Was there an Industrious Revolution in Germany? Wages and labour markets on rural estates, 17th to 19th centuries

工业革命的论点始于这样一个假设，即17和18世纪的对外贸易效率有所提高。这增加了消费品供应的多样性，因此，假设人们喜欢多样性的偏好，消费的总体效用就会增加。家庭对此的反应有两种：第一，他们用市场商品的生产取代了生计商品的生产（其特点是多样性低），以便用由此产生的收入购买市场商品。第二，总消费效用的提高导致时间利用从休闲转向工作;人们为了消费更多而变得更加勤奋。因此，论文继续指出，工业革命是欧洲工业发展的重要基础。这是因为研究和发展工作的利润与潜在用户的数量呈正相关，还因为工业革命产生了大量生产适销产品的工人。新技术潜在用户数量的增长增加了研发的利润，从而刺激了制造业的技术革新。本项目侧重于论文的一个中心方面，即以每年小时或天数计量的个人劳动投入的长期发展，这一点尚未在德国进行调查。为此，该项目比较了17至19世纪德国农业中不同期限雇用合同的工资，即工人的日工资和仆人的年工资。如果年轻人从事的是零工和农场工人或女佣之间的套利，则年工资与日工资之间的比率与年工作天数相对应。这一办法要求不仅从不同类型工作的货币工资角度，而且从实物支付形式角度分析农村劳动力市场。此外，有必要分析普遍存在的劳动合同类型，包括其在连锁市场和农业机构中的嵌入性，这些合同在不同程度上也规定了强迫劳动（劳役、强制性仆人服务），视地区而定。为此，该项目根据大约20个贵族家庭的农村庄园的账簿进行了地方微观分析，这些分析可以以不同的方式汇总，这些庄园在空间上分布在德国各地，但在某种程度上集中在北莱茵-威斯特伐利亚和萨克森。

The Industrious Revolution thesis starts with the presumption that the 17th and 18th centuries saw an improvement in the efficiency of foreign trade. This increased the diversity of the supply of consumer good, so that, assuming love-for-variety preferences, the overall utility of consumption increased. Households reacted to this in two ways: First, they substituted the production of subsistence goods (which are characterized by low diversity) with the production of market goods, in order to use the income thus generated to buy market goods. Second, the rise of the utility of total consumption caused a shift in the use of time from leisure to work; people became more diligent in order to consume more. The Industrious Revolution, so the thesis continues, was an important basis for the industrial development of Europe. This is because the profitability of research and development (R&D) efforts is positively correlated with the number of potential users and because the Industrious Revolution produced large groups of workers who produced marketable products. The growth in the number of potential users of new technology increased the profitability of R&D and thus stimulated technical innovation in manufacturing.This project focuses on a central aspect of the thesis, namely the long-term development of individual labour input measured as hours or days per year, which has not yet been investigated for Germany. To this end, the project compares wages for employment contracts of different durations, i.e. day wages of labourers and annual wages of servants in German agriculture from the 17th to the 19th centuries. If young people engaged in arbitrage between day labour and employment as a farmhand or maid, the ratio between annual wages and daily wages corresponds to the number of annual working days. This approach requires an analysis of rural labour markets not only in terms of the money wages for different types of work, but also in terms of the forms of payment in kind. Moreover, it is necessary to analyse the prevailing types of labour contracts, including their embedding in interlocking markets and agricultural institutions, which to varying degrees, depending on the region, also provide for forced labour (corvée labour, compulsory service as servant). To this end, the project undertakes local micro-analyses, which can be aggregated in different ways, on the basis of the account books of approximately twenty rural estates of noble families, which are spatially distributed throughout Germany, but show a certain concentration in North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony.