Preliminary Programme

There is still uncertainty in economic history about whether and to what extent wages were subject to cultural patterns. For England, evidence suggests that real wages and wages gaps seem to have been determined mostly by market forces, but also customary employment patterns (Humphries & Weisdorf 2015; Burnette 2009, 2004; Horrell & Humphries 1995). In Germany, female labour participation was apparently heavily regulated, resulting in large artificial wage gaps (Ogilvie 2003). However, this pessimistic view stems largely from one case study, and little comparable data is available from other places in Germany, as there is generally only little detailed information on historical wages and female labour force participation outside of England.
Entangling cultural and market effects is also complicated by different methodological problems: First, it is difficult to find comparable occupations. While restrictions to education and training – one of the known main problems in Germany – are by themselves discriminatory, they weren’t necessarily relevant to large parts of the labour. Apart from such restrictions, we know little about wage gaps in Germany, especially for the rural area. Second, data often stems from long term contracts, where effects of gender roles and seniority are hard to distinguish from actual work requirements.
To expand on this debate and to offer a fresh approach, we present a unique collection of material on agricultural labour from different German farms from the 17th to 19th century, with wages on a daily and hourly basis. We use wages from agricultural work because in pre-modern Germany about 65 percent of the population worked in agriculture (Pfister 2022). The jobs are also easily comparable, as they hardly changed over the observation period, and labour assignments are well described in contemporary sources. Finally, levels of education or training were rather irrelevant to agricultural work (Mokyr 2002).
Thus, it is possible to test for the existence of age and gender-related discrimination in several ways: First, by comparing nominal wages of different individuals by days and hours, second by comparing renumeration to task requirements, and third by reconstructing gender and age-related employment patterns, that could explain wage differences on the aggregate level. Our data thus gives us a sharp picture distinguishing market-related effects from social effects. (Show less)

This paper concentrates on rural labor in the late nineteenth century Finland seeking to analyse the impact of seasonality and short term contracts on the living standards of laboring households. Historical studies on agricultural wages and rural living standards are mostly based on data on daily wages, while the standard of living depends on total annual earnings of an individual worker or working-class family. Different kinds of indirect methods, such as seasonal wage premiums or seasonality of marriages, have been used to estimate the variation in the number of annual workdays. The objective of this paper is to propose a new method to investigate the standard of living in rural areas by using litigation material. Court cases have been used before but to my knowledge only indirectly. The paper is based on direct evidence collected from the wage disputes between rural laborers and their employers, often owner-occupying farmers. The litigation material used in this paper consists of data on wages (including in kind wages), work assignments and the length of working spells. Sometimes the cases include information on housing conditions, such as room rents, as well as on subsistence agriculture. Overall, the data is fragmentary and incomplete but contains valuable information impossible to find elsewhere, and consequently, court cases offer new possibilities to analyse wage differentials between women and men, to reconstruct individual work histories and to calculate household budgets. Different methodological challenges related to the use of court cases will be discussed in the paper. The material is collected from the judicial district of Kuopio, situated in Eastern Finland where circa 40 per cent of rural households were agricultural worker households at the end of the nineteenth century. The court cases have been identified with the help of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. The data consists of over one thousand observation from the years 1840–1900. (Show less)