Should-Read: Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution

Should-Read: A rather odd piece in its rhetorical pose. It really is not a critique of Allen’s hypothesis about the especially strong incentives in Industrial Revolution England to invent and innovate in coal energy and machine intensive ways: it is a reinforcement of it: an argument that British patriarchy reinforced and augmented the imperial, coal-resource, cultural, scientific, and technological forces converging to make the British Industrial Revolution: Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution: “The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective…

…a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution…

…The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working-class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution…