Human well-being and the 'Industrious Revolution': Consumption, gender and social capital in a German developing economy, 1600-1900

Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2017). Human well-being and the 'Industrious Revolution': Consumption, gender and social capital in a German developing economy, 1600-1900. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: Economic and Social Research Council. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-850798

Data description (abstract)

How do consumption, production and reproduction interact to improve human well-being? This project addresses this question by exploring the theory of the ‘Industrious Revolution’ – the idea that after about 1650 Europeans shifted time out of leisure and household production into market work and consumption, thereby fuelling agricultural and industrial growth. The theory is supposed to apply to all of Europe, but is based almost exclusively on English and Dutch evidence before c. 1750. This project will add substance to the Industrious Revolution by focussing on a German economy (Württemberg) where extraordinarily rich personal inventories survive from 1600 to 1900. By linking inventories with family reconstitutions and other local sources, the project will undertake a multivariate analysis of increases in market consumption and production, as a function of gender, marital status, fertility, age, occupation, local office-holding, literacy, landownership, credit relationships, kinship circles, community citizenship, guild membership, and other measures of ‘social capital’. This project will thus explore the determinants of changes in human well-being over three centuries by bringing to bear new evidence, new methods, and new conceptual tools. In so doing, it will address unanswered questions about the long-term interrelationships between consumption, work, demographic outcomes, and human well-being.

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