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Prof Ian Gazeley SAR 6.05

This course is available on the MA in Modern History, MSc in Economic History, MSc in Economic History (Research), MSc in Financial History, MSc in Global Economic History (Erasmus Mundus) and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access).  In previous years we have been able to provide places for all students that apply, but that may not continue to be the case.

This course examines living standards from roughly the industrial revolution until the millenium through the prism of the British experience. The gradual move from subsistence agriculture to advanced industrial production was accompanied by a move towards urban living and radical demographic and social change, which transformed the lives of the population within a few generations. The population of Western economies experienced an exponential increase in average real incomes, which was driven by technical progress. This transformed the living standards of the majority of the population from bare subsistence to plenty, and was accompanied by a growing role for the state in providing for those excluded from the benefits of economic progress.  Over the course of these three hundred years, the path of average incomes in Western countries also diverged from those in Asia, creating profound global imbalances in income and wealth. 

The course is organised roughly chronologically, but within this, it concentrates on particular aspects of living standards that have proved most controversial within the existing literature; either because of an imperfect historical record, differences in method or approach, or sometimes because of ideological differences. This course will explore topics relating to: the transformation of work; the progress of average incomes; the distribution of income and wealth; changes in food consumption and nutrition; the relationship between demographic change and living standards; the transformation of the role of the state and the reasons for divergence in living standards across time and place. It will also explore the reasons why historians disagree about these topics.

20 hours of seminars in the LT.

This cou