Wages before Machines: The institutions of the early modern labour market
Today, when we think about labour markets and how they lead to payment for work we take three fundamental concepts for granted: jobs, firms, and time. We think of the labour market as where most people sell their labour services, into ‘jobs’, or paid positions of regular employment, at firms where they will have a designated role, task or responsibilities, being paid for their time. We also understand that the labour market is subject to legal regulations, lobbied for by collective action groups such as unions and non-governmental organisations, enforced by legislation concerning conditions and pay. We call the regulations and the unions ‘institutions’.
However, in the early modern world, very few people had a job or worked for a firm. It was very rare to be paid for your time. Workers and employers contracted for work in established but (mostly) unwritten contracts, overseen by formal institutions and regulations which feature heavily in economic history literature. the guilds; apprenticeship; the statute of artificers, and the parish administration of the poor laws. The paper will examine how those contracts and formal institutions interacted to determine wages using cases from the building industry, the textile industry, domestic service, mining, and the military.
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This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
