–1911 appears in Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981), pp. 638“44.Google Scholarbut the weights remain the same. The other two weighted indices covering long periods of time, those of Gilboy and Tucker, use percentages for diet of 80 percent and 75 percent respectively. see their articles reprinted in The standard of living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, edited by Arthur J. Taylor (London, 1975), pp. 1–35.

3 Andrew, B. “Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740,” this Journal, 39 (12 1979), p. 867;Google Scholarand Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 371–72, 399. Appleby“Grain Prices,” p. 882, mentions that the “only likely candidate” for being an exception to the generalization is a group of Midlands parishes between 1727 and 1730.Google Scholar

4 See Braudel, Fernand, The Structures of Everyday Life (London, 1981), chaps. 2 and 3;Google Scholar and Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy 1600–1750 (New York, 1980), p. 258ff.Google Scholar

5 Lees, Lynn Hollen, “Getting and Spending: The Family Budgets of English Industrial Workers in 1890,” in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Merriman, John (New York, 1979), pp. 169–86, discusses the 1890–1891 survey.Google Scholar

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7 Holmes, G. S., “Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 27 (1977), discusses the motivation behind King's research. The method used to calculate the percentages from King's data are available from the author.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The standard guide to wage assessments for England is Minchinton, W. E., ed., Wage Regulation in Pre-lndusrial England (Newton Abbot, 1972).Google ScholarWoodward, Donald, “Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England,” Past and Present, 91 (05 1981), 28' wages were not their entire income.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Master carpenters' food percentages are probably too high because they had other sources of income. Woodward, “Wage Rates.”Google Scholar

10 The close inverse correlation between the real wage index and the food percentages for the North is especially interesting because the data on which the index is based are from the South.Google Scholar

11 The tables in Stigler, “History of Consumer Behavior”, p. 97, show this clearly.Google Scholar

12 The Eden and Davies data yield 193 usable observations and produce an elasticity for food of 1.069 (double log form with the log of household size included in the regression). Crafts, N. F.R., “Income Elasticities of Demand and the Release of Labour by Agriculture during the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of European Economic History, 9 (Spring, 1980), p. 157, separating Davies and Eden and using many fewer observations, obtained slightly different results although he also stresses high elasticity. Unlike Crafts, I used expenditures rather than income so that my figures would be comparable to those of other budget studies.Google Scholar

13 Bennassar, Bartolome and Goy, Joseph, “Contribution à l' Histoire de la Consommation Alimentaire du XIVe Siecle,” Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilixations, 30 (Mars-Juin 1975), p. 427;Google Scholar and Teuteberg, H. J., “The General Relationship between Diet and Industrialization,” in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by Forster, Elborg and Forster, Robert (New York, 1975), p. 64.Google Scholar

14 On differences between the diet of southern England on the one hand and the Celtic fringe on the other, see Thomas, Brinley, “Feeding England During the Industrial Revolution: A view from the Celtic Fringe,” Agricultural History, 56 (01 1982), 328/42.Google ScholarPubMed

15 A third of inventories from East London, a poor area, contained tea and/or coffee utensils by the 1720s. Shammas, Carole, “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History, 14 (Fall1980), p. 12, Table II.CrossRefGoogle Scholar